Along Montana's Rocky Mountain Front
July Blog
This month: The Nature Conservancy's
Pine Butte Swamp Preserve
outside of Choteau
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July
News:
From the 7/22/08 Missoulian: Trapper gives up on catching sheep-killing bears A government trapper says he did all he can to catch one and possibly two grizzly bears, suspected of killing 71 sheep in three separate attacks south of Choteau. Mike Hoggan of Valier is a trapper with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services. He has removed two foot snares that he previously set for the bears at one of the two sites where sheep were attacked. Both are along the Teton River, a mile south of Choteau. Snaring the one bear might have had the effect of averse conditioning on him. Would have been great to see that bear on its back, working at the snare with his other paw and finally getting loose while the tranquilizer was being loaded. Smart bear. From the 7/18/08 Choteau Acantha: Grizzlies kill 71 sheep south of Choteau; USDA trapper sets snares on two ranches At least one and possibly two subadult grizzly bears have killed an estimated 71 sheep on two ranches southeast of Choteau since June 13, state and federal wildlife officials said on Monday. Zane Drishinski said he was still thinking about an (electric fence), but needed more specifics from officials before deciding whether he could afford to do that. Even if a bedding ground were established, Drishinski, who lives 12 miles north of Conrad wasn’t sure that it would pencil out financially for him to make two round trips a day of about 84 miles total to let the sheep in and out of the grounds. The biggest problems in recent years with livestock along the Front have involved sheep. I think the days are over for sheep ranching on the Front. Few ranchers run sheep anymore, and there's little money to be made with them, between the work involved to keep them safe and the market for them. From the 7/05/08 Daily Inter Lake: Crews battle elements to collar grizzly bears Since the end of April, about 30 grizzly bears have been captured for management and research purposes across the sprawling Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. Ten of the captured bears have been fitted with radio or satellite tracking collars. Researchers are trying to determine whether the grizzly bear population is stable, growing or declining. News update on the ongoing NCDE population trend study, which includes the Front. Evidently it's been a tough year to get started due to the late spring. Still no word on when the final results of the NCDE population study will be released. From the 7/07/08 Missoulian: 830-pound grizzly on display in Lincoln
The mount of an 830-pound male grizzly bear struck and killed by a pickup truck near Lincoln last fall will be on display at the ranger district office alongside an educational display on bear identification, safety and conservation. From the 7/01/08 Helena IR: Conservation deal will protect 300,000 acres Some of the most prized land in the northern Rocky Mountains is being protected from development in a conservation land deal hailed as the largest of its kind in U.S. history. This isn't on the Front but it is an important deal that is happening state wide for bears and wildlife habitat. There is still much Plum Creek land in Montana at stake in terms of being sold as real estate and in terms of exisiting access under Forest Service agreements with Plum Creek that seem destined to be settled in court. The Missoulian did an Op-ed piece on 7/01/08 - Trusting a closed-door deal: If Plum Creek, Forest Service are striking a good bargain for Montana, why keep it secret? - that is a good introduction to the subject. Find other articles on Plum Creek with a Missoulian archive search
Last month's news, but more pertinent for this month's blog. From the 6/23/08 Wall Street Journal: Face-to-Face With the Grizzly Tours to view bears up close in the wilderness of British Columbia are on the rise The story is hyped, but is an indication of the growing market for bear watching and how protective and defensive guides and companies can be. Let's hope they also take into consideration the bears. Pine Butte is one of the bear watching areas in Montana outside of the relatively high density bear and tourist areas of Yellowstone and Glacier, neither has dense as coastal areas or Alaska or parts of Canada. It's not guaranteed you'll see grizzlies at Pine Butte, but many of the classes do see bears; sometimes lots of them. It depends on luck, and how hard or easy the spring is and as a result how early or late the bears are out. The Nature Conservancy maintains some of the best bear habitat on the Front at their Pine Butte Swamp Preserve, west of Choteau. There's a guest ranch there, too, called the Pine Butte Guest Ranch, and you can stay and take many different field classes. A few years back I went along for the last day of the week-long May grizzly bear class. Dr. Charles "Chuck" Jonkel of the Great Bear Foundation has been teaching a spring class and a fall class in September for the last 18 years, many of those with long time naturalist and photographer Ralph Waldt. The classes are popular and that May, Chuck's class drew participants from California, Tennessee, Belgium, Germany, Illinois, and New York City. Eric Bergman is one of the naturalists at Pine Butte who teaches classes and he was generous to let me tag along for the day on a hike in the Blackleaf Creek bottomlands. A native of Great Falls, he covers the bases in his classes in terms of bear biology and the natural and social history of the Front. Eric said the they had been lucky this week: on the morning of first day of the class they hiked up Pine Butte, the two crested hill in the midst of the preserve, and in the fen below watched two grizzlies engaged in courtship, playing and splashing in the water, before secreting off in the willows to bed down. Seeing bears in the middle of the day is rare, and seeing mating behavior is even more lucky. As we drove north to Blackleaf area, Eric slowed the van and pointed out to the class a flight of five big white pelicans. The huge birds circled high above, and they winked out in the blue sky as they turned head and tail towards us, reappearing twice each orbit, their black tipped nine foot wingspans drifting them east. We parked and dropped down from a bench into the wide bottom lands of Blackleaf Creek and walked to a beaver dam through bunchgrass and wild flowers. Carolina Warblers "warbled" and Flickers screeched as Eric, Jean - also a naturalist and class guide - and Chuck talked about how beavers engineer new habitat. Over the life span of a dam, beaver ponds fill with silt, creeks change course seeking the easiest way downhill, and the beavers go to work again. Rich bottom land builds up and is home for aspen, hundreds of species of grasses and flowers, buffalo berry and limber pine and all the animals which make up the ecosystem of the Front, from field mice to elk, bear to bright sulfers fluttering around the mud. "Change is the rule rather than the exception," Eric maintained to the class, pointing out old creek channels and beaver dams that had appeared since last year. "And the details tell the story." We threaded through a thick aspen grove, happy for the shade because the day was already hot; someone had heard it might hit 95 degrees in the afternoon, way too hot for May. While the mountain snowpack was over 100% for the spring, it might not last long.
We found bear claw marks on tree trunks, long rips in bark, some healed over, some fresher, and old scats in the faint trail, dried out and falling away into dust. Even with the luck of the first morning of class, there wasn't much of a chance to see a grizzly out in the heat of this day and in the thick brush, but seeing sign - tracks, scats, tree rubs - was good enough to prove they were here. Back up on the bench land we followed a rough two track road, and Chuck told a story from his 45 years of experience working with bears. Years ago in the Arctic, he once had to swim an ice cold melt pond to save two polar bear cubs from drowning. The tranquilizer darts hadn't worked fast enough, and the cubs made a run for it and tried to swim and get away. Chuck said the worst - or funniest - part was while he was nearly drowning trying to drag the cubs to shore, his graduate student and a helicopter pilot watched the whole thing, keeping their boots dry on land. Chuck stopped and pointed down. There were two palm-like impressions in the ground just a foot apart: one was bare dirt and must have been from this spring, and the other just starting to fill in with grass and juniper, from last year. The same cantaloupe sized rock rolled two years in a row by a bear, looking for ants and grubs. If we came back next year, we might find it moved again, he said. A few more steps and Chuck tapped his toe at a yellow flower. "What's this? It goes with bacon and eggs and..." We dropped back down into the creek bottom and broke for lunch in the grass and aspen shade near a small log cabin. In a clearing surrounded by aspen groves and, to the west the peaks of the Front, the cabin is rented out from time to time by ranchers. It must be a great place to see grizzlies walk by your front window. Farther north in a hayfield, we looked at some diggings; something was after alfalfa roots, but from the shallow depth and the lack of scat, Chuck wasn't convinced they were bear. The Nature Conservancy has a conservation easement on this field, Eric said, so the ranchers can still use it for growing hay and running some cattle while the conservancy has the assurance the land won't be further developed or overgrazed. Easements are one of their primary conservation tools; sometimes it takes years to piece together an agreement that all sides are happy with. Easements have been growing in popularity across the west as tool to conserve land while keeping ranch land in families. We weaved around aspen groves, the tree tops all leaning to the east with the direction of the prevailing wind, with smaller off shoot trees leading the growth of the grove eastward, too. More beaver dams, and an amazing underground water passage dug away from the creek so the beavers could move in safety out to harvest aspen. Trout fingerlings drifted in the shadows, frogs launched into the water. Eric said he had saved the best place to see tracks for the walk back to the van. "The bears almost always oblige us right around here," Eric said, "By leaving tracks." And they had. In a low area where two aspen groves had drawn together, there was a seep of water and mud across the trail. The shaded passage was a natural travel path between the groves, where bears could travel in the cover of trees. And there were bear tracks. We all gathered around to figure out the story. It looked like there were two sets of tracks, going opposite ways. One bear had slid sideways in the mud from his or her weight, and it looked like the other had skirted around closer to the trees. The tracks were a good five inches wide and nearly twice that in length. There were deer tracks, and cow tracks, too, but no one took photos of those. All I had was my wide angle lens, having forgot my 50mm, and I couldn't get a good close-up. "This was the area where the 1000 pound grizzly was trapped three years ago," Chuck said. "Did they let it go?" someone asked. "Of course," Chuck said. "He wasn't in trouble. The biologists were trying to snare another grizzly." "That's a big bear," someone else said. "Biggest trapped in the lower 48." And there's been no indication the bear - number 175 - isn't still around the Front, digging for ground squirrels and biscuitroot, grazing on early forbs and looking for winter killed elk in the spring, keeping his head down in the aspen groves when he hears or scents humans. But that's what bears do on the Front - for the most part, they live their secretive lives between the wilderness in the last place they can wander wind creek bottoms that lead out to the prairie. June: Baker Massacre ≈ July ≈ August: Living in bear country and trailing cattle If you like what you have read, consider a tax-deductible contribution to me
for grocery money for a 50 pound bag of food and some rawhide bones for Blue, because she needs to eat, too....
Hoggan says the bears may have moved on and he doesn't plan to set any additional snares. The bear or bears remain on the loose, but Hoggan says there have been no complaints about sheep kills since July 9.
Snares have been set on both ranches but as of Monday nothing had been caught and wildlife officials were putting out the word that anyone recreating along the Teton River should be aware of the bears’ presence.
The bear or bears killed 65 head of ewes and lambs owned by Zane Drishinski and six head owned by Bill and Betty Jo Miller in pastures along the Teton River about a mile south of Choteau on the east side of U.S. Highway 89, Madel said.
“This year has been exceedingly difficult,” said Tonya Chilton, research assistant with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Chilton explained that collars have a release mechanism timed to drop after two years, and this year there was a sense of urgency to get in the field as early as possible because nine collars are scheduled to drop. But the weather didn’t cooperate. “We had snow a month to a month-and-a-half later than we anticipated,” Chilton said.
The study — led by research biologist Rick Mace of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks — mainly involves monitoring female grizzly bears for births and mortalities. But for statistically valid trend information, the study requires a minimum number of 25 collared bears annually for at least 10 years.
The 12-year-old bear was killed by a truck in October 2007 near Lincoln. Shortly after the accident, area residents, including schoolchildren from Lincoln, Ovando and Seeley Lake, began writing letters and voicing support for the bear to be displayed in Lincoln where it spent the last years of its life.
More than 300,000 acres of critical habitat for threatened and endangered animals, including grizzly bears and lynx, will be transferred to public ownership in a $500 million deal with Plum Creek Timber. A ceremony was held Monday in Kalispell to sign the agreement.
No matter how scary it may look, our guide tells us, if a grizzly bear gets close, don't run. As we spot our first bear tracks in the mud later that evening, it's clear that we're in bear country now -- and there isn't much to run to.
We'll spend the next few nights in one of the most remote corners of the vast wilderness of British Columbia, a 40-minute seaplane ride from the nearest fishing village at a bear-viewing lodge built on a barge. In the mornings, we'll rise early to look for the bears, trekking through grassy marshes and boating along shallow inlets in one of the few places where grizzlies still outnumber humans. Our guide is an unarmed biologist.
"Biscuit root," someone said.
"Right."
"What's it for?" Chuck asked.
"Bear food."
