December 14, 2018By J. Westin Phillipen
Map (click here)
Mapped migration corridors for huntable populations of seven big game species in Wyoming: bighorn sheep, elk, moose, mountain goats, mule deer, pronghorn, and white-tailed deer. Source data from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
Right about now a few thousand mule deer (click here) are moving south through the grass valleys near the bottom of Wyoming’s Wind River Range. They summered in the high alpines near Yellowstone National Park, and as winter comes they’ve traveled 100 miles south, through private and public land, with still 50 miles more to go, across rivers, deserted two-lane highways and busy freeways, noisy natural gas fields, and barbed wire fences. Many of them are bound for a desolate sagebrush basin called the Red Desert, where they will hit a wall in the form of the four-lane Interstate 80. It is the longest land mammal migration in the lower-48 U.S. states, discovered only two years ago.
Since researchers found it, the Red Desert to Hoback mule deer corridor has made the study of land migration suddenly sexy—“very sexy,” Steve Kilpatrick, a field scientist working with the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, told me. Corridor ecology has been around a long time, but only recently has it gained wide interest. This is partly thanks to Hall Sawyer, the research biologist who found the route, and who together with the Wyoming Migration Initiative published a revolutionary study on the path, which included a stunning video shot by a National Geographic photographer. But it’s also owed to what the corridor offered conservationists. “This migration route has been going on for hundreds years,” Kilpatrick said, “and now all at once we can define it.” But that doesn’t mean it’s not in danger....
