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Happy Spring from
the offices of
American Wildlands
Within On the Wild Side this month, we would like to introduce you to our recently completed Priority WildlifeLinkage Assessments (PLAs), documents that define the most important wildlife corridors in the U.S. Northern Rockies of western Montana and north and central Idaho.
We are the first organization to compile such an extensive catalogue of wildlife corridors. April Johnston, Conservation Director, explains the significance of this work in the headline story, Priority Linkage Assessments: an Introduction.
The completion of the PLA documents moves American Wildlands’ work forward from a place of identifying where critical wildlife corridors exist and what threatens the corridors, to determining how they can be protected.
The documents break down what specifically threatens wildlife corridors, and outline the conservation opportunities that could be taken to lessen or eliminate those threats.
By making our PLA results available to our partners – land trusts and other conservation NGOs, conservation community groups, watershed councils, county planners, land owners, state and federal wildlife, land management agencies, and others – we will put the PLAs to work on the issue of how specific wildlife corridors can be protected.
Please read PLA Results at Work for examples of how our PLA corridor data, and the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps within the PLAs, are being incorporated into:
- the conservation work of land trusts through the Heart of the Rockies Initiative
- the travel planning process of the Salmon Valley District of east-central Idaho of the Bureau of Land Management - Motorized Travel Planning
- the highway safety planning process of the Montana Department of Transportation on Highway 200
- Bear Proof Containers tells of our on-the-ground project to reduce grizzly bear and human conflicts that happen all too often in a hotspot identified by the Hub PLA, and some not-so-funny shennanigans of opportunistic bears near human bounty.
We will keep you updated on the progress of these and other projects in future issues of On the Wild Side.
Also, we invite you to sign up for the magnificent Madison Passage Horseback Trailride on either of two dates – June 13 and July 12 - at the outstanding Sun Ranch in the Madison Valley of Southwest Montana, to follow the trail wildlife roam in their quest for winter shelter and rich summer pastures.
Please stay up to date on American Wildlands' spring and summer events by visiting our Events page.
As always, we welcome your comments and reflections on our work and hope you enjoy this issue of On the Wild Side that highlights the Priority Linkage Assessments.
Best Wishes!
Kristin Wimberg
Communication Director
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I-Spy On the Pass Update
Please look at the most recent I-Spy
on the Pass volunteer update. With the onset of spring, wildlife and their young
will be on the move, and more frequently attempting to cross Interstate 90 on Bozeman Pass.
If you travel the Bozeman Pass secton of I-90, please consider helping American Wildlands determine where animals are trying to cross the highway. We are looking for volunteers to share their wildlife observations from the Pass. Please enter your wildlife observations on the I-Spy site.
Our Latest Video
Watch for young animals along roadways
Click for Video
In the springtime, wildlife young are usually close on the heels of their mother, trying to get to the other side of a road. A single car can send them bolting back the way they came.
And if that road is lined with a barrier fence, the trailing young may get stranded or trapped in the wires. Fences wired close to the ground or tightly spaced together are particularly troublesome.
According the Jim Roscoe, High Divide Program Coordinator, “It’s not uncommon to see small nursery herds of elk with all the cows on one side of the fence and all the calves on the other side.”
If you are driving a country road, try to slow down or stop, and give the animals time to negotiate the fencing.
Film Screening:
"Division Street"
Produced by
Eric Bendick
Roads are the largest human artifact on the planet;
they have fragmented wild landscapes and ushered in
the ‘age of urban sprawl.’
“Division Street” presents a new generation of ecologists, engineers, city-planners, and everyday citizens who are making way for wildlife by transforming the future of the American road.
June 11, 7pm
The Roxy Theater
in Missoula
Sponsored by
Transportation4American
and American Wildlands
Your Comments
"American Wildlands rocks. I'd love to see your program expand throughout the west cuz the issues are replaying themselves everywhere!" - Supporter, Ashland, OR
"This is incredible and impressive. I am blown away by the awesome work
your group does, to say nothing about the You Tube videos I just watched." - Supporter, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Volunteer Opportunities!
* I-Spy On the Pass Volunteers needed
* Volunteers for data collection from remote cameras along Hwy 206
About us-
Staff & Board
American Wildlands
321 E. Main, Ste 416
Bozeman, Mt 59718
406 586-8175
American Wildlands'
Youtube Channel
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In This Issue
Priority Linkage Assessments:
An Introduction
By April Johnston, Conservation Director
We’ve done it! It took two years, and now our program field staff at American Wildlands has completed a major project – the Priority Wildlife Linkage Assessment (PLA). This is a detailed set of reports that defines and maps the most important corridors frequently traveled by our focal species: bighorn sheep, elk, gray wolf, grizzly bear, lynx, moose, pronghorn antelope, and wolverine.
Wildlife corridors are the connections between increasingly fragmented habitats; these corridors allow wildlife to travel to seasonal habitats and maintain genetic diversity. A corridor can be large, undeveloped lands for migrating elk herds, or a narrow highway overpass linking grizzly bear habitat on two sides of an interstate highway.
April Johnston interviews Craig Jourdonnais
of Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Park.
AWL photo library.
To complete the PLA, we sat down with over eighty federal and state biologists to examine maps, talk about where animals are migrating, and draw their movement areas on maps. We compiled their expert opinion and identified where the most important wildlife corridors, or “linkages”, are located in the region.
The expert biologists also provided insight into the greatest threats to those linkages, like housing developments or roadway obstacles. We have also highlighted the potential opportunities that people can take to protect these threatened corridors, such as taking part in county planning efforts, and supporting the inclusion of wildlife underpasses in the design of highway reconstruction plans.
The completed PLA project addresses two objectives. First, we’re excited to refine our work and be certain that the wildlife corridors we are working to conserve are indeed the most important corridors. Secondly, we are sharing our findings, and gaining a broad reach, with a diversity of groups such as Lewis and Clark County, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, Montana Department of Transportation, United States Forest Service, Wildlife Conservation Society, the Heart of the Rockies Initiative, and many others.
We will now use the PLA findings in unique ways to influence land management policy decision-making, on-the-ground projects, and federal and state agency planning efforts in our four PLA regional conservation areas.
For example, the Western Governors Association’s (WGA) Wildlife Corridor Initiative, which influences state land management and energy development in 19 western states and U.S. territories, has incorporated our Priority Linkage Assessment data into their Wildlife Corridors Initiative Policy Recommendations document. The document was unanimously accepted by all 19 WGA governors.
AWL Photo Library
On a local scale, our PLA results are used by communities wanting to place bear-proof containers in the most optimal locations to help reduce bear and human conflicts, or by ranchers interested in replacing specific segments of fencing that may be an obstacle to migrating pronghorn.
Recently, we have had international success as well. Our Priority Linkage Assessment methods and results were included in a book chapter written by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN is writing this book to highlight the importance of wildlife corridors around the world. The book, which will be published soon, will help spread American Wildlands’ message across the globe.
We are very excited about the far reaching implications our Priority Linkage Assessment will have on actual conservation efforts: helping land trusts, agencies, and conservation groups, county planners, landowners and others, decide where to apply their precious conservation dollars and staff resources.
Ultimately, our success will be measured by the ability for wildlife to travel and live throughout the U.S. Northern Rockies region, and by the ability for local people to make deliberate choices about managing their land in a manner that conserves the region’s “old west” attributes of abundant wildlife, protected public wildlands, and relatively undeveloped rural landscapes.
To view our complete PLA reports, please visit Priority Linkage Assessment.
Our PLA Results at Work!
Influencing Heart of the Rockies' Assessments of Wildlife Values
One of American Wildlands’ most rewarding partnerships has resulted from our sharing our Priority Linkage Assessment findings with the Heart of the Rockies Initiative. This initiative is a coalition of small regional land trusts and conservation partners that works at a grassroots level to find solutions to some of the most pressing issues in the area: growth management, land use planning, and private lands conservation.
The Bitterroot Valley, photo by Craig Jourdannais
Our partnership with the Heart of the Rockies Initiative (HOTR) started in March 2008, when we hosted a one-day workshop to introduce our Priority Linkage Assessment (PLA) process and objectives to state and federal agencies, conservation groups and land trusts from throughout the Northern Rockies region. At the end of the workshop, HOTR and AWL staff met to begin strategizing how AWL could best serve the needs of HOTR and its local lands trusts.
Since then, American Wildlands has presented our PLA data at six HOTR meetings: one annual meeting, and five local strategy meetings. These local meetings have addressed private lands conservation in critical habitats ranging from the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula, to the Ruby Valley of southwestern Montana, to the island mountain ranges that connect the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem with the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem to the north (including Glacier National park).
American Wildlands and the HOTR have connected so well because both organizations are addressing a similar threat: that the “old west” attributes of abundant wildlife and rural landscapes in the Northern Rockies are threatened by the burgeoning “new west” development that is occurring as more people, appreciative of the region’s wildlife, wildlands and rural landscapes, move here to live. This increased population – along with associated development, roads, fences, and commercial areas – poses a serious threat to maintaining the very natural and cultural amenities people are moving here to enjoy.
American Wildlands is pleased to be able to help provide data to the Heart of the Rockies Initiative’s private lands conservation program and process. By integrating our PLA results and GIS maps with their own research, the Heart of the Rockies Initiative is working to find a happy median between the old west attributes and the new west appreciation of the land.
In Planning: Motorized Travel Planning on Public Lands
Our PLA results are also being incorporated into a number of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management motorized travel plan revision processes; road building and motorized access on public lands was identified as one of the top seven threats to wildlife movement in our PLA interviews.
photo by Randy Wimberg
For instance, American Wildlands and the Salmon Valley Stewardship community group have submitted our data to the travel planning process of the Salmon District of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – in the Salmon River region of east-central Idaho. This area of Idaho is rich with wolves, black bears, mountain lions, bighorn sheep, elk and deer.
We are asking the BLM to use our findings as a filter to identify where existing roads and motorized recreation trails may or may not be compatible with wildlife corridors.
This is an example of American Wildlands using our data to help inform, guide and improve the planning process of a federal or state agency. You can review our findings in the
Salmon Valley Linkage of the High Divide PLA report.
An Opportunity: Highway 200 Reconstruction Near Thompson Falls
Two years ago the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) contacted American Wildlands to help fund motorist warning signs on HWY 200 near Thompson Falls, about 90 miles northwest of Missoula, where there is a high incidence of vehicle collisions with the local bighorn sheep herd.
Motorist warning sign on Highway 200
The sheep often descend a cliff and cross both a highway and railway to drink from the Clark Fork River and access nearby grass and roadside salt. Thirty-nine sheep were struck and killed by vehicles between 2007 and 2008.
The motorist warning signs, also called variable message signs, are an example of our on-the-ground work to reduce wildlife and motorist collisions. This photo shows the actual sign placed on Highway 200.
AWL Photo Library
Since that time, our Priority Linkage Assessment (PLA) data has confirmed that this is indeed a hotspot for bighorn and vehicle collisions, and that the herd cannot sustain the high rate of mortality of the past few years.
At the same time, MDT has determined that it is important to reconstruct roads in that area to improve conditions, replace a bridge, and increase motorist safety.
This exemplifies an “opportunity” for American Wildlands to affect a planning process: to influence MDTs’ consideration of wildlife as they redesign an existing highway to increase motorist safety. AWL is planning to band together with local citizens and community leaders with the intent of offering design solutions to MDT, such as installing barrier fencing near a bridge underpass that would help funnel wildlife beneath a busy highway.
This opportunity is further discussed in our Cabinet Purcell PLA report for the Thompson River Linkage.
On-the Ground: AWL contributes Bear Proof Canisters
American Wildlands has contributed funds to help purchase 75 bear-proof garbage containers for the
Swan Valley Bear Aware Task Force.
Bear-proof canister, photo by Patti Sowka
This coming summer, Swan Valley residents and businesses can purchase or rent
containers from the Task Force, part of an effort to lower the number of bear and human conflicts that frequently happen
when food and garbage are easily accessed by bears.
Biologists have given the Swan Valley linkage area the highest rating in American Wildlands’ Crown of the Continent
Priority Linkage Assessment, meaning that is it an extremely important travel corridor for carnivores and ungulates
as wildlife moves along a north and south pathway between the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem and the
Salmon-Selway and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems.
The Swan Valley, a checkboarded region of timber harvested and unharvested forest lands east of the Mission Mountains
in Montana, has the most significant problem with bears and sanitation issues in the Crown of the Continent ecosystem.
The Seeley-Swan Pathfinder Newspaper recounts an average summer:
“A grizzly bear with an affinity for white refrigerators has broken into at least five cabins and smashed a lot of windows
in recent weeks on the east side of the Swan Valley… At a valley business, a bear busted through an electric fence to get
at a grease trap, frustrating the store owners and State wildlife managers.
(more news story)
The inhabitants of the Swan Valley, both human and carnivore, have a proven need for bear-proof dumpsters. American Wildlands is pleased implement our findings in this tangible way.
For more information on this corridor, see the Swan Valley linkage from the Crown of the Continent PLA report.
Event: Ride a Wildlife Corridor!
The Madison Passage Trail Ride
on Sun Ranch
Photo by Ryan Bell
We invite you to join American Wildlands for an enjoyable day of horseback riding and corridor education at the spectacular Sun Ranch in the Madison Valley of southwest Montana, on Saturday, June 13 and/or Sunday, July 12. Join the American Wildlands staff and Sun Ranch wranglers as we follow the trails that wildlife roam in their quest for safe winter shelter and rich summer pastures.
The 26,000 acre Sun Ranch, located a short wolf walk from Yellowstone National Park’s northwest corner and bordering the Lee Metcalf Wilderness, is home to an abundance of wildlife: 7000 elk migrate through the Madison Mountains each fall and spring season, and wolves, bears (both black and grizzly), wolverines, mountain goats, antelope, and bighorn sheep pass through this major wildlife corridor called the Madison Linkage.
American Wildlands program staff and Sun Ranch wranglers will accompany you across sage covered foothills to meet Moose Creek, which flows through a glacier carved canyon. This trail ultimately climbs 2500 feet to Expedition Pass, the lowest point of passage between the Madison and Gallatin mountain ranges. Our experts will accompany you through a stunning and unique landscape that few are fortunate enough to experience.
The June Ride
How far you ride toward Expedition Pass will depend on the year’s snow pack and trail conditions. Regardless of the conditions, you are very likely to see elk, or elk sign. June weather in Montana ranges from sunny days that beg a nap on the new grasses to possibly a rogue winter storm. Whatever the weather, you are guaranteed the outstanding drama of the season.
The July Ride
In July, most elk have moved back into Yellowstone Park, but signs of their passage are everywhere – tracks, tree rubbings, and scat. Carnivores are very active in July, so you will possibly find wolf or bear tracks and sign. Midsummer is alive with marmots, pikas, and unique nesting birds, and the glorious Montana wildflower season is blooming. For the July trip, there will likely be clear passage to Expedition Pass.
Sun Ranch horses are seasoned ranch and trail horses, each with a distinctive personality befitting a companion on the trail. The experienced wranglers will match you with your trusty steed.
Please contact American Wildlands’ Development Director Lisa Lenard by calling 406-586-8175 x107, or by emailing llenard@wildlands.org for further information and to sign up for one or both rides. Price per ride is $250 per person and lunch will be provided.
Don’t delay! Only 10 riders per date.
For more general information about The Lodge at Sun Ranch, visit http://www.sunranchlodge.com
Thank you to our Business Members!
Rockford Hosts American Wildlands Day
Rockford Coffee in Bozeman hosted a cozy coffee day for American Wildlands in late January to create an atmosphere
of wild thinking about wildlife connectivity.
Rockford owner Ryan Wilson said that AWL Day not only helped raise
awareness of American Wildlands, but also demonstrated his company's support of conservation efforts in the
Northern Rockies - a benefit that reaches well beyond the walls of Rockford.
Northstar Consulting Group contributes to AWL through 1% to the Planet
Doug Fletcher believes “it’s important to give animals a chance to roam without endangering the lives of
wildlife or people.”
And because this belief matches so well with American Wildlands’ work in Safe Passages, Doug Fletcher,
CEO and Co-Founder of North Star Consulting Group, based in Bozeman, Montana, supports American Wildlands through his
company’s participation in 1% For The Planet.
A 1% for the Planet membership requires that a business make grants totaling at least 1% of annual revenues or sales to a qualifying environment nonprofit. American Wildlands is grateful to be one of North Star Consulting’s recipients.
(more on Doug)
We're interested in your photographs!
Please keep American Wildlands in mind as you travel and photograph the wildlands this spring and summer. Some of our best images come from our members. Please contact Kristin Wimberg, Communications Director.
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