A young grizzly bear browses a cherry tree on Dakota Avenue in Whitefish, Aug 2016 – by Jan Metzmaker
Remember the grizzly photographed sitting in a cherry tree in Whitefish last year? This spring, still a nuisance, it was captured again and relocated to the Spotted Bear River drainage . . .
A 3-year-old male grizzly bear that had been spotted feeding in yards and pastures near Fortine has been captured and released in the Spotted Bear River drainage.
The bear was captured on May 23 in the Deep Creek drainage and released the next day, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials.
The bear was “very habituated to human activity and being around homes,” according to a press release, and landowners were concerned about how much time the bear was spending around homes. FWP made the decision to capture the bear and relocate it to a more remote location.
Southern Cabinet Mountains, as seen from Swede Mountain, near Libby
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service had a bad day in court when federal judge Donald Malloy overturned their approvals for construction of the Montanore mine at the edge of the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness . . .
In two decisions issued at the end of May, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service violated the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Forest Management Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act when they approved a massive mining operation beneath the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness.
Hecla Mining Company is looking to build the Montanore copper and silver mine on the edge of the wilderness, about 18 miles south of Libby. The mine’s presence would require about 13 miles of paved or expanded roads, 14 miles of electric transmission line, wastewater treatment and holding, and tailings and seepage storage. If constructed, it would process tens of thousands of tons of ore every day.
The mine’s surface operations would be in known grizzly bear and bull trout habitat, and its underground activity would extend beneath the wilderness area, potentially draining millions of gallons of water from the local creeks.
The Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center is pleased to announce its inaugural Waterton-Glacier Mushroom BioBlitz June 9 and 11 at Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks. Visitors will work alongside taxonomic experts to document fungal diversity, and learn more about mushrooms and other fungi in the Crown of the Continent. Participants will use the iNaturalist app to record field observations, and are encouraged to download the app prior to the event.
Glacier National Park’s Mushroom BioBlitz is June 9 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Apgar, St. Mary, and North Fork locations. Participants are not required to stay until 5 pm. The event is free and open to people of all ages and skill levels. Registration is required. Visit https://www.nps.gov/rlc/crown/bioblitz.htm to register. Contact CCRLC at (406)-888-7944 or email Evan Portier at evan_portier@nps.gov for more information.
Waterton Lakes National Park’s Mushroom BioBlitz is June 11 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Contact william.greene@pc.gc.ca for more information. Remember to bring a valid passport if traveling across the border.
Funding and support for the Wateron-Glacier Mushroom BioBlitz is provided by the Glacier National Park Conservancy, Montana Geographic Alliance, Western Montana Mycological Association, and the Alberta Mycological Society.
Rachel Potter, prominent North Forker and NFPA member, passed along the following exciting announcement . . .
Montana’s Pioneer Botanists Book
Dear North Forkers:
I am pleased to announce that Montana’s Pioneer Botanists: Exploring the Mountains and Prairies is now on sale at the Polebridge Merc. It includes essays by Jerry DeSanto, retired Glacier National Park North Fork Ranger. Price: $29.95.
Some of you will remember that after Jerry retired, he wrote biographies for a book to be called Plant Hunters of the Pacific Northwest. Jerry was the perfect contributor to the project. His background in history and knowledge and passion for plants resulted in three wonderful stories on David Lyall (1817-1895), R. S. Williams (1859-1945) and his good friend Klaus Lackschewitz (1911-1995). Jerry did years of research that included travelling to the National Archives in Washington D.C. and spending day after day digging through herbarium specimens in various Pacific Northwest herbaria. This was pre-internet. Notes for a fourth essay on Sereno Watson were in his truck at the Polebridge Ranger Station the winter he got sick.
As the decades went by and the main players aged, it became clear that the Pacific Northwest book was not going to happen. The Montana Native Plant Society (MNPS) decided to publish a book with the original Montana essays and some new ones. My main motivation was seeing Jerry’s essay’s published. The book includes essays by 17 authors on 30 different botanists. Naturally, Jerry’s are among the best, and being rich with detail, comprise a hefty percent of the book. The essays are illustrated with portraits, historic photos and photos of flowers and landscapes (including a handful of Jerry’s), as well as old and new botanical artwork.
There is more about the book at: www.mtnativeplants.org. We are updating purchasing info and adding reviews and more, so check back periodically.
Sound level map of continental US – In general, the brighter the spot, the greater the sound intensity – National Park Service
This article from NPR really puts efforts like the Glacier Park “quiet skies” initiative in context . . .
There are thousands of parks, refuges and wilderness areas in the U.S. that are kept in something close to their natural state. But one form of pollution isn’t respecting those boundaries: man-made noise. New research based on recordings from 492 protected natural areas reveals that they’re awash in noise pollution.
Researchers from Colorado State University spent years making the recordings by setting out microphones in natural areas across the country. They caught all sorts of wildlife sounds, such as rutting elk and howling wolves. But they were also after “background” sound — wind, rain, birdsong, flowing streams and rivers, even bubbling mudpots in Yellowstone National Park.
They compared the decibel level of this natural background with the intrusive noisiness from human activity. And they have discovered that in two-thirds of the places they studied, the median decibel level of man-made sound was double the normal background sound. These were sounds that came from within the area, such as road traffic, as well from as outside, such as passing jets or mining and logging equipment.
This is pretty darn cool, not to mention handy . . .
NPMaps.com is an independent website and is not affiliated with the National Park Service. This is just a one-man project that gets worked on whenever said guy actually has some free time. It’s hard work!
The Hungry Horse News has pretty good coverage of last week’s meeting of Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem grizzly bear managers . . .
At the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem meeting last week, agencies gathered to provide updates on their fall projects of the predominantly bear-ish kind.
The NCDE is a subcommittee of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, which promotes grizzly bear population recovery across habitats and national borders.
U.S. Geological Survey scientist Tabitha Graves from the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center talked about the bear population trend project she’s been working on.
Short version: There’s no money right now to pay for Endangered Species Act protection for whitebark pine . . .
An appeals court has ruled that U.S. government officials don’t have to take immediate action to protect a pine tree that is a source of food for threatened grizzly bears.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in its order Friday that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s ability to protect species through the federal Endangered Species Act is limited by “practical realities,” such as scarce funds and limited staff.
The whitebark pine is in decline amid threats of disease, the mountain pine beetle, wildfire and climate change.
Milky Way over Logan Pass in Glacier National Park – NPS, Jacob W. Frank
Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park was just named the first trans-boundary International Dark Sky Park. Below is the lead-in from the Flathead Beacon’s article on the subject, but also check out the links following it for some spectacular photos . . .
Eighty percent of the United States’ population lives in an area where they can’t see a true dark sky. Around the globe, thanks to light pollution, only one-third of humanity can look up at the sky at night and clearly see the Milky Way.
For Glacier National Park interpretive ranger Lee Rademaker, that means every time the park prepares to host a night sky viewing, “we’re about to blow two-thirds of these people’s minds.”
For years, Glacier and nearby Waterton Lake National Park have been touting their dark night sky as another critical natural resource, just as important as glaciers or goats. On April 28, officials from the United States and Canada gathered at West Glacier to celebrate Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park being named the first trans-boundary International Dark Sky Park.
Canyons of the Ancients National Monument – Bob Wick, BLM
NPR has an impressive photo spread of the national monuments under review by the Trump administration . . .
President Trump has ordered the Department of the Interior to review all designations of national monuments greater than 100,000 acres created since 1996.
That executive order, which he signed Wednesday [April 26], places at least 20 — and as many as 40 — monuments in the government’s sights. The areas now under review span a vast range of landscapes — from arid deserts to frozen mountain peaks, from striking craggy vistas to teeming underwater playgrounds.
And, though these monuments were all established roughly in the past two decades, they all have a history more than a century long. That’s because all of them owe their existence to the 1906 Antiquities Act, a law signed by President Theodore Roosevelt that makes it a federal crime to destroy or alter ancient artifacts and ruins on federal land.
