High Country News Feature

When the first winter storms buried northeast Montana last November, the thousands of pronghorn antelope that spent the summer around the state’s border with Alberta and Saskatchewan started making their way south. Normally, they move into the north side of the state’s Milk River valley and find enough sagebrush sticking out of the snow to forage through the winter, but this year, the snow was too deep, so they kept pushing on.

“Winter came a month earlier and stayed a month longer. We had historical snow at 9 feet deep,” says Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologist Kelvin Johnson who, in late November and December, watched groups of 200 to 400 antelope walking south in single file. They crossed Highway 2 along the Milk River and followed Rock Creek and Larb Creek, eventually reaching the north shore of frozen and snow-covered Fort Peck Reservoir on the Missouri River, in northeastern Montana. Johnson saw “herds of great size going across the lake.”

Pronghorn antelope are experts at survival. The only ungulate endemic to North America (meaning they evolved here and nowhere else), they’re also the only remaining species in their family. They’ve lived on this continent for 20 million years, about 19.99 million years longer than humans. They shared the plains with American cheetahs and enormous dire wolves, now extinct, plus millions of bison that used to surge over the land. They watched the Teton Range rise up out of the Snake River plain and they weathered ice ages.

Guest Column

In December 2009, the Bureau of Land Management began rounding up and transporting wild horses off of a tract of federal land in Nevada. The herd population had reached three times the maximum acceptable management level for the area. The animals were herded by helicopter into pens and then trucked off the range, to be wild no more.

Called the Calico Gather, it was the largest such roundup to date under the Obama administration and it generated a fair amount of attention. The gather illustrates the paradox of land and species management in the United States because, depending on your point of view, horses in North America are either part of our national heritage, an invasive species or a much-needed addition to this continent’s ecology.

The wild herds and the public rangelands that support them are managed by the BLM. Such management includes, if necessary, the removal of what federal law calls “excess animals.” Under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, the BLM has authority over the herds of horses and burros, collectively known as wild equids, on public land in 10 Western states. The animals are descendants of stock brought to this continent around 500 years ago by Spanish conquistadors. Though not native, animal rights activists earned the horses federal protection.

National Park News

For more than a decade the debate over how winter in Yellowstone National Park should be enjoyed has dragged on.

The National Park Service has gone back and forth with the political winds, calling back in 2000 for recreational snowmobile use to be phased out completely only to see the Bush administration drop that decision in favor of continued snowmobile use.

Legal battles waged by those who want continued snowmobile use and those who believe Yellowstone would be healthier without snowmobiles have prolonged the debate and led to a fistful of environmental studies—environmental assessments as well as more complex and detailed environmental impact statements.

The latest comment period on the park’s proposal for winter-use comes to an end next month. Encompassing nearly 550 pages, this Draft Environmental Impact Statement on winter-use is a massive, complex document, one that challenges the lay person as well as the studied expert to be conversant on all its nuances.

Along with technically exploring how best to move about the snowbound park, examining the impacts of snowmobiles and snowcoaches as well as looking at whether plowing of roads for wheeled traffic would be feasible, the study raises questions about the role of national parks, how best to conserve and preserve their resources and how society views the parks.

Here are some numbers to keep in mind when studying this issue.

High Country News Feature

Last January, three endangered California condors were found dead in Arizona. The cause of death: lead poisoning. After eating carrion riddled with spent lead ammunition, the birds’ digestive systems likely shut down, starving them to death. Since condor reintroduction began in Arizona in 1996, 15 have died of lead poisoning; in California, 18 condors have bit the bullet. After 25 years spent trying to recover the condor from near-extinction, the birds remain imperiled by lead in their scavenged prey. Despite growing concerns about health effects on both humans and wildlife, however, lead ammunition still flies widely unregulated across the West.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-MT, wants to keep it that way. With a bill introduced last month, Tester hopes to amend the Toxic Substances Control Act to permanently exempt lead bullets, shot and fishing tackle from regulation. 

From the Panhandle

Devoted readers will recall a post a few months ago about an inordinate local interest in wolverines, sparked by a study of forest carnivores—many of them members of the Mustelid family—being made by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. Last week, two IDFG biologists, Lacy Robinson and Michael Lucid, presented the findings from this study at the East Bonner County Library.

Members of the Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness hosted the presentation. These individuals have a penchant for human-powered travel in their proposed wilderness, which, as it turns out, was included in the area IDFG wanted to study and was not accessible by snowmobile. Hence they were recruited to ski/snowshoe into a study site, and they enthusiastically assisted Robinson and Lucid—whom they thought of as “Mr. and Mrs. Mustelid,” in setting it up to capture the elusive carnivores on camera.

New West Feature

The elk of Rocky Mountain National Park are wildlife’s couch potatoes. Rather than roam widely throughout the 415-square-mile park and the land outside it, they are content to laze around in meadows, eating, sleeping and mating.

With no predators, they can afford to be slackers. Many of them saunter into the tourist town of Estes Park outside the eastern entrance. There, they mosey along city streets and loiter on golf courses.

Their inertia has created problems in the park, however. Aspen and willow stands are denuded where the elk do much of their grazing. That habitat is vital to a variety of birds and butterflies, park officials say. The damage has also driven out most of the beavers that once populated the area, which in turn has caused a nearly 70-percent decline in surface water that helps nourish the very habitat being damaged.

After years of debate, Rocky Mountain National Park decided on a solution: Kill a portion of the voracious ungulates. It’s not an image coveted by the National Park Service – sharpshooters picking off the park’s most iconic creatures. The killing is done at dawn in winter with rifles equipped with sound suppressors.

Adventure Journal Feature

Anybody who’s spent much time tromping around uncivilized places — i.e. hikers, climbers, mountain bikers, and pretty much anyone reading this site — has come across bones and skulls. PETA members and soccer moms might find this disturbing, to others it might be rad, but there’s no denying that it’s wild out there and critters are dying all over the place. Now it turns out their skulls, and whatever other bits they leave behind, still have something to say.

Biologist Joshua Miller of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, has spent the last few years combing the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park looking at over 20,000 bones for clues to the region’s ecological past. Humans have drastically impacted wildlife populations in recent centuries, but wildlife biologists have only been paying close attention for a few decades, so when Yellowstone wildlife managers talk about maintaining native species at pre-European settlement numbers, a commonly cited goal, they need some way to know what the heck those numbers were.

Enter Miller and his park survey. By studiously documenting what scientists call “death assemblages,” he says he has been able to “extend our ability to document long-term changes in ecological communities.” In other words, he can see what animals used to live in the park, what ones didn’t and make good guesses about how many there were by the number of bones, er, “death assemblages” he found.

New West Feature

Some bad smells in Superior, Colorado, are having some positive effects on the wildlife this winter and spring. The town has been using ammonia-soaked tennis balls to haze coyotes away from more populated areas.

“They don’t hurt the coyotes,” said Alan McBeath, the Town of Superior’s Parks and Recreation Open Space Director, who got the idea for using ammonia-soaked tennis balls to haze other wild animals like raccoons and rodents from the Colorado Division of Wildlife and began using them on coyotes last year. “It’s just to get them to move from really heavily populated areas like playgrounds and trailheads.”

Humans and coyotes have always had some conflicts in the Front Range because they live near one another, said Jennifer Churchill, spokesperson for the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Northeast region. But there’s been an uptick in incidents involving coyotes biting people since 2008 and it’s unclear why.

New West Film

Years from now, when the official American Prairie Reserve stretches 3 million acres, Ken Burns’ team may show up, as they did in the National Parks, to tell the story of who made it happen and how.

But right now the story of protecting the grasslands largely contained in Montana and traveled by Lewis and Clark is still in progress. What “The American Serengeti,” a new National Geographic film screening this weekend at the 34th International Wildlife Film Festival, makes clear is that there is a lot of work to be done before this ambitious, possibly unrealistic, dream can become real.

An unfinished story, of course, is still worth telling and this one doesn’t need Ken Burns when it has writer/producer and NatGeo veteran, Andy Mitchell. Mitchell’s film, the winner of the IWFF’s Best Made in Montana award, will be shown in Missoula’s Roxy Theater Saturday at 3 p.m. 

New West Feature

The recently concluded legislative session will likely and significantly alter the way Montana manages its population of bison.

Senate Bill 212 and Senate Bill 207 both add regulations for how bison are handled in the state. Gov. Brian Schweitzer sent the bills back to the legislature for amendments and they now await his final approval. The bison-related bills this session were prompted by the long-debated fate of the wild herd in and around Yellowstone National Park. Advocates of the regulations say the bills are necessary as a means to control the spread of brucellosis. Opponents say it’s unnecessary catering to the cattle industry.

Of the bills that passed, bison activists are most concerned about Senate Bill 212, which adds rules to Fish, Wildife and Parks’ management of bison. The new law requires state officials monitor, tag and, if necessary, fence any wild bison that are transported or move into the state. It’s a step backward for people who’d hoped for less regulation on bison, explained Darrell Geist, a habitat coordinator with the activist group the Buffalo Field Campaign.

Senate Bill 212 officially defines bison as a “species in need of management.” While several groups, including FWP and the Montana Department of Livestock, have already operated under that assumption and in accordance with the Interagency Bison Management Plan since 2000, this new legislation essentially gives that plan force of law, said Geist.