Pronghorn Keep Their Path: Wyoming Commission Protects Entire 2.6-Million-Acre Migration Corridor Complex

In a rare victory for wildlife, Game and Fish unanimously rejected pressure from ranching and oil interests to cut key migration routes used by the Sublette pronghorn herd in Wyoming’s Red Desert.

Photo by Jon Sailer on Unsplash

In Wyoming, where the political winds almost always bend toward ranching and oil, it takes something extraordinary to bend them back. This week, we witnessed such a moment. After months of pressure, testimony by WWP and allies, and maneuvering, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission voted unanimously to designate the full Sublette Pronghorn Herd migration corridor — a 2.6-million-acre landscape that rivals Yellowstone in scale — as the state’s first officially protected migration route.

It didn’t start that way. The Game and Fish Department had recommended cutting two key migration routes out of the corridor: the Red Desert and East of Farson migrations, used by more than 5,000 pronghorns.

Agency staff argued that threat levels in those zones didn’t warrant protection, pointing to the absence of bottlenecks or so-called “high-use” habitat. But the biology tells another story: pronghorn rely on these side paths during hard winters and droughts, when the main corridor’s resources run thin. They may be classed as low- or medium-use, or written off as mere stopovers, but in reality they’re essential to the resilience of the herd. And behind the sterile language of “habitat classifications” and “threat levels” was a more familiar force at work: pressure from powerful interests.

Despite livestock already consuming the majority of the available forage in and around the migration corridor, despite grazing privileges being explicitly guaranteed protection in the governor’s Executive Order, and despite incentives in the EO including directives for funding for landowners, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association’s Jim Magagna — a lobbyist whose misinformation taints nearly every wildlife debate in the state — was lobbying against designation.

He ranches in the area and insisted his opposition had nothing to do with his grazing leases — even as he runs a sheep operation, the form of livestock that most directly competes with pronghorn for food.

Magagna lobbied against directing funding to private landowners who actually want to help pronghorn. Designation is what unlocks those resources, enabling landowners to build wildlife-friendly fencing, restore habitat, pursue conservation easements, and create safer roads. Without it, those opportunities vanish. If the livestock industry wanted anything other than to push wildlife toward extinction, it would embrace these measures that are being provided to them.

Oil and gas landmen weighed in as well, pointing to the mitigation dollars already spent to offset damage from drilling in the Anticline, Jonah, and other gas fields that cut directly across the pronghorn’s path. Their message was clear: industry wanted fewer protections, not more.

Even Wyoming Senator Pearson, a rancher from Rock Springs, joined in on the pro-extractive industry narrative. Yet WWP pointed to the 2025 Conservation in the West poll, which found that a majority of Wyomingites want leaders to prioritize clean water, air, wildlife habitat, and recreation opportunities over maximizing land for drilling and mining. So while Wyomingites may love their oil and gas, but they love their outdoor environment too — and they want its protection put ahead of unfettered extraction.

It is for this reason, in Lander, the people showed up. Retired biologists, hunters, conservationists, archaeologists, and everyday residents filled the seats. They spoke with one voice: protect the whole corridor. They reminded the commission that 5,000 pronghorn — far more than use the famous “Path of the Pronghorn” to Jackson — rely on these migration paths to survive. They reminded the commission that habitat fragmentation is death by a thousand cuts, and that to lose migration is to lose pronghorn populations.

As reported by WyoFile, nearly 99% of public comments have supported full designation during this process.

Commissioner Ken Roberts, a court clerk and outdoor enthusiast from Kemmerer, made the motion to keep the corridor intact. He called himself “mystified” by the idea of carving pieces out, relying on what he saw in field visits to the migration routes, saying that designating all ten routes is a “win for wildlife”. Commissioner Rusty Bell pointed to the volume of public support and said plainly: “I’m going to go along with what the people have said.” And in a rare show of independence from agency staff — and from the usual stranglehold of livestock and energy interests — the commission sided with Wyomingites and wildlife against the politics of wildlife agency capitulation.

Why the Corridor Matters

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Pronghorn are not like elk or deer; they are specialists in open-country speed and endurance. Their survival depends on seasonal migrations that allow them to move between winter and summer ranges. These corridors are not optional routes. They are lifelines — the arteries that keep herds healthy and connected across a fragmented landscape. The stopovers along these migration routes are essential refueling points that allow migrating animals to maintain their body condition and arrive on their winter ranges in good enough shape to survive the winter.

When development walls off a migration, pronghorn don’t simply find another way. They are bound to ancient routes, some stretching back thousands of years. Block the path, and animals pile up at fences or fade away from the landscape altogether.

Famously, a solar farm was built in a pronghorn migration bottleneck, and many died when perimeter fences forced them onto the highway. Already, the Sublette Herd is considered at “high risk” of losing its migration because of housing sprawl, industrial development, and oil and gas drilling dissecting the Green River Basin.

Protecting the migration corridors means protecting the ability of pronghorn to endure harsh winters, access summer forage, and keep genetic diversity flowing between subpopulations. Without intact migrations, populations decline — quietly at first, and then all at once.

A Rare Win

This is a political win in Wyoming. A rare one.

But let’s not kid ourselves: the fight over pronghorn migration is far from finished. Every acre of this 2.6-million-acre corridor will be contested. Industry lobbyists are already stoking opposition to its ‘sheer size,claiming the designation could somehow lead to the federal government canceling grazing leases. In reality, there is no authority or mechanism for the federal government to do this with state-declared migration corridors. At what point does this narrative stop being policy debate and start being plain fearmongering?

While a significant move in the right direction for pronghorn, all designation does is trigger state review of new projects to minimize their impact on the migration corridor. Designation is not a boogeyman, it is basic protections in the form of minimizing impact. Governor Gordon must still ratify the designation before it takes effect.

What happens next will set precedent — for mule deer corridors, for elk migrations, for the tenuous survival of wide-roaming wildlife across the American West.

For now, though, the pronghorn have kept their path. And for once, in Wyoming, the people’s voice was louder than the stockgrowers’ and the drillers’. That’s worth celebrating — and defending.

Grace Kuhn is the digital director for Western Watersheds Project, grace@westernwatersheds.org.