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PrintA Key Piece of the Conservation Puzzle
The Sand Creek Desert harbors wildlife species large and small
Photo by Hubert Quade
This clutch of burrowing owl chicks represents just one avian species found on the Sand Creek Desert.
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It’s mid-February and our line of four snow machines roar and belch through a rolling landscape of sagebrush. The snowpack is thinner here than in the distant forested highlands, but is still substantial. We are traveling east across the Sand Creek Desert and, although they are fifty miles away, the Tetons vividly dominate the eastern horizon. This area is closed to winter recreation, but we have secured special permission from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to check on a rare wildlife species that is hunkered down for the winter approximately fifteen miles into the desert from the nearest open road. The sensitivity of the area is increasingly apparent as we flush small bands of elk and pass several moose standing in the sagebrush.
This expanse of sagebrush-steppe seems an unlikely area for moose, but the Sand Creek Desert is a vital wintering area for big game that spend summers on surrounding National Forest lands and in Yellowstone National Park.
Earlier this winter, as snow depths approached eighteen inches in Yellowstone’ s interior and southern ranges, mule deer and elk began moving to lower elevations. For all its fame as a world-class wildlife sanctuary, Yellowstone has some substantial limitations, so most ungulates (hoofed animals) depend on habitats outside the park to survive the winter. Biophysical conditions in summer also limit Yellowstone’s productivity. Sensitive species like trumpeter swan and neo-tropical migratory songbirds nest in Yellowstone, but their persistence is dependent on breeding populations and habitats outside the park.
Many lower elevation habitats are famously important to our regional wildlife populations. The South Fork Snake River supports the densest, most prolific bald eagle nesting population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) and likely augments less productive populations at higher elevations. The Teton River Canyon supports some twenty-eight hundred wintering mule deer that summer in western Wyoming, including Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. Yellowstone cutthroat trout continue to grapple with increasingly dominant nonnative lake trout in Yellowstone Lake, accentuating the importance of the South Fork Snake and Teton River cutthroat populations to the future of this species.
Protected lower-elevation lands like these surrounding Yellowstone are much more than buffers to the Park—they are integral to the survival of our region’s wildlife.
Perhaps less known than the previously mentioned areas, the Sand Creek Desert in western Fremont County and eastern Clark County, Idaho, is a mosaic of private holdings and public lands administered by the Idaho Department of Lands, BLM, and Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG). The core area for wildlife is 33,000 acres of BLM lands and the IDFG’s Sand Creek Wildlife Management Area. The Sand Creek Desert provides crucial winter range for twenty-five hundred mule deer, three thousand elk, and an astonishing three hundred to five hundred moose.
