Montana wants to keep limiting wolf quotas near Yellowstone National Park . . .
Montana wildlife officials are proposing to keep the number of wolves that can be hunted or trapped just outside of Yellowstone National Park at four.
The proposal that went out for public comment Friday would set a quota of two wolves in each of two Montana management areas outside the park.
That was also the limit set in 2016 after the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission rejected a plan to increase the quota.
The New York Times has picked up on the public lands transfer issue . . .
BURNS, Ore. — A year ago, this corner of rural Oregon became center stage in the drawn-out drama over public lands when armed militia leaders seized a national wildlife refuge, arguing that the government had too much control of land in the West.
Now that President Trump is in office, people here and in other parts of the 11 states where 47 percent of the landmass is publicly owned are watching to see what he will do on everything related to public lands, from coal mining and cattle grazing to national monuments and parks. In Burns, some ranchers and others are feeling emboldened, hopeful that regulatory rollbacks by the federal government will return lands to private use and shore up a long-struggling economy.
But the change in administration has also spawned a countermovement of conservatives and corporate executives who are speaking up alongside environmentalists in defense of public lands and now worry about losing access to hunting grounds and customers who prize national parks and wildlife.
From the official press release . . .
On April 15, Montana’s full response to the invasive mussels begins statewide with more than 30 inspection stations, decontamination stations for boats leaving Tiber and Canyon Ferry Reservoirs and a broad outreach and education effort to help ensure people recreating on Montana’s waterways are practicing clean, drain and dry techniques at all times.
The biggest changes will be seen by those recreationists at Tiber and Canyon Ferry. In March, the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission approved rules requiring boaters on Canyon Ferry and Tiber reservoirs to launch and exit at designated boat ramps, unless they are officially certified as local boaters on those specific waters by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
While local boaters won’t be required to decontaminate their vessels with hot water each time they leave Tiber or Canyon Ferry – they’ll still be required to stop at an inspection station where they’ll be expedited through after a brief interview. The program is designed to decrease volume at decontamination stations and allow a focus on boats traveling elsewhere.
Continue reading Montana’s invasive mussel response swings into gear
Here’s the latest on the state bill to fight invasive mussel species in Montana’s waters . . .
The Senate Natural Resources Committee unanimously approved a bill to bolster the defense against aquatic invasive mussels, which were detected in Montana waters for the first time in the state’s history last fall.
However, a proposed amendment granting full rule-making authority to the Flathead Basin Commission to oversee a local inspection program was not successful.
The Senate Natural Resources Committee on April 7 reviewed House Bill 622, a measure introduced by four Northwest Montana legislators: Republicans Mike Cuffe, of Eureka; Bob Keenan, of Bigfork; Mark Noland, of Bigfork; and Al Olszewski, of Kalispell. All 12 members of the committee voted to advance the bill to the Senate, which is scheduled to consider it April 11.
They finally brought someone in to take Chris Servheen’s old job. Dr. Hilary Cooley is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s new grizzly bear recovery coordinator . . .
The federal official charged with leading the U.S. polar bear program has departed Alaska for Missoula, Montana, to oversee grizzly bear recovery in the Lower 48.
Hilary Cooley, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s new grizzly bear recovery coordinator, has stepped into the job vacated by 35-year veteran Chris Servheen. Cooley will have the opportunity to finish what Servheen started: seeing through the Endangered Species Act “delisting” process for Yellowstone-area grizzlies, which turns over jurisdiction from Fish and Wildlife to Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.
The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s grizzlies, she said, are ready to be managed by the states.
The grizzly bear delisting process is making its way through the federal bureaucracy.
It’s a lot like watching paint dry . . .
The work of crafting a draft final rule to delist the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s grizzly bears is complete, and now the plans must navigate the many layers of federal bureaucracy.
The timeline for publishing the rule is unclear, in part because of the transition of presidential administrations and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s own influx status, said Jodi Bush, the agency’s Montana Ecological Field Office supervisor.
“We’ve had all of our packages stopped in headquarters lately,” Bush said in an interview at the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee meeting held in Jackson last week. “They want to look at stuff. With the [recently protected] bumblebee it took an additional 39 days for them to get through it.”
This is a seriously cute photo, but the attached story offers a lesson in habitat isolation and its worrisome effects on genetic diversity . . .
Admit it. You only clicked on this story because of the photo of that insanely cute mountain lion kitten. You just wanted to gaze into her (yes, it’s a her) milky blue eyes.
That’s fair.
But there’s more to the story of this kitten. Researchers have named her P-54. She’s no more than a few months old. And – this is the sad part – it’s likely that she’s the product of inbreeding.
The kitten was born amidst the urban sprawl of Southern California in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, the largest urban national park in the country. The recreation area is bordered by the Pacific Ocean, agricultural fields and greater Los Angeles.
A couple of years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service started taking public comments on a plan to restore the grizzly population of Washington’s Cascade Range. Now, they are a step closer to a plan that will include using some of Montana’s grizzlies to seed a new population in the North Cascades . . .
In a few years, some grizzly bears from Northwest Montana could have new homes in the North Cascades Ecosystem of Washington and British Columbia. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service earlier this year released a draft environmental impact statement to reintroduce the iconic species back to the Cascades. At least some of the bears would come from Northwest Montana if the project comes to fruition.
The 6.1 million acre North Cascades have a smattering of grizzlies in Canada and in the U.S., the last known breeding female was seen in the early 1990s. The bears were hunted and trapped to near extinction by the Hudson Bay Co. about 200 years ago, noted Park Service spokesman Jack Oelfke.
Isolated by both geography and human barriers like highways and railroads, the bears have little chance of re-establishing populations on their own.
A group of researchers just published a thorough study of the effects of hybridization on Montana’s cutthroat trout population . . .
Cutthroat trout, a prized and legally protected fish species in Montana, are increasingly threatened by a growing trend of hybridization with non-native rainbow trout, according to research published last month in the scientific journal Global Change Biology.
A group of researchers from the University of Montana, the U.S. Geological Survey, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the University of Alaska analyzed Montana’s historical fish-stocking records and 35 years’ worth of genetic data collected by state biologists, finding that hybridization between the two species is increasing across remaining geographic range for genetically pure cutthroats.
For decades, fisheries managers in Montana and elsewhere in the Western U.S. stocked rivers and lakes with non-native rainbow trout, a popular sport fish that easily established breeding populations in the state’s waterways. The state abandoned the practice in 1969, but interbreeding between rainbows and the closely related cutthroats has resulted in a proliferation of hybrids and has eroded the native fish’s genetic pool throughout most of its range.
This article really should have been longer; there’s a lot to think about here. Still, it’s worth reading . . .
Grizzly bears continue to expand their range amid an ongoing effort to turn over management of the bears from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, a federal official said.
“We’ve seen an 11 percent change in increasing range in just a couple of years,” Frank van Manen, head scientist of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, said last week at a meeting in Jackson.
Since coming under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, grizzlies have steadily expanded their habitat outward from the population’s core in Yellowstone National Park.