Fall 2019 Newsletter

The Confluence FALL 2019

From The Director

Crisp air. Falling leaves. Tree branches bare, silhouetted black against the sky. Darkness creeps into the daylight quickly in the evening and lingers into the morning. Brooding grey clouds hang low.

Chilly winds blow. The last brown bats flutter overhead. Your own footsteps in the forest sound loud against the eerie silence of autumn. As All Hallows Eve approaches, it seems a spooky, scary time of year with danger lurking in the long shadows and around every corner.

This issue of The Confluence is contrary to our usual theme. Ordinarily, we celebrate our programs, students, wildlife, and all the parts of this place that we all love. This time, we’re going along with a Halloween-inspired theme for our autumn issue…it may give you a fright!

Ghost forests. Alien invaders.

Cursed fish. Sound scary? In these pages you’ll read about some of the issues we face in the Swan, including the decline of whitebark pine and why that matters, the issues of wildlife and humans living closely together, the overabundance of non-native grasses and why that’s a problem, the threats that come from fragmented lands, and more.

You’ll also read about hope in these pages. Hope for the future. Hope for what we may do together. Hope for our local landscape and the ripple effects that good can have on the world. You’ll see how your generous donations are being put to work here in the Swan Valley, and how investing in our programs is investing in the future, as we teach our college students in the last best classroom.

These are scary times worldwide. Climate change is real and evident. Mammals, birds, fish, and insects are changing behaviors. Non-native invasive plants, insects, fish, and other animals are overtaking habitats. Glaciers are melting. Soils are drying. Forest and grass fires are larger and lasting longer. We all have something to fear, and the flames of fear are continually fanned by rhetoric and sound bites.

Author and businessman Arnold Glasow reflected our autumnal theme saying, “Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.” And author James Stephens said, “Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.” At Swan Valley Connections, we aim to dispel ignorance and inspire curiosity by providing information and opportunities for all to learn from experts, each other, and the land itself.

As one of the last truly wild places in the lower 48, the Swan Valley is a fragile environment home to rare plants, fish, birds, wildlife, and humans. All the species here are simultaneously sensitive and resilient, delicate and adaptable. We have so much to learn here.

This season of change doesn’t have to be a scary collective nightmare; instead, let‘s work together on making our dreams come true.

Sincerely,

Swan Valley Connections 6887 MT Highway 83 Condon, MT 59826 p: (406) 754-3137 f: (406) 754-2965 info@svconnections.org

Board Members Barbara Hill Raible, Chair Helene Michael, Vice Chair Alex Metcalf, Treasurer Larry Garlick Pam Hamilton Casey Ryan Mark Schiltz Mary Shaw Rich Thomason Scott Tomson

Emeritus Russ Abolt Anne Dahl Steve Ellis Neil Meyer

Advisory Board Kvande Anderson Jim Burchfield Andrea Stephens Mark Vander Meer

Staff Rebecca Ramsey, Executive Director Jonathan Bowler Laura Cannon Andrea DiNino Leanna Grubaugh Luke Lamar Mike Mayernik Rob Rich Uwe Schaefer Lindsay Wancour The Confluence is published by Swan Valley Connections, a non-profit organization situated in Montana’s scenic Swan Valley.

Our mission is to conserve the intact ecosystems within and surrounding the Swan Valley and to strengthen the connection between people and the natural world through collaboration and experiential learning. Images by Swan Valley Connections’ staff, students, or volunteers unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved to Swan Valley Connections.

Change service requested.

SwanValleyConnections.org

Rebecca Ramsey, Executive Director

Cover Image: In the Clouds on Napa Point Trail

by Andrea DiNino

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A Gift that will Continue to Give As a nonprofit organization, our success is a reflection of your success.

Your generous donations provide opportunities for: • Research and monitoring, so our state and federal agencies who are responsible for land, water, and animals can make better policy and management decisions • Land and resource stewardship advice, products, and management assistance for private landowners, and providing jobs for local contractors • Assistance for living better with wildlife, while keeping people and animals safe • Educational experiences for people of all ages • Getting partners in the same room to share information and come up with solutions to problems affecting us all • Generating volunteer activities that provide direct benefits to our community, landscape, and our organization • Visitor services, including information on cultural and natural history of the area, where and how to take it all in, and how to stay safe outdoors

Just as the earth’s climate is changing, so is the funding climate for nonprofits. Gone are the days of generous contributions from our state and federal partners to help do work on the ground, in research, or with outreach efforts. State and federal funding programs have been on a steady decline. They are increasingly reliant on nonprofits like ours to help provide services and funding to accomplish conservation and community conversations across our state.

SVC is seeking your continued support today. We are so fortunate that two generous donors have offered to match your gift dollar for dollar up to $30,000 if you have never given before, or if you give again by the end of November. Can you help us get to our goal by November 30th?

In addition to grants, government agreements, and donations, we do our best to generate revenue through our college courses and educational programs, such as our Master Naturalist certification course. We sell maps, books, SVC logo gear, and local artisan work at our office. We also make a steady stream of money throughout the year from the Swan Valley Montana license plate featuring the Gulo gulo (wolverine). Money from these sales goes right back into relevant programs, including rare carnivore monitoring, which is so important for this threatened species. We were recently informed that in the last legislative session, a law was created which states that all specialty license plate holders must maintain at least 400 registered plates or the plate will be revoked. There are currently 324 Swan Valley license plates registered in Montana. We must have 76 more plates registered before the end of 2019 in order to keep our beloved plate and the approximate $5,000 in annual revenue it brings in. Please consider registering your vehicle today with a Swan Valley plate, no matter where you live in our state! If your registration renewal isn’t yet due, you can still go to your county treasurer’s office at any time to switch your plate. The initial cost for the plate is $40, and $20 annually after, although obtaining a permanent plate for vehicles 10+ years old have only a one time fee. This is an easy and inexpensive way to add to your support.

You may also visit the Giving page on our website to see other ways to give, all in order to keep the Swan Valley wild and special, and the people who visit it welcomed and informed. You may now give monthly, annually, or leave a legacy after you’re gone. www.swanvalleyconnections.org/giving Whether you’re a visitor, an alumni, neighbor, partner, or resident, THANK YOU for caring for this incredible place and all who live within it! And thank you for helping us to navigate these financially frightening times in the nonprofit world.

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Live Up To Our Name

By Rob Rich

Say it’s the year 1808. The aspens and cottonwoods are just turning gold. The sun has been up for a few hours, and as the warming air burns off the dense valley mist, the smell of field mint goes wafting. A dragonfly sallies out from a willow, then zips back to the same branch. A Columbia spotted frog makes a gentle plop. Sedges whoosh in a light breeze, and through them, in open water, two trumpeter swans coo in nasal tones, nudging a younger one into flight. Then it suddenly feels cold on your feet, and as you look down, you see the tussock you stand on has slightly submerged in your quest for a better view.

You start to move to drier ground, then all of a sudden there’s a surprising SLAAAP from the tail of the habitat’s maker.

Such a wetland would have looked pretty enticing if you were a fur trader on the heels of Lewis and Clark, and not just because it was beautiful. At the time, the real value seen in a wetland was in the beaver pelts it could offer, and, once the industrious rodents were removed, in the pasture or arable land it could promise. Although wetlands were buggy, fickle, and, well…wet, few homesteaders would have passed up flat swath of land that beavers and floodwater had cleared. The soil would have looked moist and composted enough, and such sites spared time otherwise spent felling trees with crosscut saws and excavating roots with fire and oxen. In this way, wetlands became easy targets for conversion, first by the fur traders, and later by the homesteaders who proved up their land through having it ditched, diked, and drained.

In this the Swan Valley is not unique. Across the contiguous United States, wetland cover shrank by 53 percent, from 221 million acres in 1780s to 104 million acres in the 1980s. By the time the environmental movement formalized with federal legislation in the 1970s, people were starting to appreciate the ecosystem services that wetlands provide in filtering pollutants, buffering floods or fires, recharging groundwater, storing carbon, and providing rockstar habitats for diverse plants and animals. This wetland revaluation culminated in President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 “no net loss” policy, which aimed to prevent the destruction or degradation of converted wetlands, with mitigation efforts that restore or create new wetlands if necessary. To date the policy has found success through both non-regulatory conservation incentive programs (like the Wetland Reserve Program) and regulatory protections under the Clean Water Act. But as we continue to struggle to define which wetlands need protection (and how to prioritize them), the policy is not perfect.

Meanwhile, the pressure of habitat fragmentation marches on, and SVC cannot wait solely for policies to give wetlands the respect they deserve. Here in the Swan Valley, we’re lucky to have 16 percent of our acres covered in surface water (compared to a mere one percent statewide), and as climate change makes Montana warmer and drier, this gift demands responsibility. We even host the state’s only population of water howellia, a Threatened plant listed on the Endangered Species

Early homesteaders also thought that reed canary grass, a robust pasture plant that many remembered from Europe, would establish well in the drained but still-moist wetlands. Unfortunately, they were right. Spreading by persistent seeds and tenacious, horizontal stems (called rhizomes) reed canary grass has outcompeted native plants ever since, forming insanely tall, dense monocultural mats wherever it is not entirely shaded or flooded out.

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Above left: Landscape & Livelihood 2019 is not afraid to get their feet wet and explore the complexities of wetland ecology and conservation. Above right: While wetlands occur on only 2 percent of land throughout the Intermountain West, they host 80 percent of its biodiversity. And here in Montana, 60 percent of our state’s Species of Concern rely on wetlands and riparian areas for one or more life history stages. One of them is this western toad, found by Randy Wilson during a 2018 amphibian survey of Swan Valley wetlands voluntarily protected under conservation easements with the Montana Land Reliance. Without wetlands to lay their long, necklace-like strands of eggs, the western toad will not endure.

Act that thrives in the vernal pools that form in the Swan Valley each spring. And we have many more kinds of wetlands, too: “pothole wetlands” pocked by glaciers, woody swamps made by beavers, off-channel and oxbow wetlands along the river, marshes, wet meadows, and even fens (which are unique for being groundwater-fed, highly alkaline habitats).

To protect these local wonders, we use non-regulatory programs and support from the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners Program to help advance wetland restoration on private land with willing landowners. From plugging ditches that restore functional hydrology to coordinating solutions for coexistence with beavers, SVC is committed to helping landowners affirm that wetlands provide a greater dollar per acre benefit in public goods and services than habitat. After all, the Swan Valley may not sport the state’s highest peak or the longest river or the biggest lake, but the density and diversity of

our wetlands are something we can uniquely be proud of. It’s easy to take them for granted, kind of like our valley’s name, which originated back when trumpeter swans gathered at Swan Lake. Due in part to wetland loss, there hasn’t been a nesting swan there or elsewhere in the valley since at least the mid-20th century. But guess what? This year, for the time in decades, a pair of swans nested on a wetland near Holland Lake. And they had a cygnet, almost as if to remind us how precious and promising our wetlands can be.

Below: By plugging a drained wetland in just the right place, functional wetland hydrology can be restored. Here is a sequence from before (spring 2017, left) and after (spring 2018, right) the restoration of a wetland on private land. While they haven’t nested here…yet…trumpeter swans have visited this wetland on migration for the first time in years.

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Whitebark Pine Ghost Forest

By Luke Lamar

Anyone who has spent time wandering the high elevation forests of the Mission Mountains and Swan Range, as well as other mountain ranges across the West, has undoubtedly observed dramatic changes at or just below timberline.

Historically, vast swaths of whitebark pine trees thrived in the high country. These trees play a critical role in high elevation forests, and with help from the Clark’s Nutcracker, actually build ecosystems.

Whitebark pine cones do not open far enough to let the big, heavy seeds fall out, and if left undisturbed, they won’t be shed from the tree until the following summer when they are no longer viable. This seems like a poor reproductive and dispersal strategy for a tree species, which is where the Clark’s Nutcracker enters the picture. Nutcrackers start to feed on whitebark pine seeds in late summer and shred the tough cones with their chisel-like bills to remove the seeds. Some are eaten immediately, while others (up to 80 seeds) are tucked in a pouch under the bird’s tongue and flown to different sites where they are cached under the soil for later consumption. Not all seeds are retrieved, resulting in whitebark pine regeneration. Through this display of mutualism, the whitebark pine is dispersed across the landscape.

Many seeds are cached in open areas near timberline, on sites not suitable for other tree species, or in burned forests.

Once germinated, a tree eventually sprouts, which creates a microclimate for other shade-loving trees like Engelmann spruce and sub-alpine fir to establish themselves, ultimately forming continuous forests that offer habitat for a wide variety of animals. Eventually, these forests would restart the cycle after being burned in a wildfire.

Whitebark pine seeds are highly nutritious and are comprised of roughly 51% fat, 21% carbohydrates, and 21% protein. These nourishing seeds are enjoyed by more than just Clark’s Nutcrackers. Squirrels often cut whitebark pine cones and cache them under debris on the forest floor. These caches, or middens, are often raided by bears who seek out the highenergy food source as well. Because the whitebark pine seeds are high in fat, they are a valuable meal for bears during autumn, as they try to bulk up in preparation for hibernation.

Unfortunately, whitebark pine forests have declined by more than 90% due to a variety of threats across the West in the last few decades, leading to a cascade of ecosystem effects. With fire suppression and exclusion over the past 100 years, whitebark pines face more competition from shadetolerant trees. Fire exclusion combined with climate change has also led to epidemic outbreaks of pine beetles, which have killed many trees. In addition, white pine blister rust, a parasitic fungus inadvertently introduced to North America by humans in the early 1900’s, infects many stands and has led to massive die-offs. All threats combined have led to what some now call ‘whitebark pine ghost forests,’ where only gnarled, twisted dead snags remain.

Conservationists have termed the whitebark pine as a ‘keystone mutualist,’ meaning that it is so closely involved with other organisms that if it becomes extinct, or seriously

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depleted, other species will likely follow, and the effects will ripple throughout the ecosystem, likely unraveling a series of food webs.

Some species, like the grizzly bear, may be adaptable enough to change its habits to key in on food sources other than whitebark pine seeds in the fall. Historically, grizzlies would head for high elevation whitebark pine forests in the fall, leading them mostly away from human civilization and attractants during the key time when they need to obtain as many calories as possible.

However, with the decline of whitebark pine, grizzlies are now more prone to be found at lower elevations in the fall, where there is a much higher likelihood of encountering humans and non-natural food rewards like garbage, chickens, livestock grain, bird seed, and orchard fruit. Once a bear receives these non-natural rewards, it often leads to further conflicts with humans. Fortunately, SVC offers various resources like bearresistant trash cans or electric fencing to help residents contain their bear attractants. Solving the whitebark pine population decline, on the other hand, is not as simple, and the future appears bleak. However, there is a glimmer of hope as land management agencies work on restoration approaches, such as more prescribed fire at high elevations, the planting of blisterrust-resistant seedlings, and more.

Safety in Numbers: Public Lands Benefit from Increased Private Land Conservation

By Jonathan Bowler and Laura Cannon

We all benefit from public lands in Montana. Whether grazing livestock, camping with friends or family, stocking our woodsheds, supporting natural resource-based economies, providing recreational access, or creating habitat for wildlife, public lands embody a distinctly American way of life in the West. For millennia, the wild and open landscapes that we know as Montana have captured human imagination and sustained our ways of life through a reliance on the resources provided by open grasslands, forested valleys, fertile floodplains, and snow-filled mountains. But we can probably all agree that these resources need more than just the opportunity to thrive on public lands alone. They need connectivity.

Today, these public lands and values are subject to the interest of some 330 million Americans, about a million of which are Montanans. The sense of ownership we share for these 640 million acres of multiple-use lands creates a social complexity that can be more difficult to navigate than a traverse across the Bob Marshall Wilderness without a compass or map. To add further complexity, these public lands comprise less than a third of the land in the United States.

With a similar ratio of public and private lands to the greater United States, Montana is comprised of 29% federal lands, 6% state lands, and 65% private lands. From a national scale, the resulting mosaic of ownership may not seem overly complicated as the bulk of our public lands reside along and west of the Rocky Mountains. Zoom in closer, however, and the “checkerboard” pattern of mixed public and private lands begins to show a sometimes extremely fragmented landscape.

In Montana, this pattern has a noticeable presence on the landscape. While these property lines mean a lot to our human populations, the legal significance of land ownership doesn’t carry much importance to invasive weeds, forest diseases, or non-point source pollution, nor to wildlife and their migration corridors, forest communities, or groundwater.

To ecosystems, the mosaic of public and private lands has the potential to either fragment a landscape, or to create sustainable and coordinated land stewardship.

Our federal agencies face big challenges managing public lands for the multiple uses and benefits of 330 million

people. State agencies also juggle the interests of a million Montanans in decisions about how to manage natural resources, like game and non-game species. Additionally, the private landowner must weigh the allocation of their resources carefully with considerations for economic stability, family health and traditions, community values, land ethics, and a long list of other priorities.

There is no question that those who call Montana home do so out of a love for the landscape, the mixed cultural and natural values that make a place unique. It is not by chance that Montana is known as “the last best place”, as it is from a legacy of conservation on both public and private lands that has maintained traditional ways of life in traditional landscapes. To conserve is to maintain the quality and function of something so that it may continue to function in an unimpaired state. To return something in the same state or better is part of being a neighbor in Montana, it is expected and respected. We all benefit from previous generations leaving us the opportunity to enjoy an outdoor heritage, one that we should, in turn, pass on in the same state or better to our children.

So, is it enough? Is the 36% of Montana managed by state and federal agencies enough to maintain healthy ecosystems? This is where connectivity is key, because we cannot just expect wild places to exist solely on public lands.

Conservation must be shared by all landowners, public and private, if we are to leave anything close to a majority of Montana in the same state or better for future generations.

With each entity challenged by competing interests, changing priorities, and limited resources, partnership, collaboration, resource sharing, and access to information are critical to the conservation of connected landscapes.

Non-profit organizations like Swan Valley Connections (SVC) are dedicated to this mission. Our partnerships with state and federal agencies provide place-based information from traditional knowledge and scientific data to management decisions. Our participation in natural resource-based collaboratives act as a conduit for communication between our community and other parts of Montana and the United States.

Our conservation programs connect landowners to resources that help to make land stewardship affordable, accessible, Continued on Page 9

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The Bull Trout’s Curse:

What not to say or do around a threatened fish

By Rob Rich

To a bull trout, “road” is a four-letter word. When roads cross streams, flows may be forced unnaturally through culverts, challenging bull trout migration and access to spawning habitats. When roads run alongside streams, they constrain access to floodplains, which denies the ability to recharge groundwater, create off-channel habitat, and support diverse native plants. But roads can promote an even greater curse for a bull trout: silt.

Silt is the flour-like mix of very fine soil particles – no bigger than .002 inches across – that can be carried through water and deposited as sediment. Sedimentation is an entirely natural process in a place like the Swan Valley, where mile-high glaciers once pulverized rocks, and where our river and creeks have been grinding those rocks into smaller and smaller pieces ever since. But what is not natural is the extent and pace of sedimentation in the Swan Valley – where the proliferation of roads over a few decades has caused damage that’s hard to undo.

The Swan Valley is among the 22.5 million acres of mostly-forested land found across Montana, and sediment from our watershed’s unpaved forest roads are the primary contributor of pollution from diffuse origins (often called nonpoint source pollution). watershed. Most of these roads were built in 1960s and 1970s to facilitate commercial timber harvest, and even though many have fallen out of regular use, unchecked erosion remains a chronic harm to the health of our streams. The smallest raindrop can send the dust running, and one pulse of spring runoff or a brief summer downpour can smother all the nooks and crannies of the hyporheic zone – that vital, porous layer where surface and groundwater merge. This is the zone where aquatic insects thrive and sculpins lurk. It’s where bull trout eggs are laid and hatched. It’s where the food web for the Swan River and so many of its tributaries has its foundation. If we don’t use best management practices (BMPs) to reverse sediment pollution, the fragile hyporheic zone – and the watershed it supports – will have a dismal future.

Sediment is like a scab that’s tender and prone to flaking, and each time we drive over an unpaved surface more aggressively than we need to, we aggravate the scab. And it becomes harder and harder to heal, and eventually the dust catches up to us in the form of worsened water quality. So, especially on dusty or muddy days, give bull trout a brake!

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Thankfully, we have more strategies for restoring water quality than ever before, and we’re getting better at using them, too. On the large scale, one of the more promising approaches has been the Section 319 Nonpoint Source Management Program. Funded by Environmental Protection Agency and with guidance from 1987 amendments to a part of the Clean Water Act, this bold program required states to develop plans for reducing and preventing nonpoint source pollution. In Montana, the Department of Environmental Quality oversees the program, doling out approximately $900,000 each year for projects that target restoring natural watershed processes.

Early Swan Valley Connections (then Swan Ecosystem Center) leaders including Anne Dahl and Maria Mantas made sure our watershed earned support from this program. Their projects reduced annual sediment delivered to the Beaver Creek, Cold Creek, Herrick Run, and Jim Creek drainages. 2009 installations of BMPs along 7.3 miles of road along lower Jim Creek were especially successful, and in 2018, the creek was removed from its official status of being functionally “impaired” for aquatic life because of its excessive sediment pollution.

The only remaining “impaired” creek in the Swan Valley today is Goat Creek, which has been a focus of SVC’s latest 319-funded effort, the Lower Swan Valley Sediment Reduction Project.

Diverse trees and shrubs along creeks and the river are one of the most rewarding best management practices around. Montana’s Stream Management Zone Law has been protecting these riparian buffers from commercial harvest since 1991, but you whenever you plant a native tree or shrub by the water, you are helping to trap, filter, and store sediment before it becomes a problem.

The grant was awarded to SVC in 2017, and we’ve since been partnering with the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) in the Swan River State Forest to get this work off the ground. There are three primary restoration goals within this project: 1) to amend a large slope failure that has buried a portion of Upper Whitetail Road and continue to deliver tons of sediment to a tributary of Whitetail Creek; 2) reconditioning a degraded section of Upper South Woodward Road with improved culverts and surface drainage structures; and 3) the removal of old wooden bridge abutments facing imminent collapse at Goat Creek.

We recently gave the students in our Landscape & Livelihood College Field Program a preview of the Goat Creek bridge abutment removal (further tours for the general public will be offered after the restoration goals at each site are achieved next year). A thing like sediment seem so small and innocent when compared to the soils laced with heavy metals and toxins elsewhere in Montana. But when you stand next to tons and tons of the stuff without any trees or shrubs to hold it back, you feel small as a bull trout egg, and you understand what it might feel like to be buried. It makes you think hard about how much work goes into building a road, and how easily, if we don’t pay attention, all that work can wash away.

Left: Landscape and Livelihood 2019 students met with Clay Stephenson of Montana DNRC at Goat Creek.

Safety in Numbers, Continued and sustainable. Our own conservation properties allow us to practice and improve our own stewardship practices so we can, in turn, share our successes and challenges with our community for mutual growth and improvement. SVC uses these experiences to create the curriculum for our education programs and the topics of our community events, allowing us to engage the local “K through grey” community, regional lifelong learners, and college students from across the country in the effort to share the responsibility for conservation with our public land agencies.

We are fortunate in the Swan Valley, like all of Montana, to enjoy the legacy and heritage that was left to us. Conservation is a communal effort, with the support of our community near and far we strive to maintain the legacy and heritage that makes our home a special place. By continuing to work together, we can bring conservation to 100% of the landscape. ...

“We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children” – Unknown Origin.

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Coexistence with Rare Species in the Crown of the Continent

By Luke Lamar

The Swan Valley and the greater Crown of the Continent Ecosystem is one of the last intact ecosystems remaining on the planet that still contains its full assemblage of native wildlife species that historically occurred prior to European settlement.

Of these animals are a few of the rarest, least known wildlife species on the planet, and scientists are still just learning about their life histories and habitat requirements. The Swan Valley and neighboring watersheds are a testament to the idea that with thoughtful, sustainable land stewardship and conservation, humans can coexist with these rare species within the working landscape. Not too many communities can boast that they live, work, and play in an ecosystem that contains some of the strongest core populations of Canada lynx, wolverines, grizzly bears, and bull trout, all of which are currently listed as or under review as a protected species under the Endangered Species Act.

different entities to work together on strategies to address threats and promote human-wildlife coexistence.

It is important to monitor wildlife species over time to learn more about their life history needs, habitat requirements, and population trends, and to identify management strategies that can restore or improve their ability to survive and persist into the future. This is why SVC has partnered with other organizations and agencies to monitor lynx and wolverine populations, helping create the first ever baseline dataset of minimum number of individuals within the 1.5 million-acre Southwestern Crown of the Continent Ecosystem. In case you’re wondering, we identified 41 unique individual lynx and 32 wolverines from 2013-2016, and we are now partnering on a research project with the U.S. Forest Services’ Rocky Mountain Research Station and The Nature Conservancy in Montana to better understand how wildfires affect these species.

These species, while they share the same landscape, are often faced with different threats that can change over time. Lynx require some degree of mature multi-storied forests; grizzlies need humans to contain their food attractants; bull trout require clean, cold, connected, and complex streams; wolverines need deep, persistent snowpack and minimal disturbance. Climate change has the potential to affect all of these species, including us. Also, recent attacks and alterations to the Endangered Species Act may impact a conservation policy that has led to successful recovery stories of once-endangered species like the bald eagle. The threats to these species, and others, will always continue. There will always be a need for

SVC also partners with the U.S. Forest Service, MT Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and local residents to provide placebased solutions for human-bear coexistence, using adaptive management that integrates local knowledge with the best available science on bear ecology, behavior, and conflict management. We provide resources that, together, make this work successful: a bear-resistant garbage container loaner program that keeps bears out of trash, private property collaborations to offer advice on different ways to secure bear attractants, an electric fencing program to coordinate, design, and/or install electric fencing solutions to secure bear attractants, outreach and events that help others learn about

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bears and ways to reduce conflicts, and monitoring efforts which document conflict trends over time.

Additionally, SVC works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and private landowners to restore bull trout habitat.

We work with landowners to replace undersized culverts that can cause fish passage issues, we fence livestock from streams and plant riparian trees and shrubs to prevent erosion, and we restore ditched and drained wetlands to ensure water will continue flowing into our streams in late summer.

To date, organizations and communities around the Crown have laid the foundation which demonstrates conservation models of success where humans can coexist with these rare species. There can harmoniously be what are often seen as conflicting interests: logging and lynx, grizzlies and chickens, wolverines and snowmobiles, and bull trout and ranching. But it all takes effort, the willingness to work together to find solutions to complex issues, time spent building partnerships, and collaboration among those who sometimes have differing viewpoints. At SVC, we’re devoted to gathering information and applying knowledge, monitoring some of these wildlife species’ populations over time, working with people on coexistence strategies, and collaborating with state and federal wildlife and land management agencies to produce results that will conserve some of the rarest wildlife species and their lastremaining habitat in North America.

Wish List • • • • •

• Cloth tablecloths Two snowmobiles Enclosed snowmobile trailer • Projector • Adult and children’s Reliable 4WD vehicle waders Stand-up desks DSLR underwater camera housing

Canada lynx, grizzly, and wolverine photos by Steven Gnam

Please contribute before the end of November, so that we may maximize your giving with a match donation!

Help sustain conservation and stewardship in the Swan at

www.swanvalleyconnections.org/giving 11

6887 MT Hwy 83 Condon, MT 59826-9005

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Coming Up Nov 6

Community Potluck Dinner Beaver Ecology

Nov 30

Holiday Soiree at Buffalo Dance Gallery, Bigfork Portion of proceeds going to SVC!

dec 4

Community Potluck Dinner Year End Celebration with live music by Mike Mayernik, Joost Verboven and Pete and Rachel Feigley

jan 8

Community Potluck Dinner Salish Coyote Stories

NON-PROFIT ORG U.S. POSTAGE PAID CONDON, MT PERMIT #16