Anyone who worked in or with the Whitefish Range Partnership will see some familiar faces in this segment from This American Land. A big hand to Amy Robinson, Bob Brown, Heidi Van Everen, Frank Vitale, John Frederick, Paul McKenzie and Erin Sexton for participating in this video . . .
You can see the full television episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI1pjZWys0
Chris Peterson has a very interesting article in this week’s Hungry Horse News about the ongoing study of Glacier Park’s mountain goats. It seems humans are an excellent source of salt . . .
Hike the Hidden Lake Overlook Trail in Glacier National Park during the summer and you’re almost assured to see a mountain goat.
The region is excellent goat habitat, notes University of Montana biologist and researcher Wesley Sarmento. But the goats are also drawn there for another big reason: Salt.
Sarmento currently has 22 goats fitted with radio collars from the Logan Pass area as part of a three-year-study of the iconic creatures.
The Wilderness Society weighs in on the issue of drilling leases in the Badger-Two Medicine region . . .
As the Blackfeet Nation’s leaders ramp up efforts to protect the Badger-Two Medicine area near Glacier National Park from oil and gas development, a nationwide conservation group has issued a report singling out the sacred region as a top priority for environmental safeguards.
The Wilderness Society’s 2015 edition of “Too Wild to Drill,” which identifies places the group believes should be off limits to energy development, featured the Badger-Two Medicine among three other lands deserving protection, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Colorado’s Thompson Divide and Grand Junction region and Utah’s Bears Ears and lands near Desolation Canyon.
Flanked on the northwest by Glacier National Park, on the east by the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and on the south by the Bob Marshall and Great Bear Wilderness, the 130,000-acre Badger-Two Medicine is central to the cultural identity of the Blackfeet.
The next chapter begins in the battle over the fate of the Solonex oil and gas lease in the Badger-Two Medicine region. The feds have, uh, decided to make a decision . . .
U.S. government officials plan to decide this fall whether to take steps to lift the suspension of an oil and gas lease on land sacred to Native Americans or to begin the four-month process of canceling it, according to court documents filed Monday.
The timeline for resolving the decades-old suspension of the lease in the Badger-Two Medicine area near Glacier National Park was created after a federal judge ordered the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service to come up with a timeline to complete their review.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Solenex LLC sued to lift the suspension and begin drilling this summer on the 6,200-acre oil and gas lease it acquired in 1982. The suspension has been in place since 1993 while federal officials consider the environmental and cultural impacts.
From our friends at the National Parks Conservation Association . . .
Greetings, friends!
We’re planning a summer celebration of Glacier National Park’s North Fork, right on the riverbank the morning of Aug. 24.
Sens. Jon Tester and Steve Daines together will welcome Canada’s Consulate General Marcy Grossman to commemorate a truly historic transboundary and bipartisan alliance, forever protecting the communities and culture of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.
Places such as Waterton-Glacier and the North Fork Flathead River Valley do not happen by accident. They are choices that we make together – choices such as the recent Canadian and US legislation that protects our North Fork heritage. Please join us to celebrate the priceless gift of many more summers on the river! We’ll bring the coffee.
Details and directions below…
Directions to Blankenship Bridge (for non-North Forkers):
Grizzly bear recovery in the Cabinet-Yaak region is proceeding slowly . . .
Despite the robust recovery of grizzly bears in the forested mountains of Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and the surrounding landscape, the great bear’s future across the region remains far from certain.
The recovery zone spanning the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, Yaak River basin and areas in between— about one quarter of the size of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem — has about one 20th of the grizzly population, growing at about half the rate.
The Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population contained 45 bears in 2012 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last conducted a population estimate. Wayne Kasworm, a grizzly bear biologist for the agency, estimates that population at about 50 today, half of the 100-bear recovery target identified after the population’s 1975 listing as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Remember “OR7,” the Oregon-based wolf that created a stir when it wandered into Northern California about three years ago? It looks like he has fathered at least two pups . . .
Trail camera photos confirm that Oregon’s famous wandering wolf, OR-7, has fathered at least two new pups.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist John Stephenson said Thursday that brings to seven the number of wolves in the Rogue pack, which lives on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest in the Cascades of southwestern Oregon. That includes three pups from last year.
Biologists had confirmed the second set of pups last July, but didn’t know how many.
An interesting brown-bag luncheon presentation on mountain goats at Glacier Park . . .
The Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center at Glacier National Park is hosting a brown-bag luncheon presentation by graduate student, Wesley Sarmento. The free presentation, “Mass Visitation and Mountain Goats: Ecology and Management of an Alpine Icon,” is Wednesday, August 12, from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. at the park’s community building in West Glacier.
Wildlife habituation at Logan Pass is a priority concern in the new Going-to-the-Sun Road Corridor Management Plan. Sarmento will talk about his research project tracking habituated goats to understand how people influence mountain goat behavior and ecology.
Sarmento has studied wildlife professionally for over seven years and is currently a Master’s student at the University of Montana. As a National Geographic “Young Explorer” he conducted conservation research of the world’s largest wild sheep in Mongolia. His has also conducted wildlife research in Northern Alaska and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
The Glacier National Park Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center hosts brown-bag lectures throughout the year. Visit http://www.crownscience.org/getinvolved/outreach/brownbag for more information.
The feds have until August 17 to make a decision on a suspended old lease in the Badger-Two Medicine region . . .
A federal judge has had enough in a longstanding delay on a Louisiana’s oilman’s attempt to explore the Badger-Two Medicine region for oil and gas.
On July 27, U.S. Disitrict Court Judge Richard Leon gave the U.S. Department of Interior 21 days to come up with a resolution on the decision whether to lift a lease given to the Solonex Corp. owned by Sidney Longwell near Hall Creek back in 1982.
The leases are just a few miles south of Glacier National Park near Marias Pass in some of the wildest country in the region.
From this morning’s Glacier Park press release . . .
The Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center at Glacier National Park is hosting a brown-bag luncheon presentation by Glacier National Park Superintendent Jeff Mow. The free presentation, “Responding to Climate Change: An Organizational Perspective,” is Wednesday, August 5, from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. at the park’s community building in West Glacier.
National parks and protected areas throughout the world are being impacted by climate change through extreme weather events, warmer temperatures, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification. Mow said, “Underlying the challenge of how we respond to the new normal are an uncertainty associated with climate change. The organizational challenge for parks like Glacier is how to respond to climate change and build the organizational capacity to adapt to the wide range of conditions that we are experiencing.”
Mow has an extensive history working in northern latitudes and has been involved in climate change response for the National Park Service since 2006. He has been superintendent at Glacier National Park since August, 2013.
The Glacier National Park Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center hosts brown-bag lectures throughout the year. Visit http://www.crownscience.org/getinvolved/outreach/brownbag for more information.