The following opinion piece by ConservAmerica Fellow Dan Mahoney appeared in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle on August 1, 2025:
Wildlife habitat across the West is increasingly fragmented by development, fencing and roads, threatening migration corridors for iconic species like elk, mule deer and pronghorn.
While public lands are a crucial piece of these pathways for wildlife, the role of private lands in providing key habitat is often overlooked. Since these are the lands most at risk of development and sale, they are in urgent need of protection.
Congressmen Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) and Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) have introduced a bill to do just that.
The Habitat Connectivity on Working Lands Act would help support ranchers and farmers trying to facilitate big-game migrations across their property, leveraging existing funding mechanisms within USDA.
For species with different habitat needs across different seasons, migratory corridors help connect summer and winter range, which for pronghorn can be more than 200 miles apart. Despite their famous speed, pronghorn have a particularly hard time navigating barbed wire fencing, in which they can become fatally entangled.
During hard winters, the inability to access warmer, lower-elevation habitats with less snow cover can result in huge die-offs, and the same is true for other ungulate species. One recent University of Wyoming study determined that between 4,000-5,000 pronghorn died in the winter of 2022-23 due to impassable fences and highways.
The Zinke/Vasquez bill seeks to mitigate these harms by making virtual fencing (which uses GPS tags and electric collars to corral livestock) eligible for USDA grants incentivizing adoption of the new technology. It would also promote cost-sharing and technical assistance payments under the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program (GCRP) and Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).
This bipartisan bill has the unusual distinction of being endorsed by both the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and National Parks Conservation Association, and it seeks to build on the success of USDA’s Migratory Big Game Initiative. This program launched as a pilot in Wyoming and committed $15 million to the cause, leading to a 264% increase in program enrollment among Wyoming producers.
Capturing this momentum with congressional legislation could continue that progress with voluntary, no-cost tweaks to existing programs. Importantly, it would also do so without imposing any federal mandates or regulatory burdens on landowners who are trying to provide habitat for public wildlife.
In a best-case scenario, this success could be codified in the Farm Bill to nationalize its impact, but in the absence of a Farm Bill package the act should be passed by whatever other mechanisms are available.
By restoring and protecting these corridors, we can help reduce human-wildlife conflict and even vehicle collisions, with widespread benefits for hunters, anglers and rural economies. This bill offers a cost-effective way to thoughtfully engage with private landowners for the benefit of people and wildlife alike, and its passage would be a win for both.
ConservAmerica will be convening a full day, public event on this subject in Livingston, on Aug. 28 to discuss how private landowners can promote connectivity across different landscapes, and invites anyone with interest in the issue to attend.