LANDER—When teacher Fredde Reed became pregnant with her first child in March, her choice for prenatal care was easy, she said.

“Being Native American enrolled, I can receive care at Indian Health Service,” said Reed, who is Eastern Shoshone. Reed and her wife weren’t initially certain they would stay with IHS through the birth. They wanted to explore other options in Fremont County.

But those options have dwindled significantly in recent years. Meanwhile, two clinics on the Wind River Indian Reservation — one run by IHS, a federal agency, along with Wind River Family and Community Healthcare, run by the Northern Arapaho tribe — have been building their maternal care services.

So at IHS, Reed established care with Dr. Matt Graf, a family practitioner with obstetrics training, and was assigned what felt like a whole team of staffers to keep track of her pregnancy. She also found resources through the clinic to connect with other expecting mothers.

“They are building a really good program to support moms,” Reed said. “Especially women who don’t have a lot of support.”

Reed’s experience is notable in this New Hampshire-sized county of nearly 40,000, where non-tribal residents have a single obstetric practice to visit for prenatal and delivery care. Many women travel long distances for prenatal care and to deliver because they are uncomfortable with just one option and the likelihood it creates for delivering with an on-call traveling doctor.

On the Wind River Indian Reservation, meanwhile, IHS and Wind River Family and Community Healthcare, commonly known as Wind River Cares, have made targeted efforts to ensure they meet the pregnancy and labor-related needs of their Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho patients.

“I think in a lot of ways … [our patients] have more resources than the general community does,” said Dr. Laura Gibbons, who is part of a maternal health team at Wind River Cares.

Growth and needs

Gibbons is a family practice doctor with obstetrics training, meaning she can deliver babies but not perform surgeries like c-sections.

For more than a year, she was the only full-time OB provider at Wind River Cares, which operates clinics for tribal patients in Arapahoe, Ethete and Riverton. But late this summer, her clinic hired another family practice doctor with the same OB training, plus one who can perform c-sections.

The clinic also employs two nurses dedicated solely to pregnant women, moms of young children and their kids. Lander obstetrician Dr. Thomas  Dunaway, the only practicing obstetrician serving Fremont County, also contracts with the clinic for surgical needs.

It’s becoming a well-staffed team. That’s important, because as maternal care is shrinking in many parts of rural America, pregnancy-related risks are particularly high for Native women. American Indian people are more than two times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than non-Hispanic white people, and roughly twice as likely to experience severe maternal morbidity.

“Most of our patients are high risk,” Gibbons said, for reasons ranging from age (35 or older) to high blood pressure and gestational or preexisting diabetes.

No employees of IHS could obtain permission from the federal agency to talk to WyoFile by publication.

Unique needs

Transportation is a significant need associated with health care on the reservation — it’s a 3,500-square-mile area of scattered communities, and it’s far from urban centers where specialists are often found.

Wind River Cares operates a transportation system specifically to fill these needs, whether it’s a case of a maternal-child-health nurse picking up a patient to bring her to appointments at the clinic or the transport of a high-risk pregnant patient to see a maternal-fetal specialist in Denver.

The system is crucial, Gibbons said.

“It’d be impossible to function and provide patients the care they needed if we didn’t have that,” Gibbons said.

Gibbons credits Wind River Cares CEO Rick Brannan for prioritizing maternal care. Brannan, she said, was “aggressive and willing to hire more obstetrical providers for our group … I do think Wind River Cares has done a very good job of building access for our patients.”

And as a physician who spent all those months as the clinic’s sole maternal health doctor, Gibbons is relieved to see the team grow. Birth volume has bumped up in recent months, but even without that factor, she said, a bigger staff can just provide more comprehensive care.

The erosion of maternity care providers elsewhere in the county, she believes, “has just increased the pressure” to bulk up the clinic’s resources.

Still, for all the efforts, all Fremont County patients are vulnerable to the realities of rural medicine, she noted, including a provider dearth.

“It’s no secret, like, OB is not the only specialty we wish we had more of,” she said. “We’re short on doctors of all kinds.”

Happy patient

Many expecting mothers who talked to WyoFile traveled to places like Thermopolis, Casper and Salt Lake City to give birth.

Reed and her wife, in contrast, had planned to drive about a half mile from their house to Lander’s SageWest hospital, where Graf has privileges to deliver babies.

“I could give birth in Thermopolis or Jackson,” Reed said in early November. “But I really like Dr. Graf and I like the program that he’s building and I’m confident in that. So that’s kept us here.”

Plus, she said then, her December due date means “it’s going to be winter so you can’t really count on the roads being open.”

Babies have a way of scrambling the best-laid plans, which is what happened in Reed’s case. Shortly after talking to WyoFile, she and her wife were traveling in the Denver area when her blood pressure spiked. Her doctor recommended she go in for monitoring, and Colorado medical professionals found she had severe preeclampsia — a dangerous pregnancy-related condition.

They induced Reed’s labor, five weeks short of her due date. She gave birth, and her daughter spent 13 days in the NICU, a resource Fremont County hospitals don’t have.

“We were extremely lucky to have been in the Denver area and to deliver there,” Reed said after the birth. “If we had been home, our baby would have been flown and we would have been separated.”

The post As nearby maternal care dwindles, tribal clinics build it up appeared first on WyoFile.

LANDER—Jan Siebersma has delivered thousands of babies during his three-plus decades in obstetrics. He’s seen it all: twins and breech babies, marathon labors, emergency cesarean sections, even the rare en caul delivery when the infant emerges in the intact amniotic sac.

Working in Fremont County for the past 15 years has kept him busy. The New Hampshire-sized county is home to nearly 40,000 people and several towns, but as of 2016, Lander is the only one with a hospital that delivers babies.

As recently as 2021 Siebersma provided care alongside another OB and two midwives at the Lander Medical Clinic; all four delivered at the hospital. There was also a private practice in town. “We had a nice amount of providers, and a relatively nice life,” said Siebersma, a tall man who keeps his gray hair cropped short.

But then the clinic’s other obstetrician stopped working due to a medical issue, and one of the midwives left the practice.

“So then, [midwife] Sam Skelton and myself were left with a practice that had been built up for four people,” he said. “The thing about obstetrics, you can’t just turn the faucet on and turn the faucet off. So during that time, I just really got burned out.”

Siebersma tried to facilitate the hiring of another OB to relieve the burden, even asking the hospital to recruit another provider. But ultimately, he had to step away. Siebersma delivered his final patient’s baby in early 2023.

That left Dr. Thomas Dunaway, who employs a midwife, as the sole obstetrician serving the general population of pregnant patients in Fremont County. (Tribal patients on the Wind River Indian Reservation have access to specifically contracted doctors.) Dunaway did not respond to several interview requests.

Siebersma continues to see gynecological patients. He also works as a locum tenens doctor for SageWest, meaning he takes on-call shifts to deliver babies. But unlike before, the patients are not women he’s previously established care with and seen for prenatal checks.

Taking locums calls “is vastly different than having, you know, 150 patients that are pregnant that I’m responsible for,” Siebersma said. That type of workload is what you sign up for as a rural obstetrician, he noted. “But there comes a point where … enough is enough. It gets onerous after a while, constantly being available.”

Siebersma’s story of spending inordinate hours helping bring babies into the world — perhaps to the detriment of his own health and family life — is common among rural obstetricians, according to interviews with medical staff and experts.

His decision to stop practicing obstetrics is one piece in a complex puzzle of factors that have eroded services in this sprawling central Wyoming county, and the state as a whole. Though Wyoming has 23 counties, it is home to just 18 birthing facilities. Several facilities have shuttered labor-and-delivery units in recent years. Doctors have retired, closed offices, limited their practices or left the state to practice elsewhere. The providers who remain are left to grapple with taxing call schedules, the uncertainty of relying on unfamiliar traveling nurses and the responsibility for many patients with little backup.

Lander’s SageWest Health Care hospital has recruited a new obstetrician who will start at the hospital in 2024, CEO John Whiteside said, along with a family practitioner who can deliver babies.

“The desire in my heart is still that I do want to work and help the people of Wyoming … Sometimes things have to break for them to get fixed.”

Natalie Eggleston, , OB-GYN who grew up in Jackson

Having more hands on deck could help, providers say, but is unlikely to change the predominant climate of gusting headwinds.

Shrinking obstetric options have consequences not only for providers, but for their patients. Many women here travel for maternity care, risking dangerous road conditions and adverse outcomes. In part two of this series examining Fremont County’s OB shortage, WyoFile looks at the impacts on the oversubscribed medical professionals keeping the system afloat.

‘Couldn’t make it work’

Nurse midwife and mother of four Chase Ommen grew up in Riverton. She has many years of experience in Fremont County’s OB realm — she worked as a labor and delivery nurse in the nearby Lander hospital and later as a nurse midwife at the Lander Medical Clinic, providing a range of women’s health care services and delivering babies in the hospital.

Ommen started as an OB hospital nurse in 2011, and looks back at that time fondly.

“We were a rocking team,” she said. “We had great nurses, great providers, we had an amazing manager of our unit. And we all worked together very well. The community had choices in providers at that time, and that’s huge for a patient … and also, we provided really great, up-to-date, evidence-based care.”

There was healthy competition between the Lander and Riverton hospitals, she said. Then in 2016, SageWest, both hospitals’ out-of-state, for-profit owner, closed the Riverton OB unit and consolidated the campuses’ services. Lander’s birth volume spiked, Ommen said, and her manager became saddled with too much work and too few resources, ultimately resigning. Many felt the support from administration “wasn’t there.”

The situation didn’t improve. Working as a midwife years later, she recalls spending her days seeing patients in the clinic and her nights in the hospital delivering babies. She barely slept. “It was awful,” she said.

Ultimately, she said, she hit too many barriers — financial and otherwise —  to practice midwifery in Lander. She found a midwifery and family practice position in Billings, Montana, packed up her family and left Wyoming.

“It was really really hard for us to leave Lander,” Ommen said. “Not what we wanted.”

When Siebersma ended his OB practice, nurse midwife Skelton’s services were also lost to the community. That’s because she had a collaborative agreement with Siebersma; the hospital requires such an arrangement for a nurse midwife to deliver.

Skelton said the gaps in care are hard on families. “The idea that you will likely get prenatal care and then go in and have someone completely different show up for your birth, I think that’s anxiety-inducing for a lot of women.”

Certified professional midwife Heidi Stearns helped Fremont County mothers have home births for 15 years until she retired at age 65 in June.

With her retirement, she said, women seeking home birth options must look to midwives who are willing to travel to Fremont County from elsewhere. She refers people to a Worland-based midwife. Worland is 88 miles from Riverton and more than 100 from Lander.

Rural midwifery is tough to sustain, Stearns said — you are on your own in many ways. The specter of an abortion ban in Wyoming and other states also weighs heavily on midwives like herself, Stearns said. For example, she used misoprostol, which abortion opponents have targeted, for treating postpartum hemorrhaging.

“It’s really scary to do births without those medications,” Stearns said.

In Idaho, anti-choice laws have driven many OB-GYNs from the state, leaving women and pregnant patients with few choices in a newly deserted health care landscape. Wyoming lawmakers have passed a pair of abortion bans, though enforcement has been held up in the courts.

“I think Idaho is a good model of what would come if all the bans went into effect” in Wyoming, said Jackson OB-GYN Giovannina Anthony, who is among the plaintiffs challenging Wyoming’s bans in court.

Incentives and disincentives 

Obstetrics is not as profitable a specialty as many others, which experts say is one factor driving rural hospital labor and delivery closures. A 2022 study on rural obstetric challenges found that about 40% of rural hospitals lose money on their obstetrics programs due to factors such as Medicaid reimbursement rates. In addition, medical liability insurance premium rates are higher as a percent of gross income for specialties considered high-risk, such as obstetrics.

Another challenge to the specialty involves volume. Doctors need a large enough patient base to treat the gamut of issues and keep their skills sharp. In obstetrics, ideally that means lots of normal births as well as the complicated cases, which can be valuable learning experiences.

Rural areas often lack that volume. They are often also short on other medical resources found in urban centers, including specialists who can help with complicated cases and enough colleagues to share the call-schedule load. Retaining support staff has also been a challenge even as employees like nurses and anesthesiologists are vital for delivery wards.

Those and other factors make it difficult for rural facilities to compete with urban centers for doctors. Wyoming has long grappled with this.

The University of Wyoming participates in the WWAMI Medical Education Program, which is affiliated with the University of Washington School of Medicine. It’s considered one of the state’s strongest levers for keeping promising young doctors in the state. The program is designed to be a win-win — if a participating student goes to work in a designated underserved rural area, the program pays back up to 75% of their tuition costs for the returned service. The Wyoming Legislature funds 20 seats annually in the program.

Growing up in Jackson, Natalie Eggleston always wanted to be a doctor. When she learned about WWAMI as a teenager, she figured she’d found her ticket. “It was like, ‘all right, that’s how I get to medical school.’”

After her undergraduate studies in Utah, she was accepted into the selective WWAMI program and pursued obstetrics as a specialty.

She completed her residency and OB-GYN training in California. When it was time to come back to Wyoming, however, she started having second thoughts. She worried that the Roe v. Wade reversal, and Wyoming’s abortion-ban laws, would affect her ability to provide full reproductive care to patients.

“To imagine myself coming back to a place where I would have to basically put my own security and my job potentially ahead of what I know to be the right type of care to offer patients … It kind of seemed like an impossible place to put myself in so early in my career,” she said.

Other challenges of rural medicine factored in. She started to realize how low-resourced some of the practices were and how difficult mentors would be to come by.

“I kind of wanted to keep some of my volume and my resources high before I was ready to be the best doctor that I could be in a rural area,” she said.

And in Jackson, where she strongly considered returning, the cost of living is too high even for many doctors to afford, she said.

So Eggleston instead accepted an OB-GYN position in Billings. There is still time to return to Wyoming and claim WWAMI’s financial incentives. If she doesn’t, however, she will miss out on about $250,000 in loan repayments.

“The desire in my heart is still that I do want to work and help the people of Wyoming,” she said. “Sometimes things have to break for them to get fixed.”

As of 2022, 131 out of 194 Wyoming-WWAMI graduates, or about 68%, have completed residency and returned to Wyoming to practice medicine, according to the University of Wyoming.

Other providers

Fremont County families had 442 babies last year, according to state records, but only 339 were born in the county, indicating that 103 babies — almost one in four — were delivered elsewhere. That translates to an increased load on obstetric providers in places like Thermopolis, Jackson and even other states.

Hot Springs County’s delivery numbers jumped by 65% between 2011 and 2022.

“Fremont County, it’s a heck of a lot bigger than Hot Springs,” said Dr. Travis Bomengen, a Thermopolis family practitioner who provides OB care at Hot Springs Health. “And so, our numbers have gone up from that standpoint.”

The trend has spurred staffing changes to ensure enough providers are on hand, Bomengen said. Hot Springs Health has satellite clinics, including one in Riverton. They held off expanding for some time, Bomengen said, but the need became apparent. “That was kind of our mindset for trying to get down there and help out with some of the shortages.”

Teton County also fields spillover from other communities. At Gros Ventre OB-GYN in Jackson, employees struggle to keep their heads above water, obstetrician Maura Lofaro said one August evening after hours from the office she shares with Dr. Shannon Roberts and nurse midwife Christina Kitchen.

When she started practicing in Jackson 26 years ago, “there were actually too many of us,” Lofaro said — about eight providers in obstetrics. And it was a crowded field for some time.

But in just the last couple years, she said, five providers stepped away from OB or cut their volume. And suddenly “it was like trying to drink from a firehose,” she said, “the volume was like, pouring in.”

St. John’s Hospital has helped by hiring a locums to help Gros Ventre’s providers handle the on-call delivery schedule, she said, and efforts are underway to recruit more doctors.

Meantime, “we have not turned any woman away from this office. We have made it work.”

That includes patients from Fremont, Sublette and Sweetwater counties. Lower-priority needs do get pushed off, Lofaro said. GYN patients calling for an annual exam won’t likely get seen for four to five months, for example.

The biggest challenge is not the patient volume — it’s retaining staff like nurses. “It’s just that we don’t have the support staff,” she said.

St. John’s Hospital plans to continue to support the staffing needs of its birth center into the future, Hospital CEO Jeff Sollis said during a hospital board meeting this summer.

“We will continue to be a resource for Fremont County families who are seeking high-quality obstetrical [care],” St. John’s Communications Officer Karen Connelly wrote to WyoFile in an email.

In early November, Jackson OB-GYN clinic Women’s Health and Family Care, which collaborated with Gros Ventre OB-GYN, announced it’s closing Dec. 15 “due to financial reasons.” In a letter to patients, the clinic said its doctors will continue to practice at other Jackson locations. “With the rising cost of overhead, including rent, labor, and supplies, our private practice is no longer sustainable,” the letter said.

Fears

Of all the births Siebersma has experienced over the years, it wasn’t necessarily the rare ones that were the most harrowing.

“The ones that are scary are when women had severe preeclampsia at 26 weeks, and there’s a snowstorm, and we can’t [fly] them out and we have to do a stat c-section, and we have a pound-and-a-half baby that the pediatricians are trying to stabilize in order to get him out,” he said.

And yet, part of what he found gratifying about delivering babies in rural Wyoming for so many years were the situations that tested his skills. “I like caring for really sick people,” he said.

Looking forward, Siebersma says he worries the eroding provider base will lead to less prenatal care and more of these scary scenarios. There is a lot of high risk in Fremont County, he noted: high levels of diabetes, high blood pressure and substance abuse. The hospital already sees women in labor who received no prenatal care, Siebersma added. Babies of mothers who do not get prenatal care are three times more likely to have a low birth weight and five times more likely to die than those born to mothers who do get care, according to the Office on Women’s Health.

“Ten years ago, I would have patients coming from Jackson or from Rock Springs or Casper, Dubois, Thermopolis, to deliver here,” Siebersma said. Now, that situation seems to have reversed.

It won’t be easy to undo.

“It’s a very complicated problem that didn’t just occur when I stopped seeing OB patients in January,” he said. “It’s been going on for a long time.”

Midwife Ommen called the situation “terrifying.”

“It makes me angry for the community,” she said. “I worry for them.”

The post Rural Wyoming is losing OBs. Those who remain are spread thin. appeared first on WyoFile.

Wyoming women have quietly shouldered a health care dilemma for years: A growing scarcity of obstetric resources has made pregnancy, labor and childbirth increasingly tricky in widening swaths of the state.

Gwenith Wachter experienced the erosion first-hand through 23 years and five pregnancies. She gave birth to her first three children in her hometown of Riverton, back when the local hospital was a bustling place staffed with veteran nurses and doctors who worked well together, she said.

By the time her fourth came along in 2016, however, “none of those same nurses were still there anymore,” she said. “And that experience wasn’t super great. And then they quit delivering babies shortly after, like literal weeks after.”

With the Riverton hospital’s labor and delivery unit shuttered, Wachter had to drive 26 miles to Lander to deliver her fifth child in 2021. The doctor and nurses there were professional and capable, she said, (they may have saved her life following a dangerous hemorrhage) but traveling nurses were essentially strangers to her.

Having watched the decline of Fremont County’s resources — from two hospitals and several obstetricians to one labor and delivery facility and a single OB — Wachter believes the current situation is unacceptable.

“We absolutely have to have OB services over here [in Riverton],” she said. “I just think it’s insane. It puts women at risk.”

Wachter’s fears bear out in the numbers. More than 15% of Wyoming women had no birthing hospital within 30 minutes of home in 2022, compared to 9.7% of women nationally, a report by the March of Dimes shows. Such distance from care comes with real risks. Women who live farther from delivery hospitals are more likely to experience adverse medical outcomes. Babies are more likely to require a stay in the neonatal intensive care unit.

West central Wyoming is not unique, but with one obstetric practice, one midwife and one birthing hospital serving the general population of Fremont County — a New Hampshire-sized area that’s home to nearly 40,000 people — the situation here offers a window into the challenges, and consequences, of limited maternal health services.

(Patients on the Wind River Indian Reservation have arguably better access via doctors who contract with tribal health services to deliver babies, which will be examined later in this series.)

To be clear, a woman laboring in Fremont County can deliver 24/7 in SageWest Hospital in Lander, but she would likely do so with a traveling doctor she’s never met. That possibility, along with the hospital’s poor reputation among locals, is prompting many Fremont County women to go elsewhere — Thermopolis and Jackson, Billings, Salt Lake and Denver.

Traveling, of course, requires money, childcare, work flexibility and other resources that not everyone has. And then there’s the issue of winter travel in Wyoming, where icy storms regularly close roads and ground air ambulances.

“Who wants to travel to a different state at the end of their pregnancy?” Wachter asked. “To give birth, especially in the wintertime? So yeah, that I think is ridiculous, and puts you at way greater risk for complications.”

The OB shortage is not isolated to Fremont County. Hospitals in Rawlins and Kemmerer stopped offering delivery services in recent years. Other counties like Sublette and Weston don’t have birthing facilities at all.

“Pretty much everyone that I've talked to, it's like, there's this excitement: ‘I'm pregnant. This is great!’” But that soon gives way to, “‘Oh, shit. Now what?’”

Expecting mother Annalee Neary

“It’s a huge problem,” Jen Davis, Gov. Mark Gordon’s senior policy advisor on health and human services, said of the dearth of maternal health care.

And it’s one with dire circumstances, according to University of Wyoming Professor and midwife Esther Gilman-Kehrer, who delivered babies in Laramie for many years.

“I think the fears are that women are going to die,” Gilman-Kehrer said. “I would envision that at some point, we'll see deaths related to you know, we didn't have enough people. We didn't have enough people to look after this person.”

The challenge also raises existential questions for precarious communities. How, after all, can a community survive, much less thrive, without being able to reliably protect mothers or bring babies into the world?

In the coming weeks, WyoFile will examine the facets of this complicated problem — the economics of rural OB-GYN practice, the hurdles to attracting and retaining providers, the roles of powerful institutions — and explore potential solutions.

For all its players and complexity, at heart, the challenge is borne by women undergoing the most simple and fundamental of human experiences.

So that’s where we’ll begin, with the moms.

Trauma and fears 

When she became pregnant with her second child earlier this year, Lander farmer and attorney Bailey Brennan chose to seek maternal health care out of state.

The trauma of her first delivery largely drove her decision.

It was the spring of 2021, and more than a month before her due date, when Brennan awoke one morning to discover she was bleeding.

She had experienced complications before, including an earlier pregnancy that ended in miscarriage, and felt something was very wrong. She called her Jackson midwife, who instructed Brennan to get to the hospital in Lander — deeming it too dangerous to drive to Jackson, where Brennan had grown up and planned to deliver.

Brennan would learn later that two related complications had developed, putting both she and the fetus at serious risk.

But at the Lander hospital that day, after staff ran Brennan through tests and informed the obstetrician on call of the situation, he prescribed bed rest at home, she said. When the nurse told her she was being released, she grew furious. “I was like, ‘I need [the obstetrician] to come in, I need a second opinion and I need him to know I’m a lawyer.’”

She paused. “That’s the only time I’ve ever done that.”

The doctor arrived, she said, and discovered she was going into labor. A helicopter soon flew her to Salt Lake City. Days later, after doctors discovered the baby was in distress, her daughter was delivered via cesarean section. She was five weeks early.

The bleeding, the flight, the physical exhaustion of laboring, the shock of caring for a premature newborn — it shook Brennan. When she and her husband started thinking about having another baby, Brennan said, she knew her risk would be elevated. And when she started calling around in Fremont County, she found only two OB-GYNs were accepting patients.

She ultimately decided Salt Lake City was the best option despite it being nearly 300 miles and multiple mountain passes away. They found a maternal-fetal medicine doctor there and saw a provider in Thermopolis for prenatal care. In October, the family moved into an Airbnb in Salt Lake City to await her due date. On Oct. 27, Brennan had a successful vaginal birth after cesarean, delivering a daughter. Most Wyoming hospitals, including Lander’s, do not allow mothers to try for VBACs, as they are commonly known, due to risk of rupture. (That’s despite the positive health benefits of vaginal births).

Brennan wishes there were better options in Fremont County. “It didn't really occur to me when we decided to move to Lander that availability of medical services would be a question,” she said.

A luxury not all can afford

Brennan’s discovery of her scant options echoes many Fremont County families’ stories.

By the time Kristen Gunther started thinking about a second pregnancy, less than two years after the birth of her son, she found that none of the four providers previously available through her clinic were still delivering. “So now it's like ‘oh, now we kind of start from scratch,’” the Lander resident said.

Gunther’s first pregnancy went smoothly until she hit 39 weeks. That’s when her blood pressure spiked, and doctors diagnosed her with preeclampsia, a leading cause of maternal deaths worldwide.

In the flurry that followed, doctors induced Gunther’s labor, gave her magnesium to prevent preeclampsia-related seizures and administered an epidural. After several hours of labor, she delivered her son.

The high-risk designation that comes with her age and medical history has had a strong influence on her family’s decision making about her second pregnancy.

Gunther is due in March. After much consideration, she and her husband are now planning to fly to Maryland to stay with her parents for the birth and postpartum period.

She would love to have the baby in Wyoming, she said, but has to weigh the medical risks along with the logistics of travel and childcare for her toddler son. She considers herself fortunate to have enough work flexibility to make Maryland an option. “It’s going to be a huge challenge and it’s an insane privilege that we can even consider it,” she said in a text.

Stress of travel

Gordon’s health policy director Davis has heard many stories like Gunther’s. “But that's not an option for everybody,” she said.

Traveling is suboptimal for reasons beyond time and cost. The farther a woman travels for maternity care, the greater the risk of maternal morbidity and adverse infant outcomes.

In rural areas of Wyoming, 22.4% of women live over 30 minutes from a birthing hospital compared to 5.2% of women living in urban areas, according to the March of Dimes.

And yes, traveling for health care has always been a given for many of Wyoming’s rural residents. But Fremont County is home to the state’s 9th and 13th largest towns — these aren’t specks on the map. Riverton, the larger town, hasn’t had a labor and delivery unit since 2016.

There were 608 births in Fremont County in 2010, a number that fell last year by 44%, to 339, according to Wyoming Department of Health data. (Wyoming’s birth rate has also fallen statewide in that time).

Fremont County families had 442 babies last year, according to state records, meaning that 103 — almost one in four — babies were born out of county.

Losing confidence  

Nature Conservatory restoration scientist Maggie Eshleman initially saw an obstetrician in Lander when she became pregnant in 2021, but the office, which was relatively new, never seemed to have her test results, she said.

She found a provider in Casper instead. The decision to seek care elsewhere proved a blessing in disguise, she said, because a swarm of complications ensued. At one point, she was life-flighted to Denver to treat pregnancy-related kidney stones and an infection.

She and her husband ended up driving to Casper roughly a dozen times through the now infamous winter conditions of 2022-23, she said. They ultimately stayed for the final month because the weather was so severe. His employer has a Casper office, and she could work remotely.

The birth went smoothly; a favorite nurse ended up delivering her son.

Other mothers, like Riverton dispatcher Val Hinkle, have found themselves shuffled through doctors as provider turnover churns. Hinkle, whose first child was delivered 11 weeks early via C-section in 2017, has since established care with two midwives that left the county, including one she loved. “I just keep establishing a patient/doctor connection with these people, and they keep leaving.”

Even talking with other Riverton moms, she said, “it just seems like it's incredibly difficult to even find anybody.”

Hinkle’s first pregnancy was a frightening ordeal; her son weighed only 2 pounds and spent 55 days in the NICU in Denver. At this point, she said, her desire to have another child has dampened.

“I feel like it's pretty terrifying honestly,” she said. “Especially being high risk. It definitely changes the aspects of my life where I'm like, ‘oh, yeah, I want to have another baby,’ because it's just scary.”

Riverton mom Chelsee Kucera delivered her son in Thermopolis earlier this year. Most of the Fremont County moms she knows have done the same, she said. That’s despite Lander being closer, and the Hot Springs County facility being on the other side of the narrow, windy and often precarious Wind River Canyon.

In her case, she had plenty of time to get to the hospital. Just a few days after she delivered, however, a rock slide in the canyon caused hours-long traffic delays, she said.

Unforeseen complications 

As a resident of Dubois — the small, isolated mountain community in Fremont County’s northwestern corner — Sara Domek understood from the outset that traveling to deliver a baby in a larger town was part of the deal.

Her closest choices were Jackson, which lay over Togwotee Pass, and Lander, which lay on the other side of a stretch of a highway notoriously strewn with wildlife. Both are roughly 75 miles away.

Friends and peers had more positive reviews for Jackson’s hospital than Lander’s, she said, and she already saw a Jackson OB-GYN, so that’s where she went when she became pregnant in late 2019.

Her pregnancy entailed around 20 prenatal trips to Jackson, Domek said. She went into labor in the middle of the night in July 2020, triggering a late-night drive over the pass and south on a long, empty stretch of highway.

“I remember this cow elk standing on the side of the road,” Domek said. “Luckily my husband was attentive and aware. I was not so much, because I was having contractions.”

Domek delivered her son at St. John’s Health, Jackson’s hospital.

Unbeknownst to anyone, however, part of Domek’s placenta was retained in her uterus. That interfered with breastfeeding, which prompted many trips back and forth to Jackson to see a lactation consultant. All those hours in the vehicle likely contributed to a blood clot that developed in her leg about a week after giving birth — which doctors detected and treated with blood thinners.

On yet another trip to an OB appointment in Jackson soon after, however, she realized she was bleeding heavily. By the time they reached the doctor’s office, it turned alarming.

Domek was rushed to emergency surgery — the retained placenta had caused a hemorrhage. She lost so much blood she almost required a transfusion. It happened so fast.

“It was totally timely and so lucky that I was there,” she said. “Had I been here in Dubois and not happened to be over there, I don't know what my story would look like.”

When Domek thinks about having a second child, she worries about access to care, but also the sustainability of Jackson providers with the flood of patients from elsewhere. And the implications of a potential statewide abortion ban on reproductive health services.

“Even though it was really scary having a baby during COVID, it is a different kind of scariness now,” she said.

Medical moms 

Annalee Neary grew up in Crowheart — a tiny hamlet on the Wind River Indian Reservation southeast of Dubois. She went to nursing school at Central Wyoming College in Riverton, and did her clinicals at SageWest Lander before moving away to advance her education. When she began thinking about moving back and working near Lander earlier this year, her partner in Minnesota was scared.

That’s because Neary is pregnant, and she has other health complications, including heart issues. The thought of moving to the middle of Wyoming far from specialists made him very uncomfortable, she said.

The allure of family and community outweighed those fears, and they moved back. Neary is due in February, and their plan is to deliver the baby in Jackson. She is seeing a maternal health specialist there and plans to stay at a friend’s house.

Pregnancy in Fremont County is a blessing and a curse, Neary said.

“Pretty much everyone that I've talked to, it's like, there's this excitement: ‘I'm pregnant. This is great!’” But that soon gives way to, “‘Oh, shit. Now what?’”

Lander pediatric nurse Aven Glazier also traveled for her second birth; she went to Jackson in October for a scheduled C-section.

For her and other mothers, she said, it comes down to confidence.

“There's one OB and one midwife right now that are serving non-reservation patients, and I just didn't feel comfortable with that option with no backup,” Glazier said. “It's something where you want to feel as completely comfortable as possible. Because it's just so important.

“One choice isn't a choice,” she said.

What’s next 

This provider paucity does not just touch mothers and newborns. It’s also a story shaped by doctors reluctant to join the rigorous world of rural health care. It’s about administrators balancing priorities to keep unprofitable labor and delivery wards open. About community leaders trying to ensure amenities to attract families.

And it’s a story of overburdened physicians on the brink of burnout while others try to keep up with a wave of clients coming from outside their county borders. That’s coming up in part two.

The post Moms and babies navigate risks in Wyoming maternity care desert appeared first on WyoFile.

Rotund, plump, hefty — go ahead and pick the fat synonym and it’ll likely aptly describe Grizzly 566, the second-heaviest grizzly bear ever documented in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

The 19-year-old male was well known to biologists in Yellowstone National Park, where the big bear resides. As a 3-year-old in 2007, he weighed in at 232 pounds. During a 2010 handling, the boar had plumped up to 393 pounds. His weight stayed in that range, registering at 381 pounds when caught and immobilized at age 9 in 2013.

Then a decade went by without Grizzly 566 coming onto biologists’ radar.

Yellowstone biologists nabbed him once more on Oct. 15 while trapping bruins for routine grizzly bear monitoring, according to Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team leader Frank van Manen. It was the tail end of a verdant summer following a long-lasting winter in the Northern Rockies. Grizzlies in the Yellowstone region eat upwards of 266 species in four animal kingdoms, and options for foraging were evidently plentiful in 2023 — and especially so for this bruin.

Grizzly 566 weighed a whopping 712 pounds.

“You don’t come across animals of this size very often,” van Manen said.

In fact, he said, the only heavier Yellowstone-region grizzly bear ever documented was encountered all the way back in 1977. That beast of a bruin was a 715-pound male.

In some respects, Grizzly 566’s near record-breaking heft isn’t completely surprising. Male grizzly bears don’t reach their peak body size until age 14, van Manen pointed out.

Plus, a couple other grizzlies handled in 2023 had relatively high body fat percentages, he said. Ordinarily, by October, females reach 28% to 30% body fat and males are just a little bit fatter — it’s 32% or so of their fall body mass.

Boars are the fatter sex because they need extra reserves for when they emerge from the den. That’s breeding season: Males are more interested in getting to know female grizzlies than extensive eating, and they’re actually losing “quite a bit” of body mass in April and May, van Manen said.

Grizzly 566 figures to be set up well for ursine philandering come next spring.

“He had 41% body fat,” van Manen said. “It looks like the highest [body fat figure] we’ve had before was 43%.”

Were Yellowstone-region grizzlies as a population fatter than average in 2023?

Tough to say, van Manen said, though the rate of fat gain appeared “pretty much normal” this year, he said. The leanest time of year is the end of June, when grizzlies typically range from 15% to 20% body fat. Because dozens of grizzlies are captured across the ecosystem throughout each spring, summer and fall, comparing grizzly bear fat levels from one year to the next isn’t straightforward statistically.

Taking a longer view, however, the science on grizzly bear body fat is more clear. Grizzly fat accumulation rates have not changed over the decades, nor is there any correlation to population density, recent research has found.

That says a lot, van Manen said, about the remarkable plasticity of grizzly diets: Even as major food sources like whitebark pine, cutthroat trout and some ungulate populations have declined, bears are still packing it on.

“The way these animals are gaining fat from June through October hasn’t changed,” he said. “These are incredibly resourceful animals and they’re finding calories on the landscape.”

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UPDATE: This story was updated at 8:25 p.m. on Oct. 2 to include remarks from Rep. Steve Harshman (R-Casper). —Ed.

The state of Wyoming has taken a key step toward unloading its last remaining 640 acres locked within the borders of Grand Teton National Park. The land, in the heart of Jackson Hole, could be sold at auction.

Progress toward the sale of the so-called Kelly Parcel came late Monday, when the Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments announced it was initiating a land disposal in conjunction with releasing a detailed analysis of the square-mile property.

“This is one of the very first steps in the process, and there certainly is a long way to go,” Wyoming Office of State Lands Deputy Director Jason Crowder told WyoFile. “It definitely has consideration by the [State Board of Land Commissioners] still in front of it.”

The Kelly Parcel is located along the eastern edge of Grand Teton Park, though it also shares boundaries with the Bridger-Teton National Forest and National Elk Refuge.

The State Board of Land Commissioners — the governor, secretary of state, treasurer, superintendent of public instruction and the auditor — are scheduled to review the issue at its Dec. 7 meeting. If the board approves of the proposed sale, it’ll direct the Office of State Lands to proceed with putting the pricy acreage surrounded by federal land to auction.

“Any sale of state lands, by constitution, has to be sold at public auction,” Crowder said, “unless we do an exchange or unless the Legislature gives the board authorization to do a direct sale.”

The Wyoming Legislature has enabled direct sale of state land to the U.S. Interior Department — the National Park Service’s government parent — twice in the past. In 2016, a $46 million sale was completed for 640 acres in the Antelope Flats. In 2012, the state sold off an 86-acre tract near the Snake River.

Negotiations between the Interior Department and Wyoming about state-owned land in Grand Teton began in 1949, the year before the park was enlarged.

All that remains is the Kelly Parcel.

The 640 acres has an estimated value of $62.4 million, according to the OSLI analysis. Past appraisals, in 2010 and 2016, put the value at $45 million, then $39 million. The tract is bisected by Gros Ventre Road, but its development potential is inhibited by a scenic easement lining the road.

There are no statutes currently on the books enabling a direct sale of the Kelly Parcel to the Interior Department, Crowder said.

But lawmakers have attempted to facilitate the sale in the past. As recently as 2021, former Rep. Andy Schwartz (D-Jackson) ran a bill that would have authorized a direct sale, though it fell apart after Rep. Steve Harshman (R-Casper) successfully passed an amendment that set the floor price at $3.2 billion — around 82 times the appraised value at the time.

The Wyoming Legislature has also unsuccessfully tried to wring more money out of the parcel. In 2019, a bill died that would have allowed for economic development on the tract — even a casino.

Securing permission for a direct sale could be difficult during the Legislature’s upcoming budget session, at least judging by one lawmaker’s reaction.

“Why would Gov. Gordon bargain sale for our most priceless 640 acres of state School Trust lands to the Biden Administration?” Harshman, a former two-time House speaker, told WyoFile in a text. “Wyoming people will be shocked.”

It’s unclear if Grand Teton National Park and its nonprofit partners have secured $62 million in the instance that the Legislature approves a direct sale to the Interior Department.

WyoFile was unable to reach Teton Park officials before this story was published.

Any major development, either an auction or direct sale, will not occur until 2024 at the earliest, Crowder said.

“We’re required to advertise it for four consecutive weeks before we go to a public auction, if [the board] approves us to move in that direction,” he said.

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Jackson photojournalist and birder Tom Stanton was cross-country skiing in Grand Teton National Park in late April, looking for owls, when he heard an unfamiliar song. He froze.

“In my head, I was like, ‘I’ve never heard a great horned owl make that kind of noise,” he said. “But it was coming from an area where there had been a nesting pair of great horned owls a couple of years prior.”

Intrigued, he waited. “About a half hour later, they did what I call the monkey call,” hooting back and forth. “I was like, ‘I’ve never heard great horns do that.’”

He skied over to the old nest site. An owl flashed by in the corner of his vision, too fast to identify. But then he saw a cottonwood tree with the type of cavity owls use for nests. A stray feather lay near the opening.

Stanton did what any good birder would do: He returned the following day.

“I was kind of sitting watching the cavity from a distance,” he said. “And all of a sudden, up pops the barred [owl].”

There was a moment of cognitive dissonance, he said, because Wyoming isn’t barred owl habitat. There have been sightings, but they are rare. He could see the pairs’ distinctive black eyes, however, and used his birding app to confirm their songs.

These were barred owls.

Though he didn’t want to harass the birds, Stanton’s instinct was to document. So he returned to the site a couple days a week for the next few months to watch and photograph the pair calling, hunting, sleeping and eventually hatching two chicks. In doing so, Stanton documented Wyoming’s first breeding pair of barred owls.

The news will no doubt pique the interest of birders, who are known to travel on short notice to glimpse rare species. But biologists aren’t celebrating yet. The arrival of a non-native bird could have ramifications for the ecosystem’s other denizens, they say.

“We’ve definitely been apprehensive just because we kind of look at things from a bigger ecosystem-level picture,” Teton Raptor Center Associate Research Director Katherine Gura said. “And it’s hard to say what the impact is going to be on some of these other species that are really important in this ecosystem.”

Moving in?

Barred owls are similar in size to great horned owls, but lack the “horns.” They are similar in profile to great gray owls, but are smaller and have black eyes in contrast to the great grays’ distinct yellow ones. Though they are eastern birds, they have expanded their range westward through the boreal forests of Canada and down into the Pacific Northwest.

In Washington, Oregon and California, their negative impacts on federally protected northern spotted owls have created a high-profile management conundrum. Barred owls, which are territorial and eat a variety of prey, have edged out the shier and more specialized spotted owls. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has wrestled with the issue for years, even experimenting with killing barred owls to make room for spotted owls.

Barred owls have also moved south from Canada into parts of Idaho and Montana. In Wyoming, there have been sightings of vagrant barred owls over the years, but never breeding pairs. Grand Teton National Park has 12 records of barred owls between 1982-1999, according to Public Affairs Officer Valerie Gohlke.

Wyoming Game and Fish Department Nongame Bird Biologist Zach Wallace wasn’t terribly surprised by the news, given their expansion. It’s too early to know what it means for the state, he said, as it might be an anomaly. Any rare bird record in the state is reported to the Wyoming Bird Records Committee for review, Wallace said.

“At this point, it’s one pair,” he said. “We just keep track of it.”

Grand Teton National Park intends to do the same, Gohlke said, monitoring the owls and their relationship with other species in collaboration with the Teton Raptor Center.

The management crisis in the Pacific Northwest, Wallace said, is “a really extreme situation with an endangered species. They’re doing management as a last resort, real ecological triage. And we have no reason to believe that would happen here.”

But Gura of the raptor center, who has been studying great gray owls and other raptors in the region for about a dozen years, is uneasy.

Her team discovered the owls independently of Stanton. They were conducting a prey survey one day this summer when a colleague came across one of the adults and then discovered a fledgling.

The Raptor Center team was “extremely surprised” by the discovery, Gura said. They were also concerned, “because of the potentially detrimental effects on the native raptors that we spend a lot of time researching and studying and working to conserve.”

What happened with barred and spotted owls is “highly concerning” to her.

“A lot of people have asked me, ‘what are the potential impacts going to be on great grays in relation to barred owls?’” she said. Because great grays are one of the least studied raptors, she said, there isn’t a ton of research to draw from in considering potential competition with barred owls.

“There’s just really a lot of unknowns,” she said. “Maybe they’ll be able to persist no problem, but there’s just the potential that there’s going to be a similarly negative impact on great grays as there has been on spotted owls.”

Soon after their discovery, Gura said, she connected with Stanton, who shared his research and documentation. The center’s plan is also to monitor and study what happens next.

Observations

They may be cast as villains in spotted owl habitat, but the barred owl family charmed Stanton as he observed them over the months.

He saw the male dive for voles, squirrels and songbirds and deliver them to the female. He watched as the adults preened and cackled together in greeting — behavior he said was downright affectionate. They checked in often with one another and were extremely vocal, he said.

Stanton glimpsed the first evidence the owls had successfully bred on the afternoon of June 28. That’s when a fluffball of gray feathers appeared at the edge of the cavity around 2:30 p.m. A second chick popped up about three hours later.

The female kept a close eye on them, he said. He figured they were four to five weeks old. After that, he watched the two chicks fledge — they started by hopping from limb to limb before graduating to flying farther distances behind their parents.

One of the chicks did not survive — its wing was discovered and it was likely taken by a predator, Stanton said. But he has consistently been able to find one of the remaining three.

All told, Stanton spent hundreds of hours watching the owls, taking thousands of photographs. It was certainly a remarkable wildlife experience, he said, a birding highlight. But Stanton is also aware that non-native immigrants can come with impacts.

“The big question is: How will it impact the great grays?” he asked.

The post A new owl species has bred in Wyoming. Not everyone’s thrilled. appeared first on WyoFile.

As an energy rich state, Wyoming is no stranger to trying to find the balance between extraction and conservation. In the case of the Greater Little Mountain area near Flaming Gorge, the attempt to strike that balance has taken over a decade, resulting in a recently released draft plan that embraces two of the state’s key economic drivers: the oil and gas industry and our great outdoors.

This magical high desert region of over 500,000 acres in Sweetwater County boasts habitat of badlands, aspen groves and pine forests. This place, simultaneously rugged and fragile, is one of Wyoming’s most sought-after hunting grounds for mule deer and elk and holds intimate streams that shelter genetically pure Colorado River cutthroat trout. Since 1990, this area has also benefited from more than $10 million to enhance and maintain these resources from government agencies, as well as non-profits, local businesses and community members.

Last month, the Bureau of Land Management Rock Spring Field Office released a draft land use plan for southwest Wyoming that seeks to strike a common-sense balance between allowing for energy development and protecting sensitive fish and wildlife habitats.

What I appreciate most in the BLM’s balanced, thoughtful approach is how it does not impact existing oil and gas leases. In fact, over half of the planning area is already leased and there are already active, producing wells across the landscape. Simultaneously, the BLM’s newly proposed oil and gas rule would be a long-overdue win for local communities by reducing conflict between leasing and drilling and other uses that are essential to supporting Wyoming’s way of life: fishing, hunting, recreation and conservation.

For decades, the federal oil and gas leasing programs prioritized resource extraction over valuable fish and wildlife habitats on our shared public lands. This is why Congress had to pass legislation in 2009 to protect 1.2 million acres in the Wyoming Range from ill-advised oil and gas leasing. But now the BLM is working to improve public land management by curtailing speculative leasing that directly impacts wildlife habitat while providing little if any public benefit.

Public lands oil and gas development has no doubt benefited Wyoming and our country, and will continue to do so for years to come. But what’s important moving forward is continuing to find a balance between our economy and special places like Greater Little Mountain.

As Wyoming sportsmen and sportswomen begin to ramp up for hunting season — with many pursuing game in the landscapes where they work — I appreciate that the BLM’s proposed management plan for southwest Wyoming seeks to provide for both responsible energy development and conservation.

Throughout the fall, the BLM will be taking public comment on the four proposed alternative plans, and now is the time for those who care about the future of public land hunting and fishing in southwest Wyoming to speak up. Energy development and conservation need not be mutually exclusive, but it takes smart planning to strike this balance. This is our moment to get it right.

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At least one wolf from what is likely the first breeding pack Colorado has seen in 80 years wandered into Wyoming in 2023 and was killed.

That’s according to credible reports from ranchers and other stakeholders interviewed by WyoFile.

No Wyoming or Colorado official, however, has confirmed the wolf killing.

Wyoming claims the information is confidential and that not even Colorado wildlife officials have a right to know.

An 11-year-old state law intended to conceal the identity of people who legally kill wolves in Wyoming is keeping Wyoming officials tight lipped. The statue is being interpreted so broadly that Wyoming Game and Fish Department officials say they cannot share anything more specific than the aggregate number of wolves that have been killed in the state’s 53-million-acre “predator zone” — an area that covers roughly 85% of Wyoming. So if a wolf dies well outside of Canis lupus’ normal range in southern Wyoming, even the general region of the killing is considered confidential.

In other words, state officials say merely confirming a wolf killing in a Wyoming county — or even the southern half of the state — would run afoul of the law because that information could somehow identify the person who pulled the trigger.

“We talked to our attorney, and she said basically that we cannot provide [wolf deaths] by location or areas like we used to,” said Dan Thompson, the large carnivore supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “It’s all aggregate.”

The statute, and the Wyoming Attorney General’s reinterpretation of it, are hamstringing Colorado’s ability to monitor its historic and closely watched North Park Pack — founded by a known Wyoming migrant wolf, 1084M. The pack, which established a home range in northern Colorado’s Jackson County, has continued to eke out an existence on the eve of the expected broader reintroduction of wolves to the Centennial State, now just months away.

Although Wyoming law has stymied the free flow of information about North Park Pack wolves when they’ve crossed an invisible state border and died, word has gotten out anyway. Last October three black subadult female members of that pack wandered north and were legally killed by hunters, an incident that drew headlines and triggered threats of a lawsuit. Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials learned of the suspected losses to the pack from a private landowner, spokesman Travis Duncan told WyoFile in an email.

There are no seasons or other limitations on killing wolves in Wyoming’s predator zone — eradication is openly the goal — but the state does require that successful hunters and trappers submit reports notifying authorities of their kills. Colorado officials have learned that their counterparts in the Equality State are unwilling to share those reports, or any information within them.

“Wyoming Game and Fish said they cannot provide those data to us,” Duncan said in the email.

But the southern Wyoming wolf deaths — of animals likely associated with the North Park Pack — continued this year. Colorado didn’t receive any reports of the deaths this time, Duncan said.

‘Everybody knows about it’

It’s no secret that wolves have been killed recently in Carbon County, not far from the southern border, said Pat O’Toole of the Ladder Ranch. A neighboring Wyoming rancher, he said, killed a wolf “a couple months ago.”

“Everybody knows about it,” O’Toole said. “I’ve seen pictures of it.”

O’Toole’s not thrilled that his Little Snake River-area ranch, which straddles the state line, has once again become the domain of the wolf, a sometimes difficult-to-live-with large carnivore that was eliminated from Colorado’s southern Rockies by the mid-1940s. Wolves that gain a taste for domestic animals often kill until they’re killed themselves, he said, and they make livestock ranching more difficult.

O’Toole was not surprised that likely North Park Pack wolves haven’t lasted long once they’ve crossed the state line. With a step across that line, a wolf goes from a “State Endangered” classification — fully protected from hunting — to a “predator” that can be shot on sight without a license by anyone.

“This valley is full of hunters, and boy, it’d be a pretty smart wolf to make it in this valley,” O’Toole said. “Everybody here drives around with a rifle in their pickup because that’s the culture.”

Wyoming’s predator zone and unregulated hunting near the state line has hampered wolves’ ability to establish in Colorado.

“Essentially, one state is blocking a national success story from happening,” said Matt Barnes, a rangeland scientist who was a member of the advisory group that helped shape Colorado’s wolf management plan. “It is absolute night and day, either side of this invisible line, which is always not good for wildlife.

In 2020, Colorado’s first modern-day wolf pack found a home range off to the west in Moffat County, not far from the Wyoming border. The pack wasn’t confirmed to have produced a litter, like the North Park Pack has, and it also didn’t last long. Three wolves from the pack were reportedly shot in Wyoming, right near the state line. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement officers investigated that boundary killing incident, WyoFile has confirmed, and the inactive case was recommended for closure. But the federal agency didn’t formally close the investigation, leaving the files unretrievable through the Freedom of Information Act.

And now the North Park Pack has been cut down by legal hunting across the state line. In February, Colorado Parks and Wildlife captured and collared two males: wolves 2101 and 2301. Even if reports continue to come in, any other wolves remaining in the state are unconfirmed.

“CPW is currently only aware of these two wolves in Colorado,” Duncan said in an email. “There was no evidence of reproduction in 2023.”

Reintroduction looms

Biologically, it likely won’t make much difference if the North Park Pack is hunted out of existence. The reason is that Colorado is months away from initiating its plan to reintroduce wolves to the southern Rockies. That plan, set in motion by voters in 2020, is to import 30 to 50 wolves west of the Continental Divide at least 60 miles from Colorado’s borders with Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico.

Wyoming declined to provide wolves to its southern neighbors. Gov. Mark Gordon explained the decision in a statement, saying Wyoming is opposed to Colorado’s wolf reintroduction and “has the scars and lessons learned” from its own wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park nearly three decades ago.

“Wyomingites know all too well the challenges associated with introducing a new large carnivore into an existing ecosystem,” Gordon said. “It does not matter that the wolves may have been a part of the system in generations past; it is still a huge change.”

Montana and Idaho also declined to provide their fellow western state with wolves. But talks are ongoing with Washington and Oregon and northern Idaho’s Nez Perce Tribe, reported the Fort Collins Coloradoan.

Duncan, at CPW, told WyoFile in the email that he’s “confident” Colorado will gain the cooperation of one or more states or jurisdictions.

“CPW plans to release the first wolves in Colorado this winter,” he said. “We anticipate that we will find a source in time to release wolves prior to the December 31, 2023, deadline.”

Given the looming reintroduction, former federal wolf biologist Mike Phillips isn’t surprised that Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials haven’t made much of historically significant North Park Pack animals getting shot up in an area outside of their control.

“If I was Colorado, I’d have plenty to do without getting in a pissing match with the state of Wyoming,” said Phillips, who was a member of Colorado’s wolf reintroduction advisory panel.

‘It’s crazy’

Still, Phillips described Wyoming’s practice of keeping the wolf deaths classified as a “sad state of affairs.”

“It speaks to just how irrational people are when thinking about gray wolves,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

Controversy around the wolf deaths in southern Wyoming have also fueled calls to federally protect Canis lupus across the species’ range in the West.

“It’s intolerable that Colorado’s invaluable, endangered wolves can be secretly gunned down upon entering Wyoming,” Center for Biological Diversity staffer Collette Adkins told WyoFile in an emailed statement. “This travesty reinforces the need to return federal protections to wolves in Wyoming and across the northern Rockies.”

Adkins’ employer already threatened to sue the U.S. Forest Service for not safeguarding wolves on the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest in Wyoming, contending Endangered Species Act violations. But the lawsuit didn’t materialize after the Forest Service informed the advocacy group that there was no evidence of “confirmed gray wolf populations, denning or gathering/rendezvous sites identified” on the national forest.

As Colorado’s wolf population picks up steam in the years ahead, it’s likely that there will be more incidents of dispersed wolves being legally hunted across the northern border in Wyoming. After the Yellowstone and central Idaho reintroduction in 1995 and ‘96, the population of 66 reintroduced wolves grew rapidly, roughly tenfold within six years. Unless the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office reinterprets the statute yet again, exactly how many of Colorado’s newfound wolves meet their end in Wyoming is likely to remain a mystery.

A bill protecting the identity of legal wolf hunters made it through the Wyoming Legislature in 2012 in the aftermath of an Idaho wolf hunter’s identity being posted online, which led to harassment.

There are two applicable sentences in the legislation: “Any information regarding the number or nature of wolves legally taken within the state of Wyoming shall only be released in its aggregate form and no information of a private or confidential nature shall be released without the written consent of the person to whom the information may refer. Information identifying any person legally taking a wolf within this state is solely for the use of the department or appropriate law enforcement offices and is not a public record …”

Until recently, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department did not interpret the statute quite so broadly. Just this spring, for example, Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik told WyoFile that, “We do know of harvest down in southern Wyoming in the predator area in 2022.”

It’s unclear what changed.

Game and Fish Chief Warden Rick King did not specify how releasing wolf mortality data on a regional scale — which the department isn’t doing — would violate the statute. “The Department does not comment on the legal advice we have received,” he said in an email.

Recently retired longtime First Amendment attorney Bruce Moats suspects that the attorney general’s interpretation of the statute runs afoul of the Wyoming Public Records Act and legal precedent, which established that agencies have an obligation to “segregate material, redact exempt material and turn over the rest.”

“I think that applies here,” Moats said. “Why can’t you redact the names?”

The Wyoming Attorney General’s Office did not respond to WyoFile’s request for an interview.

The post Wyoming is killing Colorado’s wolves, again, and the state’s keeping it secret appeared first on WyoFile.

Laramie resident Sylvia Bagdonas asked Wyoming Game and Fish commissioners to “not disappoint the public” as they mull a 50% hike in mountain lion hunting in western Wyoming to help mule deer populations that took a beating last winter.

“After reading news accounts about this proposal it seems that the boosts in hunting quotas are intended to appease outfitters and big game hunters with little science involved in the decision,” Bagdonas wrote in a comment letter. “It is assumed that proper stewardship of Wyoming wildlife is based on science, not politics and money.”

Bagdonas was one of 84 people who wrote in response to a state proposal to increase the maximum numbers of cats that can be killed in four hunt areas from 46 to 70 animals. The 24-cat increase is under consideration outside the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s triennial regulations review, because concerned outfitters pressured the commission to target more coyotes, black bears and mountain lions in hard-hit deer range. The agency obliged, reopening the process out of cycle.

The majority of the seven dozen people who jotted down thoughts on the mountain lion hunting hike were opposed. That includes many commenters from out of state, but also those who typically pay the most attention to Wyoming lion hunting: the houndsmen who partake.

“I don’t want to speak as a collective for the group, but most of the people I’ve talked to who are avid mountain lion hunters don’t support increasing quotas,” Dan Thompson, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s large carnivore supervisor, said about the regulation change at a July public meeting in Pinedale.

Brad Huffaker, of Rock Springs, was one houndsman who wrote in opposition to boosting quotas. Alex Krabbenhoft, of Cheyenne, was another.

“I am currently not in favor of raising quotas in the state as all quotas were renegotiated last year,” Krabbenhoft wrote, “and I don’t believe the data is conclusive enough to warrant an increase already.”

Houndsmen were widely supportive of another revision to the regulations: a new mountain lion “pursuit season” that will let successful resident lion hunters continue running their dogs after they’ve fulfilled their one-cat quota. That change sprang from Senate File 179 – Mountain lion pursuit seasons, which cleared the Wyoming Legislature this year.

There was also some support for increasing quotas in the four hunt areas that encompass the Wyoming and Salt River ranges. Specifically, unit 14 would go from a 20-cat quota to 30; unit 17, from five to eight; unit 26, from 15 to 23; and unit 29, from six to nine cats.

Sy Gilliland, who presides over the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association, encouraged the increase: “Everything we can do to help keep mule deer on the landscape we must do, and this includes significant predator control,” he wrote. “Coyotes, black bears and especially [mountain] lions must be heavily harvested to give the few remaining mule deer a chance to repopulate their habitat.”

A representative for a national trophy hunting advocacy group, Safari Club International, also took the time to weigh in. The state’s lion hunting proposal “generally demonstrate responsible and sustainable management,” SCI State and Local Liaison Chris Tymeson, of Kansas, wrote.

Other out-of-state wildlife advocates wrote in opposition.

Nancy Hilding, president of Prairie Hills Audubon Society in South Dakota, argued to commissioners that the planned reduction of lions “may be pointless” because quotas in two of the four hunt areas didn’t even fill anyway.

Thompson affirmed that’s the case at the Pinedale public meeting. Lion hunters killed three of the six maximum cats allowed in hunt area 29, which runs south of the town of Jackson and includes the Snake River and Gros Ventre mountain ranges. In hunt area 14, which encompasses the southern Wyoming and Salt River ranges, 18 of the 20 cats allowed were harvested by hunters, Thompson said.

Quotas filled in the other two areas: Star Valley’s unit 26, and unit 17, which covers the east slope of the Wyoming Range.

The intent of the 50% quota increase is to transition the four hunt areas into “population sinks” that drive down lion numbers, Thompson said. And the amount of pressure proposed is not unheard of. When mule deer populations were much higher in the early 1990s, there were similar numbers of cats being targeted in the Wyoming Range, he said.

If the quota hike succeeds and lion numbers do tumble, Thompson anticipates that the puma population could promptly bounce back if pressure was eased up down the road.

“That’s what our plan is predicated upon: That [lion numbers] can rebound, as long as there’s prey and habitat,” he said.

Whether reducing lion numbers helps the embattled deer population is another question.

A study out of southern Idaho in the early 2000s found that extensive predator removal essentially had no impact on fawn production, though did temporarily increase doe survival. Ahead of the proposed lion hunting hike, Wyoming Game and Fish did not attempt to model how killing up to 24 more cats could influence a deer herd that’s historically numbered in the tens of thousands.

“We’ll be able to look at that,” Thompson said. “Hopefully we can answer some of those questions with ongoing research.” Game and Fish commissioners are scheduled to consider the agency’s lion hunting regulation revisions at their Sept. 13 meeting in Gillette.

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