Suburban Utah Is Ground Zero for Deer Conservation

This article was originally published by High Country News.

Every spring, about 2,000 mule deer traipse through Utah’s Cedar Valley, a broad, sage-dotted flatland some 40 miles south of Salt Lake City. The herd winters in the Lake Mountains, nibbling sagebrush and other forage, and summers around the Oquirrhs, whose green shoulders jut from the valley floor to the north. The animals commute between the ranges via two general routes, following washes and ridgelines and their own ancestors’ trails. They have likely made this journey for centuries, perhaps millennia, the culture of migration passing through the generations like language.

Modern obstacles now threaten this timeless trek. The herd’s passage takes it through Eagle Mountain—more than 50 square miles of sprawling exurb, composed mostly of subdivisions layered atop former ranchlands. Since its incorporation in 1996, Eagle Mountain has exploded from just 250 lonely souls to more than 50,000. It’s now on track to surpass 150,000 by 2060, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in Utah.

As Eagle Mountain has grown, its deer have suffered. Subdivisions are encroaching on their habitat, and traffic kills about 100 every year. It’s a common crisis in the West, where, in 2016, researchers calculated that a football field of open space succumbs to development every 2.5 minutes. Mule deer are among the victims of this creeping habitat loss. Wyoming’s herd has declined by nearly half over the past three decades; in western Colorado, researchers have found that residential development is worse for fawn survival than energy development. In housing humans, we evict deer.

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Eagle Mountain is aware of the problem. Few Western municipalities have done more to incorporate ungulate movement in their planning. Prodded by a scrappy local group called the Eagle Mountain Nature and Wildlife Alliance, the city has written deer-friendly ordinances into its zoning codes, negotiated conservation deals with would-be builders, and, most ambitious of all, sought to permanently protect the herd’s narrow migration corridor. “When this started, the mayor said it was a dream,” Bettina Cameron, the alliance’s director, told me. “We’ve overcome so many different obstacles.”

These efforts have attracted notice. “So many towns are retroactively trying to fix situations like this, and to get out front before development fills it in too much is a neat concept,” says Matt Howard, the natural-resource manager at the Utah Department of Transportation. Whether Eagle Mountain can continue to grow without sacrificing its most charismatic fauna, however, is far from certain. The stakes are high: If the city succeeds, it could provide a blueprint for other Western towns trying to strike their own precarious balance between development and conservation. If it fails, the deer will suffer the consequences.

One spring morning, I drove to Eagle Mountain to see the corridor for myself. I joined a group that included Cameron, Mayor Tom Westmoreland, and the municipal wildlife biologist Todd Black. We headed up a promontory called Turtle Hill for a bird’s-eye view of the city—cul-de-sacs, pickups in driveways, vivid emerald lawns. Million-dollar homes sat next to tumbleweed-strewn lots. Cameron gestured toward a wide swath of undeveloped land owned by a patchwork of state agencies and private developers, and explained that it was slated for large residential developments serviced by a new highway. “This is going to have 4,500 homes on it,” she said.

Cameron is part of the city’s rapid growth. A former member of New York’s Air National Guard, she moved to Utah in 2008, seeking open space. She and her husband came to Eagle Mountain in 2018, the same year the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources began fitting mule deer with satellite-tracking collars, documenting the routes by which they meandered through town. A year later, Cameron read about the state’s research, recalled the deer that roamed seasonally across her own five acres, and realized she’d inadvertently bought property near a migration route. She and like-minded neighbors formed the alliance and began urging the city to protect deer movement. “We started looking at county maps and saying, ‘Okay, where can they go?’” she recalled.

At first, it seemed hopeless: Valuable lots pressed against the migration route everywhere, and a maze of highways and residential roads fractured the corridor. Nevertheless, the alliance found a relatively receptive audience in city government. In 2018, Eagle Mountain banned construction along ridgelines and seasonal washes, part of a broader effort to keep a third of the city as open space. “We’re trying to create something unique, and not just another urbanized development,” Mayor Westmoreland said. “If we can have an equal amount of land dedicated to outdoor recreation and wildlife, that just seems like a pretty ideal place to live.”

In 2021, the city hired Black, a research scientist who’d spent his career studying deer movements at Utah State University, making Eagle Mountain among the only Western cities with a municipal wildlife biologist. Black knew that deer wandered into subdivisions seeking ornamental plantings and gardens, running into conflict with landowners and cars; if too many deer strayed, the migration could dissolve. He and others began to design a large chute, composed of more than 20 miles of 8-foot-high fencing, that will someday guide deer through Eagle Mountain. Around dense subdivisions, the funnel will narrow to about 330 feet to hustle deer through; in other places, it will expand to give them space to feed and rest. Wildlife corridors are often abstract, loosely defined pathways, but Eagle Mountain’s will, in theory, be a piece of solid infrastructure. “I tell everybody to picture a mule-deer luge that runs through the city,” Black said.

The deer luge is years from completion, as Eagle Mountain cobbles together funding from the Mule Deer Foundation and other sources. In partnership with the state, though, the city has already installed some crucial components, such as a stretch of deer-proof fencing along State Route 73, a historic collision zone. At a gap in the fence, where the corridor bisects the highway, a roadside infrared detector flashes an alert to drivers whenever deer approach. Eventually, the warning system will be replaced by an underpass, one of nearly a dozen proposed wildlife passages. In the meantime, highway-roadkill numbers have already plummeted, Black said.

At times, the corridor’s infrastructure struck me as almost surreally proactive. From Highway 73, we drove to the foot of an adjacent hill, where an 8-foot fence cleaved the brush. On one side of it, Black explained, the land was protected by conservation easements and would remain deer habitat in perpetuity; on the other, a development agreement ensured that houses and residential roads would eventually bloom. Earlier, Black had averred that the city was trying to “put the horse before the cart,” and this preemptive fence seemed to epitomize that philosophy. The barrier ran like a zipper across the land, dividing nothing from nothing, waiting patiently for the subdivision that would justify its existence.

That subdivision, and more, are coming. In Eagle Mountain, signs advertised growth around every bend: Master Planned Communities, We Buy Land, Lots Available, New Homes, New Builds, Now Selling. A Tyson Foods billboard thanked locals for welcoming the company’s new beef-and-pork plant. Meta had opened a data center, and Google planned to follow suit.

As Eagle Mountain grows, deer will shape its expansion. The city’s transportation plan requires wildlife crossings for new roads along the migration route, and its planning code includes Wildlife Corridor Overlay Zones—stretches of habitat where developers must install animal-friendly fencing, minimize artificial lighting, avoid construction during deer migration and bird-nesting seasons, and abide by other restrictions. Along the herd’s most crucial migration pathway, development is almost entirely proscribed.

Of course, it’s one thing to protect deer on paper, and another to foster private-land conservation during a real-estate boom. Both the city and the alliance are leery of infringing on property rights, which many Utahans consider sacrosanct; as Black put it, “The last thing I want is for it to be a take.” The city prefers to deploy carrots rather than sticks—courting landowners, many of whom have generations-deep roots in the valley, and offering conservation incentives. One developer donated 55 acres to the city just before her death. Others have agreed to density transfers, ceding land within the corridor in exchange for permission to build houses with smaller road frontages or squeezing more homes into other developments. (None of the developers contacted for this story responded to a request for comment.)

Not everyone is eager to accommodate ungulates. The city has also been forced to make concessions to builders—including, in some cases, amending the proposed deer luge by routing animals as much as a quarter-mile from their habitual trails. “If we can make it look as comfortable as we can to them, I think it’s going to work,” Jeremy Anderson, the Utah regional director for the Mule Deer Foundation, told me. Nonetheless, it’s a suggestion that wildlife must still compete with development. “I’m always afraid that I’m going to miss something that’s going to destroy this corridor,” Cameron said.

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And some of the project’s toughest challenges still loom. At one point, we passed two undeveloped parcels, totaling 320 acres, owned by Utah’s most powerful political force, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Those lands, smack-dab in the middle of the deer corridor, are protected by a U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation program through 2030, but the Church has signaled its interest in building on the lots once that deal expires. “They’re the only landowner I haven’t had the opportunity to sit down with yet,” Black said carefully.

The deer luge struck me as a perfect Anthropocenic conundrum—both a wildly inventive conservation initiative and a reminder of how we’ve squeezed nature in the contemporary West. “I applaud Eagle Mountain for what they’re trying to do, but I feel very sad when I go there, and see that we’re telling wildlife they can only go through this narrow strip now,” Patricia Cramer, a transportation ecologist who’s consulted with Utah’s agencies, told me later. But what were the alternatives? As Cramer put it, the paving-over of deer migrations is “the story of the West.” Eagle Mountain’s plan represents a different and creative narrative, one in which humans made space, however circumscribed, for wild creatures.

At the tour’s end, we drove into a subdivision at development’s bleeding edge: houses still clad in their Tyvek epidermis, yards crawling with earthmovers, a gated community with nothing behind the gate. Beyond lay the sere hills of Camp Williams, a 24,000-acre National Guard training site in the Oquirrh Mountain foothills, where the deer summer. Between the camp and the subdivision ran Black’s fence, shepherding deer away from the lawns and gardens that would someday blossom there. The animals were out there somewhere, and I hoped we’d glimpse one—it would make for a powerful juxtaposition, these ancient nomads set against modernity’s trappings. The deer, however, didn’t show.