Tracing Montana's wildlife comeback
Book details how state restored game populations
By JIM MANN/Daily Inter Lake
"I'm going to do what I call lazy eights behind them and we'll work them up towards the trap. Then I'll get real low so don't be surprised if I hit the ground with the tail wheel…"
. Augusta pilot Cliff McBratney on his plans to haze antelope near Helena, 1947.
It's a story that went untold largely because it took so long to unfold, a multigenerational effort to restore Montana wildlife populations that were nearly wiped out in the late 1800s.
The story was first told in a video documentary released three years ago, and now it is chronicled in a book rich with detail, "Montana's Wildlife Legacy: Decimation to Restoration."
"It's not a really a story about Fish, Wildlife and Parks or government. It's a people story," said co-author Terry Lonner, a veteran of the state wildlife agency. "It's about the people of Montana. And it still is. They are still the key to making Montana's wildlife legacy so rich with success."
"Montana's Wildlife Legacy" starts with a view of the state prior to settlement, dating back 11,000 years when Clovis Indians hunted mammoths, and fast-forwarding to the arrival of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
"They recorded an abundance and diversity of wildlife on a landscape that could have been called the American Serengeti," the book's foreword states.
"After their historic journey, 'New Americans' discovered Montana. The fur trade, hide hunting, mining, homesteading, logging and livestock industries in the 1800s had a significant impact on its wildlife."
Actually, it was a catastrophic impact that was most dramatically seen in the rapid decline of bison, from more than 30 million to just a few hundred before the turn of the 20th Century.
To Lonner, the bison decline was the catalyst for efforts to restore a variety of depleted game populations.
If not for Montana citizens, Lonner believes bison would now be extinct.
"That's actually what started this whole conservation movement in the late 1800s," he said. "The people of Montana were way ahead of their time. They saw what was going down and they did something about it."
With more than 600 historic photos, graphs and maps, "Montana's Wildlife Legacy" outlines the progressive efforts to repopulate parts of the state with bighorn sheep, antelope, elk, deer, bison, mountain goats and even beavers and other furbearing species.
The book is the only complete compilation of Montana's trapping and transplant records. The records for elk transplants, for instance, date back to 1890, with the most aggressive efforts occurring before 1950.
From 1910 through 1997, more than 9,000 elk were dispersed across the state, most of them coming from Yellowstone National Park's northern herd.
For a modern hunter, the book is a treasure trove of information on the origins of today's game populations.
A hunter looking for whitetail deer in the East Rosebud River area near Red Lodge might be interested to know that the population was augmented with deer trapped in Flathead County during the 1940s.
While Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks wardens and biologists supervised many of the transplants, they mostly were carried out by citizen volunteers.
"People took these populations down and people brought them back," Lonner said. "People wanted the resource back."
The idea for the book stretches back to a meeting of state wildlife managers in the mid-1990s.
Lonner recalls that Jim Williams, the current wildlife manager for Northwest Montana, found a box full of old photos of transplant operations and other memorabilia in a trash container when he was working as a state biologist in Great Falls. Williams decided the photos could not go to waste.
"Williams is kind of the spark plug for the whole project," Lonner said. "He was a major player in the whole thing."
By 1999, Lonner recruited his co-author, Harold Picton, emeritus professor of wildlife management at Montana State University's department of ecology.
"He was doing interviews with a lot of old-timers who did a lot of the restoration work," Lonner said. "I guess between him and I, we interviewed about 55 people and now a dozen of them are gone. They are off to the happy hunting ground."
The original plan was to publish a book, but the video documentary was produced first, featuring many of the filmed interviews.
Lonner said there is a big push to get the book into the education arena.
"We're donating it to libraries around the state, both public libraries and school libraries," he said. "The big aim here is to try to get it into the public sector for education."
Otherwise, the book is for sale in the Flathead Valley at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional headquarters on Meridian Road in Kalispell, at the Sportsman and Ski Haus or it is available online at:
http://www.montanaswildlifelegacy.com/
Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com