Winter is typically a quiet time of year, but come February, the phone at Swan Valley Connections (SVC) starts ringing. “Yes, the date is still April 15,” I can hear Leanna say down the hall. Leanna may be our longtime Office Manager, but everyone in earshot knows she’s not talking about tax day. She’s talking about another kind of deadline, determined by the time when Douglas-fir beetles take flight.

I’m getting 46 inches here,” said Jan, measuring out the length between where the animal’s foot touched down to where the same foot touched down again. “I got 48 over here,” said Ed, “though it’s still hard to get clear sense of the tracks.” But even without conclusive identification, energy in the group was soaring, knowing a stride of this size could only come from a very large animal.

If record highs for human-caused bear mortalities are set, they typically happen late in the fall, when the onset of winter coincides with voracious appetites. This is the time, which scientists call hyperphagia, when bears consume over 15,000 calories per day so that they can go into hibernation with the nourishment needed to survive until spring.

A couple weeks ago, a group of ten nonprofit and government stakeholders from Romania learned about bear-resistant trash bins in the Swan Valley. They tested latches, pummeled the thick plastic with their fists, and ran their hands over jagged and warped edges left by grizzlies who chewed – but failed to open – the bins.

“This is where the water lily was last year,” sighed Fish Biologist Beth Gardner, pointing to a small cove in Holland Lake's south shore. The water lily. Singular. Today, water lilies abound there, in a growing patch the size of a Chevrolet Suburban. And there are other patches around the lake's edge, wherever the water is shallow and still.

Dragging a meter-long net a meter underwater while putting along at five miles an hour, I understand what it’s like to be a bull trout holding still against the flow. The drag was only a hundred meters and three minutes long, but even with a forearm resting on the gunwales of the aluminum skiff – a well-worn, forest-green vessel dubbed Shrek – there was an isometric intensity to the static pull.

With a sound that registered somewhere between plunging a toilet and a breeze through aspens, Matt Bell stepped his sandaled foot into the pond’s shallow edge. Squish, squish-squish. “This is the Frog Stomp,” he deadpanned, as if the practice had been widely endorsed by amphibian authorities beyond the Montana Land Reliance (MLR) where he works. “These guys are camouflaged and hard to see in the shadows, and the idea is to trigger some movement out of them.” Nothing jumped...

Hunched under a battery and generator heavy on her back, Beth Gardner squeezed a switch, instantly transmitting 800 volts from the probe in her hand to the waters of Red Butte Creek. The boxed apparatus beeped with the insistence of a paramedic’s AED, but as she scanned and shocked each riffle and pool, Beth didn’t flinch. At least not until a white shape surfaced in the swift creek’s froth, and she started yelling hysterically, “there’s one, right there, yes…you got it!” Graham plunged his net and scooped the quarry to find...

Jan Moore will never forget waking to the sound of a grizzly cub wailing with its mother thundering inside a culvert-shaped trap. It was the furious attraction of family denied freedom by inches of metal. Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Grizzly Bear Specialist Tim Manley was trying to relocate the whole family together, and as the panicked calls reported the pre-dawn rage, he could only sigh and get dressed for another day on the job...

Our Wildlife in the West students recently went fishing at Upsata Lake, but they didn’t want to catch anything, except maybe some plankton, aquatic insects, or algae. Motored gently about in small skiff by volunteer Barry Gordon, and led by Blackfoot Challenge’s Caitlin Mitchell, we hand-reeled in a white, three-foot net on a hundred-foot rope. Shaped like a wizard’s hat, our net yielded just a little draft of fluid the color of weak green tea, which we promptly conveyed into a 250 mL plastic bottle. There were some crumbles and scum in the fluid, some of which squirmed...

If you happened to be driving to check on the Jim Lakes trailhead last Thursday, you might have seen some peculiar folks crouched over huckleberries not far from the road. It’s June, of course, so nobody was feasting on northwest Montana’s most beloved wild fruit. Instead, we – volunteers and staff for a project with the Earthwatch Institute...

More than a few eyebrows perked up when Biologist Rusty Sydnor called something on the landscape a “wasteway.” Our Wildlife in the West students were on tour in the Mission Valley, to learn from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) about managing watersheds and native fish...

Have you seen the Swan River lately, or a neighborhood creek? Unless you're looking right now, or even if you are, the scene has probably been changing since you saw it last. That's partly why, in between an exciting round of backcountry navigation, bear, wolf, and lynx studies, our Wildlife in the West program began to explore our local waters...

"Five and seven (that's twelve), plus seven (nineteen)…thirty," said Sharon Lamar, whose quick mental math earned her a role in summation. “Thirty red-winged blackbirds, last chance," I called, feeling like an auctioneer, then scribbled yet another species to our list. But we weren't selling anything away: we were accounting for the priceless gift of the birds who have returned with the spring. By the end, in admirable tribute to World Migratory Bird Day, Swan Valley Connections' volunteers counted…”