Ranchers and conservationists along the Hi-Line and in Central Montana are using state research and federal funding to help remove man-made barriers to migration of pronghorn and other big game animals.
By the craggy outcroppings of the Missouri River Breaks in Phillips County, barbed wire fences run along the length of the road and lay rusted in the field, tangled around sagebrush.
This is the kind of fence cattle rancher Dennis Oxarart says covers his property.
“I know all the old timers out here, they found cedar posts. There’s a lot of army barbed wire from World War I and II,” Oxarart said.
This expanse of land and roughly half the rest of the county belongs to farmers and cattle ranchers like Oxarart, who on this morning is driving a 4x4 across his property outside Malta to tag a newborn calf.
“We used to ride horses everywhere,” Oxarart says from the driver’s seat. “This is faster.”
Landowners share these fields with a rich ecosystem of animals native to the Northern Great Plains, like meadowlarks and grouse, foxes and coyotes and populations of mule deer, elk and pronghorn.
“We love the wildlife out here, and the last three years of drought have really knocked the numbers down,” Oxarart said.
Fences keep cattle in their pastures, but they can also block the movements of big game animals like pronghorn or end their journey entirely.
“There's nothing worse as a rancher than seeing an animal hung up in a fence,” Oxarart said. “I hate that. I’ve seen elk tangled up. I’ve seen deer. Come by and find a carcass that the coyotes have ate, the deer is hanging, the top wires are crossed around their legs. Animals just there for bait, is all it is.”
Research shows physical barriers like fencing are some of the big obstacles migratory animals like pronghorn navigate when passing through areas of agricultural development. Also called antelope, pronghorn are uniquely North American.
The second-fastest land animal in the world after cheetahs, their ancestors have been roaming the Great Plains for as long as the grasslands have existed.
Euro-American settlement in the West brought increased hunting, housing developments, a shift of rangeland to cropland, and other pressures to the pronghorn population, which declined from 35 million in the early 1800s to fewer than 15,000 in the early 1900s.
Despite successful habitat restoration efforts over the last two decades, their numbers hover around one million and Montana wildlife managers know relatively little about the state’s pronghorn populations.
Justin Gude with Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks says FWP for the first time has committed federal and state resources to better counting and collaring pronghorn similar to what wildlife managers have done with other popular game animals like elk.
“We really laid the foundation for knowledge about pronghorn population dynamics with this project,” Gude said.
Federal funding over the last few years has helped drive the research, and Montana representatives are trying to help the process along.
Congressman Ryan Zinke in 2018 signed a secretarial order during his stint as Interior Secretary dedicated to building agency efforts to support big game migration corridors. He’s now continuing that focus with a bill that would further fund projects like fence replacement.
“I am excited about it,” Rep. Zinke said. “It’s a collaboration again between government entities, fish and wildlife service, and those that have a stake in the state, certainly ranchers and a lot of groups.”
The flush of federal dollars since 2018 is helping state agencies and conservation groups to better understand pronghorn movements and work with landowners to replace the fences that block them.
Oxarart said he has miles of old fences to replace, and most of them are barbed wire fences. Working with landowners like Oxarart, is Conservation Coordinator Martin Townsend with the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance.
“Every time that we can show landowners any information that the wildlife or science community is gaining that affects their place, I mean, people love taking care of the ranch that they’re on, so they work tirelessly to find ways to make it better,” Townsend said.
Townsend said research at the state level and the funding that enabled it has been invaluable in pinpointing problematic fences and replacing them with ones designed to let pronghorn and other big game animals pass.
Oxarart says wildlife-friendly fencing is actually a win-win for ranchers as it helps fund an expensive and never-ending task.
“If each mile costs you 8 or 9,000 in materials, I can’t afford to go put in ten miles of fence,” Oxarart said.
Funding through the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance is helping Oxarart keep his cattle enclosed while also making sure animals like pronghorn move on quickly, all while financing his fence replacement.
“If I’m gonna do something, I want to do it the right way," Oxarart said.
Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks released the results from its multiyear study of pronghorn populations and movements on July 15.
The Montana Pronghorn Movement and Population Ecology Project kicked off in 2020 with funding from the U.S. Department of Interior and included data already collected in the Madison Valley.
According to the study, pronghorn numbers in some parts of central to eastern Montana remained low at less than half of the agency’s goal while other populations were stable. Researchers wanted to find out why.
Justin Gude with Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks said they did not emerge with those answers.
“We got a lot more information about what drives pronghorn population dynamics, but we did not get a clear signal about the herds in the central part of the state and what was different about them, and they’re in fact not that different anymore,” said Gude.
Researchers collared over 700 adult female pronghorn across 8 study areas in southwest, central and southeast Montana to analyze how populations of pronghorn move through those areas, their seasonal patterns and points where highways, fences or other barriers stopped them.
The research shows that the majority of pronghorn populations they studied in central and eastern Montana tend to stay in their winter ranges rather than migrate.
FWP’s management recommendations from the project include increasing female survival rates through hunting limits, prioritizing the summer habitats where pronghorn forage for food and raise their young and replacing problematic fences that block pronghorn passage with wildlife-friendly fencing.
