Pronghorns and sage-grouse rejoice as the Bureau of Land Management moves to preserve a swath of sagebrush steppe in Oregon
Open, wide: The 57,304-acre Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge on the Nevada-Oregon border is just one protected place where the deer and the antelope play. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
By Kendra Chamberlain. January 29, 2025. A huge chunk of some of the best sagebrush habitat in the Pacific Northwest for sage-grouse and pronghorn (aka pronghorn antelope) has just received a significant safeguard.
The Bureau of Land Management is expanding protections across 1.1 million acres of land in the Greater Hart-Sheldon area in southeastern Oregon.
The Greater Hart-Sheldon refers to a swath of land between and surrounding two important refuges: the Hart National Antelope Refuge in Oregon and the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge Area in northern Nevada, a small piece of which is located in Oregon. Much of that land falls within the BLM’s Lakeview District.
Map: BLM
On Jan. 17, the federal agency concluded a decades-long process to amend the 2003 Lakeview Resource Management Plan (RMP), re-designating parcels of land across the district to afford more protections for wildlife and habitat.
“As an update process, it’s been 20 years in the making,” says Ryan Houston, executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA), a Bend-based conservation group that for decades has worked for more protections in the area.
Resource Management Plan updates typically come only once every couple of decades, and are often slow-moving, arduous processes.
ONDA considered this RMP update a “once in a generation opportunity” to address protecting sections of habitat that are currently vulnerable to things like mining and energy siting.
The update is part of a 2010 legal settlement between BLM, ONDA and other conservation groups requiring the BLM to survey areas that were unprotected and identify lands that would be eligible for more protections.
The RMP covers 3.2 million acres of public lands in Oregon’s Lake and Harney counties.
Of that, roughly 1.6 million acres represent what the BLM determined as wilderness-quality lands.
“These areas are some of the best public lands habitat for wildlife. These are intact landscapes [and] are really important places for species that require large expanses of open space to roam, species like pronghorn and sage-grouse,” says Houston.
Ranching, mining, recreation taken into account
The Hart and Sheldon refuges were established in the 1930s to protect the winter and summer ranges of pronghorn antelope.
Studies show both antelope and sage-grouse move between the two refuges and throughout the Greater Hart-Sheldon area extensively throughout their respective life cycles, as much of the land surrounding the refuges still offers quality, connected habitat.
One of the biggest threats to the area is electrical and pipeline transmission projects, according to Houston.
“When you build out a transmission route, there’s a big, long, linear feature that slices across the landscape that can fragment habitat and disturb the way that wildlife use that landscape.”
Case in point: In 2024, Columbia Insight reported on a U.S. Department of Energy proposal to designate a strip of land skirting the edge of the Greater Hart-Sheldon Area as a National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor (NIETC)—that proposal has since been dropped.
Distance, runners: Pronghorn have the longest land migration in the continental United States, and are the fastest land animal in North America, with top speeds close to 60 mph. Photo: Jeannie Stafford/USFWS
The BLM’s final RMP amendment extends some form of protection to 1.1 million of those 1.6 million acres: 42,000 acres are newly designated as Wilderness Study Areas and 370,000 acres are now managed under the strictest class of land with wilderness characteristics.
The vast majority of that habitat, totaling 738,000 acres, will be managed to “minimize impacts to wilderness characteristics while emphasizing other multiple uses,” including livestock grazing, mineral rights and off-highway vehicle use.
As far as compromises go, Houston says the BLM’s final decision is worth celebrating.
“The reason that we’re excited about and still supportive of this decision is that we also recognize that these are multiple-use lands, and that the BLM fundamentally has a very difficult job to do in terms of trying to balance all the different uses on the landscape,” says Houston. “We view this decision as a practical decision where they have appropriately balanced the different uses on the landscape, [and] they are promoting good conservation and management in a lot of places.”
