Wyoming · UplandGreater sage-grouse

Wyoming supports roughly 37% of the species' entire rangewide population and its own Core Area Strategy (enacted 2008) designates 31 named Core Areas covering about 24% of the state's surface area but holding up to 82% of Wyoming's breeding sage-grouse, one of the strongest density-to-area ratios of any species. Critically, the state's regulatory hunt-area map does not track this density map cleanly: legal Hunt Area 1 (the only open area for 2026) covers most, but not all, of the state's strongest core areas, including the Bighorn Basin's Hyattville/Shell/Washakie core areas (Big Horn/Washakie counties) and the south-central/southwest core areas anchored at South Rawlins (Carbon County), Greater South Pass (Fremont/Sweetwater counties), and Daniel (Sublette County), while the Thunder Basin and Buffalo/Powder River Basin core areas of northeast Wyoming (Campbell, Converse, Weston, Johnson counties), which together hold a real and substantial share of the state's population, fall entirely within the CLOSED Hunt Area 4. Rather than a regulatory zone overstating the species' huntable range, Wyoming's regulation excludes a named, high-density population from the hunt altogether.