It’s an early Saturday morning and instead of being cozied up in my warm bed, I’m sitting in the cab of my truck, listening to the Wyoming wind blow, and scanning rugged peaks for mountain goats while I wait for the rest of the crew to arrive. The trail into the canyon calls me but will have to wait for another day. We have a lot of work to do today. 

Clarks Fork Canyon, 40 miles north of Cody, is the kind of place that Western dreams are made of: rugged, biologically diverse, and cradling the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River in its rocky bosom. One look at the windswept cliffs, full river, and nutritious late season grasses and you know this is an ideal home to the iconic big game species of the Absaroka Front. Elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, mule deer, and pronghorn forage here year-round.  

Wyoming is proud of its abundance of public lands and the wildlife that calls those lands home. Often managed for multiple uses, the Bureau of Land Management parcels at the mouth of Clarks Fork Canyon support livestock grazing, motorized and non-motorized recreation, hunting, fishing, and wildlife habitat. However, when there are competing uses, something or someone often comes out on the bottom. 

Criss-crossing this landscape is miles of fencing. While it’s often said that the Colt revolver tamed the West, it was barbed wire that domesticated it – dividing the vast open space into sections that could be grazed by livestock, farmed, and developed by settlers from the East. Fencing rangeland with barbed wire has been a common practice for over 150 years. Yet it has only been the last couple of decades that wildlife professionals and range managers have begun to study the effects fences have on wildlife and to suggest modification or removal to improve migration of wildlife across these lands. 

Fences are hazardous, even deadly, to wildlife. Legs get caught in top wires during a jump, antlers get snagged and tangled, and birds fly into wire that is invisible at dawn and dusk. Sheep fence, also known as woven wire, is gridded and completely impassable for pronghorn, deer fawns and elk calves who can’t make the higher jump. Animals become trapped in highway right-of-ways where they are hit by vehicles or kept from mothers, water, food, or critical habitat, leaving them to die of exposure, dehydration, or starvation. But fences are needed to contain livestock; ranching is a generational way of life as well as an economic priority on the range —so what is the answer?  

“Wildlife-friendly fencing” – it sounds like an oxymoron. However, research, on-the-ground trials, and implementation are proving it a success in reducing wildlife injury and death and increasing permeability across the landscape. Wildlife-friendly fencing is fencing that is more easily navigable by wildlife, but still does its job of containing livestock. Current standard recommendations include a top wire height of no more than 38 inches, a bottom wire height of 16 to 18 inches, a smooth bottom wire when possible, and variable spacing of the internal wires, depending on how many. Technical specifications are constantly being monitored and modified to improve effectiveness for livestock containment while adjusting for wildlife needs. 

While still sturdy enough to contain most livestock, these measurements allow elk and deer to jump the fence without catching hind legs in the top wire and allow enough space for pronghorn, bighorn sheep, and elk calves and deer fawns to crawl under the fence without snagging horns or suffering lacerations from sharp barbs. 

The Absaroka Fence Initiative (AFI) is working to become a leader in wildlife-friendly fencing. A community-driven initiative, led by state and federal agencies and non-governmental organizations like the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, AFI was formed in 2020 in response to the thousands of miles of unfriendly fencing on the Absaroka Front and multitude of negative wildlife-fence interactions. GYC has been a partner in AFI since its inception, and I have been a member of AFI’s steering committee since I started with GYC seven months ago. Working across Park County, Wyoming, our aim is to ensure fences are functional for livestock management and wildlife movement across the landscape.  

We accomplish this by removing unnecessary fencing, modifying existing fencing to be wildlife-friendly, and working with landowners who are constructing new fences to educate and assist them on the most effective fencing for their needs while still allowing wildlife to move across the land. Much of the work is done utilizing volunteers on public workdays. 

Back at Clarks Fork Canyon, AFI members rolled in with pickups and trailers filled with tools, coffee, and donuts to fuel the volunteers helping with a fence project for National Public Lands Day. As the sun rose high, with safety and project briefings wrapped up, I watched in amazement as the 50 volunteers headed out with their team leaders to begin work on their fence sections. 

Fence work is not easy. It can be slow and arduous and barbed wire is cruel and unforgiving. Yet here were dozens of individuals, ranging from elementary-aged to retirees, marching across this remote, rocky landscape with bolt cutters, buckets, and fence pliers, ready to do their best to modify fences for improved wildlife movement.  

Three hours of work saw two and a half miles of fence modified! The project entailed cutting out fence stays (vertical twisted wires used to create spacing between strands) so volunteers could remove strands of barbed wire from the four- and five-wire fences to make them three-wire, and adjusting the remaining wires so that the top wire was dropped and the bottom wire was raised. Hundreds of fence clips were cut and replaced, 860 pounds of wire was removed and rolled by hand (to be recycled later), and all the fence stays were cut and removed. The volunteers returned to base, a little slower, a little dirtier, but with the joyous feeling that giving freely of one’s time can provide. They shared accomplishments and chatter over a lunch buffet provided by GYC. 

After the last tool was packed and the last congratulation shared among my AFI partners, I climbed back into the cab of my truck, gave the rocky outcroppings one last glance in search of white goat fluff, and headed back to town, my mind already envisioning future fence projects and the impact a small group of dedicated individuals can have. 

To learn more about GYC’s work to keep mule deer, pronghorn, elk, and other wildlife moving safely across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, visit our website or sign up to receive our emails. If you’d like to hear about future volunteer opportunities, visit the Absaroka Fence Initiative’s website.   

—Erin Welty, Senior Wyoming Conservation Associate