Wildlife Management

A cable TV news crew taping a segment on bear safety Friday in Yellowstone National Park got a little something extra in the bargain: a close encounter with a bear.

“That was what we refer to as an incident within an incident,” park spokesman Dan Hottle said Monday, joking that he worried some might think the encounter was staged.

Hottle had taken the crew from CNN to Joffe Lake — a five-minute drive from park headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs — where they were interviewing Yellowstone bear biologist Kerry Gunther.

Adventure Journal Post

On one level, this video of creatures captured by a single webcam in Banff National Park, Alberta, over the course of a year is incredibly cool. Bears, elk, mountain lions…mountain bikers, hikers, ravens…the spot is like Grand Central Station for wildlife. True, the images were edited together, and no doubt there were long periods of a whole lotta nothing going on. But the variety and volume is astounding.

Which leads one to a sense of awe and a glimpse into the notion that what goes on generally out of sight of man is pretty incredible and pretty important. We know there are critters out there, but they’re so often shy and we’ve pushed so many of them off into corners far from the sprawl of our houses and roads that it lets us forget the world is populated by far more beings than ourselves. We know this, but we don’t retain it.

National Park News

Following a fatal bear attack this week on hikers inside Yellowstone National Park, park officials were quick to point out it was the first such attack in 25 years. It happened on Wednesday morning, when a man and his wife about a mile and half in on the Wapiti Lake trail startled a sow and her cubs.

Park officials today released their identities: Fatally wounded was Brian Matayoshi, 57, of Torence, Calif. Also wounded was Marylyn Matayoshi.

It appears from the release put out by YNP that Brian Matayohsi tried to defend himself while his wife ran for help. According to the release, another group of hikers “heard the victim’s wife crying out for help, and used a cell phone to call 911.”

The couple saw the bear twice on their hike, according to Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash. The second time, the bear charged them and the couple ran, according to a press release. “The bear caught up with them, attacking Mr. Matayoshi. The beear then went over to Mrs. Matayoshi, who had fallen to the ground nearby. The bear bit her daypack, lifting her from the ground and then dropping her. She remained still and the bear left the area.”

It does not appear the couple carried bear mace.

New West Feature

It’s too early to tell how much Saturday’s oil spill on the Yellowstone River will ultimately affect aquatic wildlife, Bruce Farling, the executive director for Montana Trout Unlimited, said Tuesday.

The spill took place in “a transitional reach where coldwater species start giving away to cool- and warm-water species,” he said in an e-mail. No federally listed endangered species live within the spill zone, and that section of river is not part of the pristine “blue ribbon” section prized by trout anglers. That’s the good news. But in addition to goldeye, sauger and channel catfish—all native game fish—the area is home to popular non-native sportfish such as rainbow and brown trout, smallmouth bass and walleyes, as well as non-sport species, including minnows, longnose dace and Flathead chub.

More worrisome, the pallid sturgeon, which is endangered, and its relative, the shovelnose sturgeon, are found downstream from Miles City. Should the oil reach that far, it could prove problematic, Farling noted.

WyoFile Feature

The bear went over the mountain — as many kids learn from the popular song — to see what he could see. But the wolf went over the mountain and just kept on going, covering 40,000 square miles in two years.

Pluie, a well-traveled adult, female gray wolf tracked in 1991 by Canadian wildlife officials, was the inspiration for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Conceived in 1993 and formally established in 1997, the joint U.S.-Canada nonprofit group works with local landowners, agencies and organizations across the Northern Rockies to preserve and connect wildlife corridors that are crucial to the migration of key species like grizzly bears, elk and golden eagles.

“You can’t isolate nature from the rest of nature and expect her to survive,” said Harvey Locke, a conservationist and former attorney who founded Yellowstone to Yukon.

“The golden eagles that winter in Wyoming spend their summers in the Canadian Rockies,” Locke said last week during a presentation at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody. His talk also promoted “Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam,” a photography exhibition by Florian Schulz, on display at the BBHC through Aug. 7.

Scientific understanding of the importance of wildlife corridors has been growing over the last 20 years, as new technologies and tracking techniques have allowed biologists to follow groups and individual animals over vast distances, Locke said, who was born in Canada and lives in Boulder, Colo. A more detailed picture of how animals move across the landscape has emerged, along with a stronger appreciation for the importance of key migration corridors.

New West Feature

Last month the U.S. Forest Service granted short-term access to 17 caves in Colorado’s White River National Forest. The move granted access to the caves for the National Speleological Society’s (NSS) annual convention.

Caves in the area—near Glenwood Springs, 150 miles west of Denver—have been closed since last July to prevent the spread of white-nose syndrome, a disease that has decimated bat populations in the eastern United States.

The disease causes a fungus to grow on the wings, nose and ears of infected bats and disrupts normal hibernation. Infected bats arouse too frequently during the winter, which leads to starvation.  Since being discovered in 2006 in New York, scientists have observed the disease in 17 states and four Canadian provinces and estimate it has killed more than a million bats.

But what the short-term permits and blanket cave closures signal are the levels of precaution the poorly understood disease has raised, leaving conservationists and the caving community with different viewpoints on what should be done. 

High Country News Feature

The gigantic Wallow fire now searing Arizona and New Mexico has burned a lot of things, including several thousand acres of habitat for the threatened Mexican spotted owl (not to be confused with its more notorious cousin, the Northern spotted owl, once blamed for the demise of logging in the Northwest).

Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has released a new recovery plan for the raptor. It was federally listed in 1993 and in 2004, FWS designated 8.6 million acres of critical habitat in Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

Its population has continued to decline though, mostly due to habitat loss, despite court rulings upholding the critical habitat designation. But without good on-the-ground management, that designation doesn’t provide much protection from the biggest threat to the species: wildfire.

Guest Column

A brook trout in New England is a vastly different fish from a brook trout in the West. Genetically identical, same spots on its flanks, still heartbreakingly beautiful, but a brookie in the West is a fish out of water, if you will.

That’s because brook trout are native to the East. Saunter up a babbling brook that cascades down through a lush, dense forest in the gentle Green Mountains of Vermont – brook trout country. Slither through some sagebrush alongside a fast-flowing freestone river framed by snow-covered 11,000-foot peaks in June in southwest Montana – not brook trout country.

What happened? Simple: some “bucket biologists” with genuinely good intentions – both government-sponsored and independent – stocked rivers around the country with reckless abandon in the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth.

Those big brown trout in the Yellowstone River? They, like soccer and small bathrooms, are native to Europe. And the fittingly named rainbow trout? Native to the rivers of the Pacific coast.

The thinking was: Trout are good, so more trout must be better.  Rivers were supplemented, fishless streams were amended, and our nation’s waterways would never be the same.

Wildlife Management

On July 14, the commissioners for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks will likely OK a quota of 220 gray wolves for the revival of the much-debated hunt this fall.

In advance of the hunt, FWP sought public comments. Today, the Associated Press released a report on its analysis of those comments.

Not surprisingly, the comments range from extremes, with some advocating trapping and poisoning. The story by Matthew Brown, a Billings-based reporter, includes the e-mailed comments of “Barry from California,” who referred to wolves as “hounds of hell” and said their reintroduction was instigated by subversives bent on “destroying our nation.”

That’s followed by Barbara Laxson of Mansfield, Texas, who decried the “senseless killing of God’s creation.”

“What are you crazies doing up there in the beautiful state of Montana?” Laxson wrote.

New West Feature

Spring flooding in the Rockies is adding a new challenge to an already struggling osprey population, according to a researcher at the University of Montana’s Project Osprey program.

High, murky rivers have been forcing nesting parents to fly as far as 10 to 15 miles away from their nests in search of clearer mountain streams where they can better spot prey, Erick Greene, director of UM’s Environmental Biogeochemistry Laboratory in Missoula, said.

“Some of the nests we’re watching, they’re not bringing in fish,” Greene said. “Maybe once every third or fourth day. Some of these chicks are starving.” Because light bends, it is impossible to spear fish by aiming directly at them, he explained. To catch fish, which comprise about 99 percent of their diets, the birds have to target their dives elsewhere, depending on the position of the sun and angle of their flight. An osprey may plunge anywhere from 30 to 100 feet above the water to snatch a fish.