Absaroka Fence Initiative: Saving Wildlife, Building Friendships

When neighbors come together to improve their properties for the wildlife that shares that space, something bigger and better is often forged.

That’s the experience of those who have been involved in the Absaroka Fence Initiative (AFI), a local program that replaces barbed wire fences with wildlife-friendlier ones, and in some places removing abandoned, and often dangerous fencing.

“Fencing can physically just harm or even kill an animal when they get trapped,” said Kimi Zamuda, the local initiatives coordinator in the migration program for The Nature Conservancy-Wyoming (TNC), one of the partner organizations in AFI. “It can separate fawns from their mothers, and if that happens, the fawns can honestly die. It also just causes undue stress, and it alters or just cuts off movement paths across landscapes, so it really negatively impacts the connectivity of these animals.”

Zamuda, a wildlife biologist and environmental scientist, has been involved with the Absaroka Fence Initiative since 2023. Zamuda and Erin Welty of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition are co-chairs for the program.

“I think AFI is a phenomenal organization,” she said. “I think it’s the people involved, the number of volunteers, and part of what makes it, I think, so impactful, is how we use science and our wildlife data to really strategically inform the projects we do.”

Zamuda said that to date, the Absaroka Fence Initiative has completed 26 projects, removing 18 miles of fence and modifying 33 miles on public and private lands.

License Plate Funds Launch Fence Initiative

“Most of these fences are for livestock management that is still actively utilizing fencing on the landscape, so it can’t all just be removed,” she said. “A lot of landowners, especially sizable ranches, or even, a hundred to two hundred acre ranches, have fencing on their landscape. And fencing is very costly. It’s necessary, but it is costly to maintain.”

Initially, a major portion of the funding for AFI came from the Governor’s License Awards, money generated from the state’s wildlife conservation license plates. A $25,000 award from that fund kick-started the Absaroka Fence Initiative, according to Zamuda.

“We started with that and have applied to other grants over the years,” she said. “We work with permittees, lessees and private landowners, and either AFI pays for the entire thing to be modified, or we buy the materials – we kind of cost-share it, in a sense.”

Zamuda said not only do AFI’s efforts financially help the landowners, the lessees and the permittees, but by making the fences more wildlife friendly, that decreases the amount of damage costs and the amount of repair costs the landowners are facing each year.

“We recognize the importance of private land stewardship in Park County,” she said. “It is hugely important to our economy, our livelihoods, as well as wildlife.”

Neighbors Rally After Tragedy Strikes Close to Home

Although funding is essential to AFI’s mission, it is only part of the equation. More than 500 people have volunteered for an astonishing total of 3,300 hours so far, to make the open spaces safer for the animals who live here.

Margie Johnson is one of those volunteers. She and a number of her neighbors in the Cody’s Country subdivision up the North Fork found out about the Initiative when they became aware of the hazards that abandoned barbed wire fences posed to the wildlife in their neighborhood.

“We had the two mule deer get into a tussle and got into the barbed wire with a downed fence along the forest line, and they wrapped around a tree, and they stamped each other in an hours and hours long fight,” Johnson said. Although Game and Fish staff were eventually able to free the animals, she said the damage had been done.

“Later, I learned from Jim Zumbo, the wildlife biologist who lives in Cody’s Country, that the trauma in their system would not allow that animal to survive, that it was too traumatic,” said Johnson. “Getting caught in that fence killed these two beautiful, beautiful creatures, and it was heartbreaking to watch it.”

Shortly after that incident, the Johnsons and one of their neighbors started making plans to take it upon themselves to begin clearing out the abandoned wire that the deer had gotten caught in.

Restoring the Landscape

“There was so much fencing, it just crisscrossed everything,” said Johnson, whose subdivision runs from the Yellowstone Highway two miles up to the boundary of the Shoshone National Forest. “It was long runs, it went across ravines, it was buried in the ground, it was nasty.”

The more the neighbors talked, the more people volunteered to help take down the fencing. And then they learned about the Absaroka Fence Initiative.

“Light bulbs went off in all of our heads, that, hey, we can make this bigger,” said Johnson. “They (AFI partners) brought tools and they brought know-how. We had a little 15-minute training session at the very beginning where we all came together at somebody’s house.”

Between the neighbors and the volunteers from partner organizations through AFI, 3261 pounds of dangerous, rusted barbed wire fencing was cleared – roughly 90% of the abandoned wire in the subdivision.

“That’s over a ton and a half removed because of two groups joining together,” Johnson said. “We actually matched each other (for volunteers). I believe (the total) was 46, and I’m going to say it was evenly matched, 23-23.”

Johnson said this project was long overdue. “Our subdivision started in 1973, and it did not get done until we joined with the Absaroka Fence Initiative,” she said. “We made a lot of connections across the entire subdivision, because it’s a pretty big subdivision, but people from the top, middle, and bottom all came together. And it was friend-raising as much as taking down the fence.”

Clearing Migration Paths

Since 2020, Zamuda said AFI was primarily targeting dangerous fences that were in the core migration paths for elk, mule deer and pronghorn across Park County. But in 2024, the group began a project specific to the Carter Mountain pronghorn herd southwest of Cody, which Zamuda points out is the highest elevation herd in the world.

“The goal is to modify or remove, where possible, 100 miles of fencing across this route,” said Zamuda. “They’re crossing public and private land, they’re crossing major highways.”

In July, the Knobloch Family foundation awarded AFI a $400,000 grant to complete Phase 1 of the project, which is modifying 20 miles of priority fence on BLM land. And although the Carter Mountain pronghorn herd is the focus of this project, Zamuda noted that other species will benefit from the removal of dangerous fencing in this area as well.

“There’s core sage grouse there, and their migration route, there are elk and mule deer herds, there are bears and big horn sheep,” she said. “So basically, this project is going for that landscape-level impact that’s focused on one species, but will benefit multiple.”

Collaborative Efforts Bring Greater Impact

TNC is just one organization involved in the initiative that has brought together multiple agencies, landowners and neighbors to remove or replace 51 miles of abandoned barbed wire fences in Park County alone, just in the last five years. The U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Meeteetse Conservation District, and the Draper Natural History Museum are all partners in the Initiative, along with the landowners and volunteers who donate their time and energy.

“The last three years, we have partnered with the local high school to bring students out on a fence modification to talk about wildlife migration and the impact of fences on wildlife, as well as natural resource careers,” said Zamuda. “This year, we will modify a fence later in October that is within the (Carter Mountain) pronghorn project area.”

So far in 2025, AFI has completed 6 projects, modifying 9 miles of fence. But Zamuda told the Cody Journal that the number of fences that cover Wyoming’s landscape is huge.

“There are so many miles of fence in the western part of the US,” said Zamuda. “There is a stat for Sublette county that there is enough fence to run from New York to, I think, Maine, or New York to San Francisco. So we’re talking hundreds, thousands of miles and fences in one county in Wyoming.”

For more information on the Absaroka Fence Initiative, visit https://absarokafenceinitiative.org/

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