Wildlife-friendly fencing helps preserve key migration corridor
HAMMOND – New wildlife-friendly fencing borders both sides along 5 miles of a prairie highway in remote southeast Montana. In this vast landscape of sagebrush grassland, the fence may not seem like much, but it will have far-reaching benefits for pronghorn in two states and could be key to their survival.
This more permeable fence along Highway 212 just east of Hammond will help restore a major north-south pronghorn migration corridor between Montana and Wyoming. Two separate pronghorn research projects in these states identified a key migration corridor and movement barriers, including at this project location. In Montana, a multi-partner effort led by FWP worked with landowners to replace fencing at this critical bottleneck.
Adult deer and elk are often able to jump fences without issue, but lighter-framed pronghorn typically prefer to crawl under. However, in areas like southeast Montana that have many miles of sheep fencing, that is not always possible. Many fences are very low to the ground and have tight spacing between the strands. This can pose a significant barrier to normal pronghorn movement, particularly when snow drifts along the fenceline.
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Landowner Doug Gardner was one of the key partners of this project. Over the years, Gardner has often seen pronghorn stopped by fences near his family’s homestead near Hammond, where Highway 212 runs through his property. To move north or south, pronghorn would have had to cross that highway and the low fences bordering it.
“Antelope, when we’d have tough winters, they’d congregate up against the highway, and they couldn’t get across the fence to keep going south to find a little better grazing,” he said. “I just remember many times getting on Highway 212 in a hard winter and having hundreds of antelope on the fence, and that was the end of where they could go, unless they turned around and went north.”
The problem is well known in conservation circles, and it was part of a statewide study that FWP launched in 2020 called “Pronghorn Movement and Population Ecology in Montana.” A total of 702 pronghorn does were captured and fitted with GPS collars in eight study areas across the state. The goal was to determine seasonal ranges, movement corridors, barriers to movement, disease exposure, pregnancy rates and causes of mortality.
FWP wildlife biologist Ryan DeVore, based in Broadus, helped orchestrate the capture of 105 does in Powder River and Carter counties. Region 7 biologists also collared 91 does in Rosebud and Garfield counties. Tracking movement in the Powder River-Carter study area through collar data, DeVore found that some does stayed in a relatively small area, while others traveled up to 70 miles one way seasonally.
But in several spots, there were significant barriers to movement. Some individuals never left a pasture or two because that fence was tight enough that they were not able to navigate it.
Being stuck in a pasture with limited or poor forage for a season can negatively impact the body condition of an animal, which could limit their reproduction and threaten an animal’s ability to survive.
At the project site near Hammond, several collared individuals apparently intended to cross the highway but none were able to do so. They had a lot of trouble and spent a great deal of effort and energy against that fence trying to get across.
“You’re seeing a collared animal move throughout the landscape, and all of a sudden, they hit a stopping point, and they can’t get through it,” DeVore explained. “Near this project, we saw individuals that moved 5 miles along the fence trying to find a spot to cross and were unable to. You know they are really needing to access resources further north or south, and to know that we’re making an impact by opening up that bottleneck for them to cross is really key for the benefit of pronghorn to improve their health and survivability.”
“The main reason we want them to be able to migrate is to find better habitat and better conditions,” DeVore said. “A winter storm system might track through one area but have much less snow maybe 5 to 20 miles away, so if pronghorn are able to find an area where there’s less snow or some wind-swept ridges where the snow is blown off, they’re able to more easily access the forage and save energy by not having to trudge through deep snow. This hopefully increases their survival rates as well as their fawn production and recruitment coming into the following spring.”
After the Montana pronghorn study began, DeVore’s colleague, senior Wyoming Game & Fish biologist Erika Peckham, launched a similar study. In sharing data they discovered similarities, including a doe collared in Wyoming that made it all the way to the Montana project site.
“We found a migration path we were unaware of between Gillette and Broadus spanning up to 100 miles,” DeVore said.
“The open communications that Ryan and I have had have been instrumental in ensuring that data is shared across these ‘imaginary to wildlife’ lines,” Peckham said. “This project illustrates the importance of collaboration and having good working relationships with our neighbors.”
Over time, a network of partners grew: Andrew Jakes with the Wyoming Migration Initiative (University of Wyoming), who has an extensive background on pronghorn in Canada and Montana; Larry Sickerson, Montana Department of Transportation area biologist; Mitch King of Montana’s Outdoor Legacy Foundation, who supplied nearly half of the project funding; Brock Wahl of the North American Pronghorn Foundation, a new organization that provided substantial funding; and the Mule Deer Foundation, which contributed heavily. FWP also allocated key financial support.
“We kind of all came together and said, ‘How do we work on this?’” DeVore said. “I became the local contact, and we shared research data.”
When it came time to launch the project, DeVore reached out to landowners Doug Gardner, Robert Giacometto and Andrew Cathey, all of whom agreed to be involved.
“It is a pretty nice incentive for the landowner, getting a new fence,” DeVore said. “Otherwise, putting it in themselves would be a pretty hefty price tag, and it’s especially nice [to have a good fence] along the highway.”
Using a fence with a higher bottom wire is a bit of a risk for landowners, but testing was done to confirm it would hold cattle and calves.
“For a cow man, it’s absolutely a great new fence,” Gardner said. “It’s hard to beat, and it’s very easy to work with Ryan.”
Gardner, his wife, Kerry, and their son, Myles, run a yearling and cow-calf operation east of Hammond on land that Doug’s grandfather homesteaded in 1916.
The land and Doug’s family history are intertwined, and his love for both is clear in his collections of arrowheads, rocks, antiques, photos and family keepsakes. In a special room of his house, a barnwood display holds his grandfather’s World War I helmet, complete with bullet holes received while he ran ammunition to fellow soldiers, along with his gas mask and rifle.
Gardner likes to tell the story of his grandmother traveling alone to South Dakota to adopt his father in 1923, venturing by horseback and then by wagon to make the journey.
“That’s quite a story. She was gone five weeks to find a little baby in South Dakota and bring him home, and my grandfather had no communication the whole time she was gone,” Gardner said.
Life on the prairie has never been easy, but Gardner embraces hard work, family ties, personal freedoms, beautiful country, the ability to get away, the generosity of neighbors and the plentiful wildlife.
“I tell people the same thing: ‘To live here, you got to have a thick skull and a pea brain,’” he said, grinning. But his tone softened when he added, “It’s home.”
Wildlife have always been part of the ranch’s backdrop, including pronghorn, deer, sage hens, pheasants and sharp-tailed grouse.
“I think anybody that’s a good steward of the land, who takes good care of his cows and his sheep and his ranch, is a good steward for the wildlife,” he said.
Gardner has always tailored his operation to benefit wildlife as well. He leaves strips of grass at the edge of hay fields, maintains water lines to supplement old reservoirs, and rotates all his pastures. So it was not a hard decision to work with FWP to replace the woven-wire fence on his place to help pronghorn and other wildlife.
“You want to see them be able to get out and move and find wind-blown ridges where they can graze,” Gardner said. “They’re very tough, but they have to be able to move.”
Projects like this are not new in Montana or elsewhere, but there is a growing push in the conservation realm to find solutions that work for wildlife, according to DeVore.
“To have such a large project and to get to work with so many great people, knowing the impact we made is not only going to impact pronghorn for a couple years, but for a couple decades to come, it doesn’t get much better than that,” he said. “It’s just extremely rewarding for my career, for the work that I do, to know that we’re making a positive impact for pronghorn in this multi-state corner.”
The next step is to continue to monitor movement in the project area with trail cameras, but both DeVore and Gardner have already seen pronghorn successfully navigating the fence.
“One of the most rewarding aspects of this project is to take research and put it on the ground into real-world management actions, to really use it for the good of pronghorn,” DeVore said. “Now we can take the data we have, the locations we’ve found where there are barriers, and work on chipping away those barriers one by one.”
The scientific name for pronghorn is Antilocapra americana, which DeVore finds fitting.
“It really is a North American species that typifies the American West of open landscapes and the raw, untouched land,” he said. “When I think of pronghorn in the West, I think of more intact landscapes, and it makes me think of what it used to be, maybe back when Lewis and Clark came through. Hopefully we can keep intact these populations that roam the landscape and cover the country.”
