Volunteers make fences more friendly to wildlife in Jackson Hole

JACKSON, Wyo. After nearly two decades of fence removal projects all around Jackson Hole, volunteers are almost running out of historic barbed-wired fence to take out.

But ranching and raising and grazing cattle isnt going away in western Wyoming. Fences, in some form or another, will always be a part of the landscape. So now the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, the organization leading the fence-pull movement, is moving on to retrofitting fences to make them more wildlife-friendly.

Now that weve removed virtually everything that we can remove, weve moved on to modification, Gregory Giffiths, a fence project organizer, said from the field recently.

Griffiths task on a recent Saturday was removing two miles of top barbed-wire and replacing it with heavy-duty wooden poles along a section of in-use fence in Grand Teton National Parks Elk Ranch area. The new top poles will be less likely to snag the bison, moose, elk, deer and other critters passing by as they migrate and move about.

The project was a collaboration of the wildlife foundation and National Parks Conservation Association. It used $5,000 donated by Nature Valley/General Mills.

Thirty-four volunteers gave up their Saturday for the project.

At Elk Ranch, groups of bison swarmed the area on both sides of the fence, as if to reassure the volunteers that their time was being put toward a worthwhile cause.

The wildlife foundation had already taken a crack at the section of fence volunteers were hard at work on Saturday. To protect pronghorn, which tend to crawl rather than jump, the bottom two strands of barbed wire had been swapped with a single strand of smooth wire last summer.

This arms going to be sore, said Steve Mason, taking a break from hammering spikes into drill holes bored into the new pole. But its sore from good things.

Mason, like a good number of the crowd at Elk Ranch, was a seasoned volunteer. He is a good friend of Bob Kopp, president of the wildlife foundations board of directors.

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Volunteers make fences more friendly to wildlife in Jackson Hole