Wolves face a fresh push to strip away the federal protection that’s helped them recover from near extinction, while deer, antelope and moose may get government help in Colorado and other states to roam across increasingly fragmented habitat.

David Bernhardt, the Trump administration’s acting interior secretary, told state wildlife managers from across the nation who gathered Wednesday in Denver that the feds in the coming days will propose the removal of the gray wolf’s endangered species status in the Lower 48 states.

“Many of our experts believe the wolf no longer needs the protections of the Endangered Species Act,” Bernhardt said during a 23-minute speech at the annual North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference that the Interior Department declared closed to the press.

The push to “de-list” wolves, to be formalized this week or next in the federal register, immediately enraged wildlife advocates, who lamented that wolf howls still can’t be heard in prime habitat from the Grand Canyon to Colorado’s high country to the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

While in Denver on Wednesday, Bernhardt also unveiled two orders directing Bureau of Land Management officials to work with state wildlife agencies in protecting big game migratory routes and to improve access to tens of millions of acres of public land for hunting and fishing.

One order expands a directive by former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to aid the winter migration of pronghorn antelope, mule deer and elk by adding wild sheep and moose and summertime protection, according to a conservation group leader and a public lands group’s recording of Bernhardt’s speech. The other requires the BLM, when buying or selling property, to consider impacts on recreational access to public land.

This public posture by senior Trump officials shows an emerging selective federal approach toward wildlife survival struggles as pressures intensify. Energy development, road and housing construction, fencing, bright lights and noise degrade once-healthy habitat, creating patches where species hang on, conservation biologists, state agency officials and wildlife experts at the conference said.

Long-sought “connectivity” between the patches of habitat around the West requires removing or modifying fences, building road-crossing structures and potential costly capturing of non-flying wildlife to be carried over blocked migratory routes, conference participants said. Benefits of creating safe “wildlife corridors” include preventing local extinctions, enabling the seasonal migration that wildlife need, improving genetic robustness, and helping animals habituate to changing conditions.

“At some point, there’s a tipping point,” said Whit Fosburgh, chief executive of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a national group with 92,000 members that helped host the conference.

“You are seeing the decline of mule deer,” Fosburgh said. “We have to be making smarter decisions on how we do development. … And states have an obligation here. They have primary authority to manage animals.”

Fosburgh met with Bernhardt after the speech. He has supported Bernhardt’s nomination to become interior secretary, calling him “accessible” and devoted to wildlife — and more reliable than Zinke, who stepped aside amid multiple investigations into his real estate dealings.

“Whoever is going to get put in that position is going to have to take direction” from President Donald Trump, Fosburgh said. “I would rather have someone like Bernhardt, rather than a Scott Pruitt, who tries to destroy the agency. You could get somebody who is a real ideologue.”

Bernhardt in his speech had said: “Our priorities are the president’s priorities.”

Bernhardt was “unavailable for an interview today,” Department of Interior spokeswoman Faith Vander Voort said.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Gavin Shire in Washington, D.C., confirmed plans to push for a wolf de-listing. A 2013 push to de-list the gray wolf under President Barack Obama’s Interior Secretary Sally Jewell perished amid a storm of public outrage and federal court rulings.

Yet some conservationists contend gray wolves now have recovered sufficiently under the Endangered Species Act for removal of the protection — which cattle ranchers and others threatened by wolves have demanded for years. A Fish and Wildlife data page indicated the gray wolf population in the Lower 48 states has reached about 5,680. Hunters nearly drove wolves extinct around 1900.

Federal agency gatekeepers indicated interior secretarial orders likely would be released in the next few days in Washington, D.C.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials said they hadn’t seen federal documents and were not in a position to comment.

“CPW often partners with local and federal agencies to provide insight into wildlife movement and corridors. We also work with the industry to identify these same boundaries,” agency spokesman Travis Duncan said. “However, our role is more advisory in nature as we are not the regulatory authority over federal lands or private lands. We will continue working with other agencies and jurisdictions to inform them on wildlife corridors and wildlife movement so that they can make their decisions on land use with the best available data we have.”

Bernhardt comes from Rifle on Colorado’s western slope, surrounded by federal land holdings and fossil-fuel development. He worked for a decade at the Department of the Interior, including service under President George W. Bush before overseeing natural resources legal work at a Denver-based law firm that represents industry clients. He worked as deputy interior secretary under Zinke, Trump’s first interior secretary. Trump nominated Bernhardt to be the interior secretary, pending confirmation in the U.S. Senate.

Wildlife groups roundly opposed the move to de-list wolves, vowing lawsuits.

“When wolves returned to Yellowstone, it re-calibrated the distribution of elk to the benefit of stream-side plant communities, beavers, songbirds and trout,” Western Watersheds Project director Erik Molvar said. “The absence of wolves from their traditional western ranges not only perpetuates ecological imbalance, but, from a human perspective, deprives visitors to western public lands of experiencing the wilds of the mountains and basins in their truly wild and primeval state.”

Some conservationists are lobbying against confirmation of Bernhardt as secretary.

“Bernhardt has been the architect of some of Interior’s most destructive policies in the Trump administration, including those that shut western communities out of decisions about oil and gas drilling. The suggestion that he’s ‘pragmatic’ doesn’t line up with the reality that he has been doling out special favors to his past lobbying clients and rubber-stamping the wish list of extractive industries,” Center For American Progress public lands program director Kate Kelly said.

“Unless acting Secretary Bernhardt stops selling off Western wildlife corridors for drilling, this order will be just as meaningless and toothless as the last one,” Kelly said. “Over the last two years, Bernhardt has ignored state-identified wildlife corridors and pushed nearly one-fifth of all Western oil and gas leases into the very places that pronghorn, mule deer and elk need to survive and thrive. Until he starts to walk his big talk on conservation, it’s hard to see these orders as anything more than window dressing.”