Crouching motionless in an aspen grove teeming with mule deer nibbling on spring green-up. Clambering up a precipitous and deadfall-covered slope in search of a collar signal. Slogging through mud in a growing blizzard that soon made a sighting unlikely. And, one winter day, watching the objective — ultra-migrating Deer 255 — in the sagebrush, nosing through undergrowth with fawns, unbothered by her observers.
Gregory Nickerson’s years-long effort to track the path of Deer 255, a doe known for migrating more than 200 miles each spring and fall in search of food, was never boring, he said.
“She was hard to find,” Nickerson said. “Even if you have the GPS points, trying to get where she was was always epic.”
Nickerson helped share the mule deer’s migration feats with the world through his work as a writer and filmmaker with the Wyoming Migration Initiative. The doe’s fanbase grew as she became a key figure in migration science. Nickerson’s interest in her story also grew; he started compiling his research and field adventures into a book.
The Laramie writer and former WyoFile reporter recently won the 2025 Pattie Layser Greater Yellowstone Creative Writing & Journalism Fellowship for his Deer 255 project. The Wyoming Arts Council fellowship comes with $3,500 and an opportunity for a week-long writing residency within the Greater Yellowstone region.
The project’s working title is “The Superior Deer” — a nod both to her migration path, which began near the tiny southwestern town Superior, and to her status in the world of migration.
Origins
Nickerson grew up outside of Bighorn. As a child, he loved hearing stories from his neighbor, born in 1918, of how things used to be; that helped instill a lifelong interest in history. He started going hunting with his father at age 12, and became captivated by ungulate herds.
“We would see these big migratory herds, and it was super impressive to see into their world, basically, and have this little glimpse of this massive movement of animals, this non-human part of planet Earth,” he said. “I just became more and more fascinated by that.”
As a young man, he guided guests at the Darwin Ranch east of Jackson, where he was exposed to more ungulate patterns and life cycles. He wrote a little about critters as a WyoFile reporter in the early 2010s, but mainly covered the Wyoming Legislature. When Nickerson started working for the migration organization in 2016, he was able to fully immerse in the topic.
He first became aware of Deer 255 in March 2016 when Wyoming Migration Initiative researchers caught and fitted the doe with a tracking collar.
“At the time, she was just one of dozens of deer being collared” for research on mule deer in the state, Nickerson said. For much of the rest of that spring, Deer 255 migrated with fellow mule deer and didn’t elicit much notice. “But by mid-June, we saw that she had somehow gone 100 more miles than the rest of the deer.”
That great distance piqued everyone’s interest, he said. Then her collar stopped working.
Two years later, in 2018, she was caught once again, and researchers identified her as 255. Fitted with a new collar, she began making her super-sized migration of roughly 200 miles each year, starting from the Leucite Hills of the Red Desert and walking north up past Pinedale into the Hoback Basin and near the border of Grand Teton National Park. She even ventured into Yellowstone National Park and Idaho. As of 2024, Deer 255 made the longest distance migration for any mule deer tracked by scientists — at 242 miles.
By the time Deer 255 died in April, she was widely admired.
The protagonist
Nickerson always knew he wanted to write a book about animal migrations, but said it took several years of following Deer 255 and many thoughtful discussions with his wife to decide the doe would serve as the narrative thread. Deer 255 will guide readers through not only her own migrations but a larger history of migrations, how Americans almost destroyed routes and the prospects going forward, he said.
“She’s the main character, but really it’s her migration, and the paths of curiosity that led me into, that the book is really focused on,” he said. The landscape that Deer 255 traversed, he added, “has all of these super relevant, super interesting, historic events related to migration and conservation as well. So I use her path across the land as a way into all those stories.”
The book, he said, will include his own adventures and misadventures tracking Deer 255 — he attempted to spot her in all four seasons, and she proved an evasive and hardy target. Along with data specific to the doe’s superlative travels, he plans to weave in information on how recent scientific tools have opened up human understanding of animal movement, the broader history of animal migration and how ungulates like Deer 255 have been able to live and migrate thanks to preservation and management that has helped restore certain corridors.
Recent technological advances have also helped make clear that Yellowstone’s mammal migrations are under great pressure, Nickerson said, and there’s a lot more work to be done.
He hopes the life of this super-doe helps build migration awareness, and is grateful to the Wyoming Arts Council and the Layser family for the show of confidence.
“The stories of these individual animals can teach you a whole lot about our world and our relationship to it,” he said.
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