Category Archives: Science

Wildfires are getting worse; logging isn’t the solution

Environmental Issues, News, Science,
Forest ownership in the United States — Mark D. Nelson, Greg C. Liknes, and Brett J. Butler – U.S. Forest Service

“…there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” — H. L. Mencken

Here’s a good article, with a minimum of editorializing and including actual numbers and stuff, discussing why increased wildfire danger does not actually  justify an increased timber harvest. Better forest management however . . .

The western United States is facing another destructive wildfire season, with more acres burned in Colorado alone in 2025 than in the past four years combined. If global warming continues on its current trajectory, the amount of forest area burned each year could double or even triple by midcentury.

In other words, more fire is coming, more often.

As U.S. forests burn, Congress and federal agencies are asking an important question: What role should federal land management play in reducing fire risk?

Continue reading . . .

 

The Phantom of the Rockies

Environmental Issues, Science
Roaming wolverine - USFWS
Roaming wolverine – USFWS

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.

Continue reading . . .

Howl – The dark side of wolf reintroduction

Environmental Issues, News, Science
Biologist Diane Boyd with a tranquilized wolf in the field
Biologist Diane Boyd with a tranquilized wolf in the field

Our own Diane Boyd got some more ink, this time in a long-form article with lots of photos published in ‘Nautilus’…

Diane Boyd walked along the North Fork of the Flathead River. It was a clear blue summer day, and the wolf biologist relished being in this Rocky Mountain valley in northwestern Montana. She set foot here 45 years ago to track the first known gray wolf to wander into the western continental United States from Canada in decades. Humans had exterminated the last of them in the 1930s.

The river wove through pine, aspen, and willow trees that rose along the edge of a sprawling grass meadow. The mountain peaks in the distance were topped with snow. Boyd grew up in suburban Minnesota, where she was the neighborhood kid who could be found at the wild edges of the subdivision putting caterpillars in jars.

“I always wanted to go more and more wild in my life—wildlife, wild places—and it doesn’t get a lot wilder than here,” Boyd said to me last summer, as we walked through the quiet meadow.

At age 69, dressed in jeans, running shoes, and a T-shirt picturing a dog lazing on a lake pier, Boyd seemed very much the innately independent biologist who settled here at age 24. She spoke with a directness that had little room for sentimentality. The meadow area is called Moose City and was originally a 1910s homesteader ranch with six log cabins. Boyd lived alone in one of the tiny cabins without electricity or running water for 12 years.

Continue reading . . .

The heartbeat of wild places

Environmental Issues, Photos & Images, Science
Mountain Lion - US Forest Service
Mountain Lion – US Forest Service

A fascinating article on mountain lions with a North Fork focus and some excellent photos . . .

Populations of big cats are declining globally because of habitat loss and poaching, but mountain lion numbers are increasing. They are the most successful large cats in the Americas and live from the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in South America, north to Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Jim Williams, author, biologist and former regional director of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, says Montana has two to four times as many lions as wolves on the landscape. More mountain lions live in Glacier National Park than Yellowstone proper, Williams says, due to the high white-tailed deer population in Glacier, and wolf packs in Yellowstone have displaced mountain lions from the high, open plains to the northern region of the park where deep canyons and steep slopes are prevalent. “There are 4.9 resident adults per 100 square kilometers in Glacier,” he said. “That’s the highest we’ve detected in Montana.”

The story below happened in Glacier, but could have easily occurred in Greater Yellowstone or anywhere carnivores face off in conflict.

Continue reading . . .

Inside the experimental world of animal infrastructure

Environmental Issues, Science
A black bear emerges from a wildlife underpass installed on the Flathead Reservation
A black bear emerges from a wildlife underpass installed on the Flathead Reservation

MIT Technology Review has a very informative long-form article on “animal infrastructure,” the bridges, underpasses and other structures and techniques being developed to deal with conflicts between animals and human activity . . .

In the mid-2000s, toads were meeting a gruesome end near Ede, an old, leafy town in the middle of the Netherlands. Local residents came to the rescue. For a few weeks each spring, the town erected a set of temporary fences along a kilometer or so of road, in an area where the animals crossed over from their winter habitat in the south to three breeding ponds in the north. When the toads hit the barrier, they’d hop sideways for a few meters until they dropped into a bucket, one of 36 pitfall traps that lined the fence.

Every day, volunteers would diligently carry the toads to the other side and send them on their way. It was a crude, somewhat laborious way of mitigating the hardship of being an amphibian in a world built for humans. But it was a lifeline that Ede residents were happy to provide for their warty neighbors—which, like so many other species worldwide, have suffered difficulties feeding, breeding, and migrating as their familiar landscape is carved apart by human infrastructure.

What followed has taken on the air of a cautionary fable among a small international community of ecologists and ecological designers…

Continue reading . . .

New Study Shows Risks of Moving Grizzlies

Environmental Issues, News, Science,
Trail camera in the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem shows a sow grizzly and two cubs at a hair corral site used to collect DNA samples - Wayne Kasworth, USFWS
Trail camera in the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem shows a sow grizzly and two cubs at a hair corral site used to collect DNA samples – Wayne Kasworth, USFWS

Looks like the success rate for relocating grizzlies is not very encouraging . . .

Moving grizzly bears is no easy task. It’s far better to let them move themselves.

That’s the takeaway from a new study published in The Wildlife Society’s Journal of Wildlife Management. The investigation analyzes 40 years of grizzly translocation events performed in Alberta, Canada. It determines that out of 110 attempts, just 33 translocations—or 30 percent—succeeded.

That conclusion supports some long-established foundations for our work here at Vital Ground. Wildlife managers use translocation both to remove problem bears from an area and to bolster recovering grizzly populations. In either case, the new research demonstrates that relocating bears is far from a cure-all.

Continue reading . . .

Montana Wolf Harvest Dashboard

Environmental Issues, Science

Collared Wolf - courtesy USFWSWant to know how Montana’s politics-before-science wolf harvest is going this year? The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Wolf Harvest Dashboard has you covered. You can even drill down to information on each individual kill. For instance, the three wolves taken in Wolf Management Unit 110 (WMU 110), which encompasses the North Fork, were all trapped on January 20 in the Lazy Creek area.

Kudos to NFPA Board member Diane Boyd for highlighting this resource.

Link: Montana Wolf Harvest Dashboard

 

Op-ed: We cannot support delisting Montana grizzly bears unless state laws are changed

Commentary, Environmental Issues, Science

Here is a well-reasoned op-ed that recently appeared in the Helena Independent Record opposing grizzly bear delisting due to problems with Montana’s current wildlife management  regime. You’ll see some familiar entries in the 35-name signature block, including NFPA Board of Directors member Diane Boyd.

(Bonus: the Char-Kosta News, official news publication of the Flathead Indian Reservation, has a lengthy discussion of the underlying background issues.)

Grizzly bear on log - Ken Peaco, NPS

We are 35 state, federal, and Tribal wildlife professionals who have worked together for more than 40 years to help recover and manage grizzly bears, wolves, and other wildlife in Montana. We did this by building science and fact-based management policies and plans with public input while carefully balancing the needs of bears and other wildlife with the needs of the people who live, work, and recreate in Montana.

We believed in and promoted the eventual delisting of recovered grizzlies and wolves and turning them over to state management. We believed that the wildlife professionals in Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP) would be good stewards who would continue to carefully manage grizzly bears and wolves using science and facts after recovery and delisting.

All this changed in 2021 when a new legislative majority and a like-minded governor took office. Science-based wildlife management in Montana was replaced by anti-predator hysteria fueled by misinformation and emotion. Professional wildlife management by FWP biologists was replaced by partisan political intervention that overturned decades of sound wildlife policy.

Continue reading Op-ed: We cannot support delisting Montana grizzly bears unless state laws are changed →

‘Grizzlies and Us’ series worth the read

Environmental Issues, News, Photos & Images, Science,
Grizzly Bear - Montana FWP
Grizzly Bear – Montana FWP

Wow! Lee Enterprises, owner of a number of newspapers in this part of the country, including the Missoulian, recently wrapped up their “Grizzlies and Us” project, a ten-part series consisting of some 22 individual articles examining “…the many issues surrounding the uneasy coexistence of grizzlies and humans…”

Highly recommended reading . . .