From the Daily Inter Lake . . .
Several wildfires touched off by lightning Sept. 8 made galloping runs over the weekend along the Continental Divide, most of them in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
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Larry Wilson: History committee gearing up
Larry Wilson’s column this week discusses the recently-formed NFLA History Committee, tasked with preserving the history of the North Fork . . .
The North Fork Landowners Association has established a history committee, and their current project is to do oral interviews with North Fork old timers. It’s too bad the project cannot include original homesteaders of the area, all of whom have now passed over the Great Divide. Good thing is that today’s old timers knew the homesteaders.
That knowledge, coupled with the written interviews of homesteaders done by the Forest Service, Park Service and Hungry Horse editor Mel Ruder, should make a more complete picture of North Fork history from homestead days up to the 1960s.
Stage 1 fire restrictions go into effect for Flathead County
From the Hungry Horse News , , ,
A fire on the south side of Big Mountain and another in Marion drove home the point of the Flathead County Commissioners in imposing Stage 1 fire restrictions on private property in Flathead County…
As fire crews battled the two fires – both likely human-caused – and facing persistent hot and dry conditions that continued to fuel fires, the Flathead County Commissioners approved Stage 1 fire restrictions on Sept. 6.
The restrictions ban fireworks, require that campfires have a fire ring no larger than three feet in diameter and limits smoking to buildings, vehicles or areas that are cleared of vegetation…
Grizzlies making urban appearances in Flathead Valley
From the Flathead Beacon . . .
Grizzly Bear Management Specialist Tim Manley has been busy.
In the past two weeks Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks captured five grizzly bears in the north end of the Flathead Valley.
Rise in bear-related chicken raids ruffling feathers of wildlife managers
This very interesting, if lengthy, article is not nearly as silly as it sounds. Turns out the rising interest in hobby farming is triggering some pretty serious bear conflicts. Bears like chicken and sweet corn just as much as humans do.
There are some great quotes here from a collection of highly irritated wildlife managers.
From today’s Missoulian . . .
More grizzly bears are keying in on unprotected chicken coops in western Montana, with increasingly deadly consequences – both for the bears and the pilfered poultry.
The rise in bear-related chicken raids is ruffling the feathers of state and federal wildlife managers who are forced to move or kill bears that receive a food reward, be it from a trash can, a fruit orchard or a bird pen. The conflicts are entirely avoidable, managers say, but it’s the responsibility of landowners to buck the disturbing trend…
“I sometimes get calls daily on chickens, whereas I used to never hear about it,” said Jamie Jonkel, FWP’s bear management specialist in Missoula. “Chickens are the new garbage. There are so many chickens on the landscape that it’s like having garbage cans with wings just tempting the bears.”
Cool, damp weather helps slow fires
From the Daily Inter Lake . . .
Recent rains, higher humidities and lower temperatures have put a damper on fires still burning in Northwest Montana.
About a half inch of rain was recorded Wednesday at Spotted Bear and the Big Prairie Ranger station in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, where the 4,100-acre Big Salmon Lake Fire and the 5,100-acre Hammer Creek Fire have been burning for the last few weeks…
There was a similar effect on the South Fork Lost Creek Fire, which has burned 1,681 acres just outside the wilderness about seven miles south of Swan Lake…
Lake trout removal tactics paying off
The Daily Inter Lake has a pretty interesting report on the progress being made to remove invasive lake trout from Quartz Lake in Glacier National Park . . .
It’s been rough and wearying work plying the waters of Glacier National Park’s remote Quartz Lake for unwanted lake trout, but the effort appears promising so far.
Since the experimental suppression project got under way in 2009, more than 1,500 non-native lake trout have been removed from the lake through spring and fall gill netting.
“All the signs are indicating that we are making a dent up there for sure,” said Clint Muhlfeld, an aquatic research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “We saw a pretty dramatic decline over the course of the spring sampling.”
‘If Glacier leaves you speechless, speak up’ – ProtectGlacier.com launched
Many of you already got an email from the National Parks Conservation Association announcing the opening of the “Protect Glacier” website. For those who haven’t seen the big announcement yet, here it is:
More than 30 years ago, fans of Glacier National Park were alarmed to learn of Canadian coal mining plans that would tear down entire mountains along the park’s northwestern border.
Today, after decades of international negotiation and diplomacy, those plans finally have been scuttled, with Canada pledging to protect the park’s world-class waterways from upstream mining. Today the United States is working to do the same.
Even as major energy companies (including Chevron, BP, Exxon and ConocoPhillips) volunteer to retire their mining and drilling leases on Glacier’s western fringe, lawmakers struggle to pass protective measures prohibiting future mining of public lands in the North Fork Flathead River drainage.
That’s why a coalition of concerned citizens and Glacier Park lovers — with help from the National Parks Conservation Association — has brought this historic issue into the dot.com future, with a website and clearing house dedicated to resolving land-use conflicts in the transboundary Flathead.
ProtectGlacier.com went live this week, a virtual world where visitors can explore maps and photographs from the Flathead, can learn about what’s at stake and flipthrough years of reports and research. They can read the latest park news, Tweet and re-Tweet and link to Facebook, and they can listen to what people are saying about the North Fork Watershed Protection Act. That legislation (S.233) has been introduced by Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester, and would withdraw public lands adjacent to the park from future drilling – just as the Canadians have done on their side of the border.
Online visitors to the site can sign a ProtectGlacier.com letter of support of the legislation, adding their voices to the thousands who already have spoken up on behalf of America’s finest alpine park.
This Website represents the future – our future, Glacier Park’s future – but it’s also just the latest chapter in a very old story, a story that Glacier’s advocates have been helping to write for decades. This is, in fact, how history gets written. So pick up that keyboard, and be sure to add a few lines of your own at ProtectGlacier.com.
Further reading: The National Parks Traveler website also has a good article about the ProtectGlacier.com site.
Larry Wilson: Fewer bear problems this summer
In this week’s column, Larry talks about the encouraging drop in bear-human conflicts this summer. . . .
I’m a little bit surprised that there have been so few grizzly bear problems this summer.
On Trail Creek, the huckleberry crop has been less than bountiful in the lower elevations, and this usually translates to more bear problems.
The two three-year-old sows that have been seen quite often have not caused any problems, and the big boar on Trail Creek has also been seen but, so far, has not been a problem.
I think there are several reasons for this, but the biggest is the fact that North Fork humans have become excellent guests in grizzly habitat.
Montana’s wolf hunt opens this Saturday
Idaho started their wolf hunt the other day, now it’s Montana’s turn. From the Daily Inter Lake . . .
Wolves will be legal game when archery season opens Saturday, but successful hunts are expected to be very rare…
Montana has set a statewide quota for 220 wolves to be harvested this year during the archery season, the early rifle season in wilderness areas and the general big game season that opens in late October…