On Tuesday, June 24th, 7:00pm at Sondreson Hall we welcome back North Fork neighbor, author, and world-renowned wildlife biologist, Diane Boyd. She will discuss wildlife-human challenges through the parallel lenses of Montana-Nepal-Human carnivore coexistence. A presentation of photos and videos will complement the conversation.
A short reading from A Woman Among Wolves and book signing will follow.
Snacks will be provided at both presentations and Q&As will follow!
Here is a digital flyer for a talk by Bruce Mclellan, Canadian wildlife biologist, who spent 40 years studying bears in the Canadian Flathead. His recent book is excellent. He is speaking in Whitefish next Wednesday, June 11, 7:00pm, at the Whitefish Community Center. The talk is sponsored by Glacier Two Medicine Alliance.
(Kudos to Suzanne Hildner for spotting this one.)
Great article about wolverines from the Mountain Journal . . .
Mist rises off the river, wetting our faces as we ford with chunks of slush bouncing off our waders. Stabbing the riverbed with ski poles, Mike Schadell and I struggle through the swift current, trying to find purchase on slimy river cobblestones. Our packs are weighed down by skis, dangling boots, three days of gear and a deer’s hindquarter.
We’re in Glacier National Park for an ongoing, multiyear, parkwide, noninvasive citizen science wolverine study in January 2010. Biologists had gathered data to estimate how many wolverines reside within the protected area’s boundaries. We each carry deer hindquarters to lure the largest mustelids to a post where steel wool brushes snag the animal’s hair, which we will gather and use to collect DNA.
Once across the river, we ski the undulating terrain through a mosaic forest of burnt black lodgepole pine, Douglas-fir and still-living, needleless larch trees. A fire raged through here years ago charring most of the woods. Deer, moose and wolf tracks punctuate the snow. A pine marten, a smaller member of the mustelid family, scampers from behind a tree. Its curiosity outweighs its elusive nature for a moment before it darts back into a dark hole at the base of an upturned root wad.
Our very own Kylie Heikkila, an NFPA board member and Glacier National Park Lead Wilderness Ranger who specializes in noxious weed mitigation for the North Fork, will provide lots of information and “how to” during this one hour lecture. Bring questions! NFPA will provide snacks. Sondreson Hall is located on the North Fork road about 8 miles north of Polebridge on the left.
What exactly is “old growth? This article adds some context to the discussion . . .
In an old-growth longleaf pine savanna, the absurdly long pine needles sing in the wind. Once considered forests, these landscapes in the southeastern U.S. coastal plain are open-canopied and sunny, more grassland than forest, with underbrush kept clear by frequent fires.
Longleaf pines – their needles can be up to 18 inches long – are among the longest-lived trees in eastern North America, surpassing 500 years if they are lucky enough to escape lightning strikes from the region’s frequent thunderstorms. Almost more fascinating is the ground cover, with up to 50 species per square meter, including some plants that are thousands of years old, with the vast majority of their biomass below ground. Picture an underground forest.
In the American West, there are other types of old-growth forest. Dry ponderosa pine woodlands are similarly open in structure and contain trees up to nearly 1,000 years old. But perhaps the most familiar old-growth forests are the complex, wet old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, which stretch from northwestern California to southeastern Alaska.
No big surprise. Whether it will actually lead to more timber production is an open question . . .
[Click here for map of areas under consideration for increased logging. (PDF, 19.7MB)]
President Donald Trump’s administration acted to roll back environmental safeguards around future logging projects on more than half of U.S. national forests under an emergency designation announced Friday that cites dangers from wildfires.
Whether the move will boost lumber supplies as Trump envisioned in an executive order last month remains to be seen. Former President Joe Biden’s administration also sought more logging in public forests to combat fires, which are worsening as the world gets hotter, yet U.S. Forest Service timber sales stayed relatively flat under his tenure.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins did not mention climate change in Friday’s directive, which called on her staff to speed up environmental reviews.
The press release is quoted in full here. There’s a link to the final plan at the end.
Mar 26, 2025 2:07 PM
HELENA – Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks released the 2025 Montana Gray Wolf Conservation and Management Plan today, wrapping up an extensive public process to capture updates to wolf management strategies and research into a new plan.
The final 2025 Montana Gray Wolf Conservation and Management Plan (2025 Wolf Plan) incorporates updates in wolf-related research, more than 20 years of management experience, evolution in conflict management, new laws, social perspectives, and public input.
“The former wolf plan served us well, but it was time to make sure our management plan contained the evolutions we’ve made in wolf research, monitoring, conflict management, and the changes to the legal framework we operate under today,” said FWP Director Christy Clark.
The 2025 Wolf Plan builds on a foundation of FWP wolf management: monitoring populations, tracking harvest, effective conflict management, and flexibility to integrate evolutions in science.
The 2025 Wolf Plan shifts a key counting metric from the number of breeding pairs to the number of wolves representing at least 15 breeding pairs. The final plan establishes that 450 wolves would ensure 15 breeding pairs. Population estimates will continue to be determined by the peer-reviewed Integrated Patch Occupancy Modeling method, or iPOM. The final plan also reflects the current depredation prevention and response program.
“Wolf management discussions continue to draw a lot of attention from people in Montana and around the world,” Clark said. “The 2025 Wolf Plan will ensure those conversations can be grounded in current science and the research FWP is doing every day.”
To see the final plan, click here.
This sounds like a really good idea. Note that the proposed study includes the three forks of the Flathead River, as well as the main stem as far as Flathead Lake . . .
Rep. David Bedey was born and raised in Hamilton, and he used to fish the Bitterroot River, but it’s so busy he doesn’t anymore.
“Now I go to the Clark Fork or somewhere else where I don’t have to play bumper cars with folks,” said Bedey, a Hamilton Republican.
Bedey made the comments Wednesday in the House Appropriations Committee in support of river use data that would be collected through House Bill 762, sponsored by Rep. Joshua Seckinger, D-Bozeman.
The “river census” bill, which preliminarily passed 67-32 in the House one day earlier, would require Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks to produce a report of all watercraft on 16 river stretches in the summer totaling 966 miles in the state.
Continue reading . . .
Looks like a pretty significant effort . . .
As bears begin emerging from hibernation, wildlife conflict specialists in northwest Montana are preparing for a busy spring. But they hope that by continuing to equip communities with tools to avoid conflicts, they’ll spend more time on prevention this season, and less time setting traps.
It’s a strategy that’s been paying off in recent years as bear-human conflict experts ramp up their education and outreach curriculum and push preventative measures, such as installing electric fences and investing in bear-resistant garbage containers in order to get ahead of the curve. Although a high call volume for human-bear conflicts has continued to overwhelm specialists with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP), they’ve refined their effort to target the root of the problem — unsecured food and other wildlife attractants in the wildland urban interface (WUI).
Trapping and relocating bears, they say, is a short-term solution to a persistent problem; convincing residents to lock up their grain, electrify their chicken coops and store their barbecue grills indoors, on the other hand, makes a lasting difference.
See also . . .
FWP Press release: New funding available for community-led bear conflict prevention