When the Wild Speaks, Are We Listening?
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
WILDLIFE CONNECTIVITY • OPEN SPACE • COMMUNITY
Leslie Miller's stunning column in the Park Record gives voice to the animals of the 910 parcel — and reminds us why connectivity is everything.
"Hello Humans, Asked to give voice to my feathered, furred and scale-skinned community living wild on the 910 — our homeland — is a challenge."— Leslie Miller, Park Record, March 11, 2026
A Voice We Rarely Hear
Imagine setting down your own perspective entirely — your plans, your priorities, your very language — and asking instead: what do the animals need us to know?
That is exactly what Park Record columnist Leslie Miller did this week in her extraordinary piece, "Wild Seeing: A Call to the Humans." Speaking in the first person on behalf of the hawks, foxes, deer, and elk who inhabit the 910 parcel north of Park City, Miller writes with a poet's ear and a conservationist's heart. Her column is one of the most moving pieces of wildlife advocacy we have encountered in recent memory.
On behalf of Save People Save Wildlife, we offer Leslie Miller our heartfelt thanks — for her keen insight, her unwavering commitment to wild places, and for the profound act of literally giving voice to our animal neighbors. In a public conversation that so often treats wildlife as scenery rather than community, her words are a necessary and overdue correction.
The 910: The Northern Anchor of a Living Corridor
The 910 parcel is not simply a beautiful stretch of open ranch land. It is the northern anchor of one of the most significant wildlife corridors along the Wasatch Front.
Just to the south, the Parleys Canyon Wildlife Crossing — the fruit of years of advocacy, science, and community commitment — stands as a landmark achievement for human-wildlife coexistence. That crossing allows safe passage for multiple species-from bear, mountain lion, moose, elk, deer, porcupine, chipmunks, and more a safe passage across one of Utah's most heavily traveled highway corridors.
But a crossing without connected habitat on both ends is a bridge to nowhere. The 910 is what lies on the northern side of that bridge. It is the landscape that wildlife emerge from when they begin their journey south. It is the winter range, the fawning ground, the hunting territory, the home.
A wildlife crossing without intact habitat on both ends is like building a bridge to an island that keeps shrinking. The 910 is what makes the entire corridor whole.
Miller captures this beautifully. The animals she channels speak of freedom: the freedom to roam across seasons, to raise young in fringed nests and rocky hollows, to follow the ancient paths their ancestors have traveled for millennia. That freedom requires space — and it requires that the spaces be connected to one another.
What Connectivity Really Means
Wildlife do not recognize property lines. A mule deer searching for winter forage, a black bear following a berry corridor, a moose moving between wetlands — these animals need continuous, unbroken landscape to survive and to sustain healthy populations.
Fragmentation is one of the leading drivers of wildlife decline. When habitat is divided into isolated patches by roads, fences, development, or recreation pressure, populations shrink, gene pools narrow, diseases become rampant, and species quietly disappear. We rarely notice in real time. The losses accumulate slowly, then suddenly.
The nearly 9,000 acres of the 910, represents a rare and precious opportunity: a largely intact wildlife landscape in one of the West's most rapidly urbanizing regions. Protecting that connectivity — keeping the chain unbroken — is one of the most consequential conservation decisions our community faces.
The Promise That Comes With Public Land
As Miller notes, the 910 Cattle Ranch was recently purchased with public funds — federal dollars through the U.S. Forest Legacy Program and local investment through the Summit County Open Space Bond. It belongs to all of us now.
For nearly three decades, the 910 thrived as a de facto wildlife sanctuary under rancher David Bernolfo, who prohibited hunting, prosecuted poachers, and removed miles of ranch barbed wire. The animals who live there have known an unusual degree of safety and continuity. Miller writes movingly of the dozen or so familiar human faces they encountered over those years — and what that rare quiet meant to creatures who value privacy and a sense of place just as we do.
Public ownership is a new chapter. And with it comes a responsibility that should weigh on all of us: the decisions made now about how the 910 is used, accessed, and managed will determine whether it remains a functioning wildlife sanctuary — or whether it becomes another beautiful-but-broken landscape, loved to death.
Save People Save Wildlife urges Summit County and its land management partners to plan the 910's future with the wildlife corridor as the primary lens. Experts in large landscape conservation must be central to this process. Patience and restraint must guide it. Recreation and access have a place — but they must be layered thoughtfully onto the land's ecological function, not imposed upon it.
A Call to Our Community
Miller ends her column with what reads as both an invitation and a quiet plea. The animals of the 910 are asking for our attention. They are asking us to remember that they were here first, that they are sentient beings with complex lives and real stakes in the decisions we make. They are asking us to be worthy of the trust that comes with stewardship.
We echo that call. Please read Leslie Miller's column in the Park Record. Share it with your neighbors. And then ask your elected officials and land managers one simple question: what are we doing — right now — to protect the full length of this corridor, from the 910 in the north all the way through Parleys Canyon and beyond?
The animals are speaking. Let's make sure the humans are listening.
