Wildlife biologist reflects on career

Chances are you don’t know her name, but if you’ve ever hunted state lands along the Thompson River Corridor, reeled in a fish from the streams of the Swan River State Forest or simply savored the natural beauty of the Bull River Valley, you ought to thank Gael Bissell.

Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, Bissell officially retired earlier this month after a 31-year career as a wildlife biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, having had a hand in nearly a quarter of a million acres of wildlife habitat conservation.

Working behind the scenes with myriad public and private partners, she helped secure a combination of land purchases, donations and easements throughout Northwest Montana worth approximately $120 million.

Bissell earned her zoology degree from Ohio Wesleyan University, then worked as an environmental consultant in Buffalo, New York, before making the westward journey for graduate school. While getting her master’s in environmental studies at the University of Montana, she met her husband-to-be, Rick Mace, who also retired last month after 35 years of working to recover the grizzly bear population in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.

“I was interested in restoration and environmental contaminants, and I began looking at the [Department of Natural Resources and Conservation],” Bissell said. “We were still in Missoula while we were thinking about what to do, and Rick said, ‘Well, if you get a job in Kalispell, there’s always a lot of grizzly bears up there.’”

She started working for the state in 1984 after a stint lobbying the Legislature for Montana Audubon, and was soon helping to draft mitigation plans addressing the impacts of the Libby and Hungry Horse dams. Construction of the two dams caused the inundation of 52,600 acres of land, and the Northwest Power Act was passed in 1980 to restore fish and wildlife habitats that suffered as a result.

“There was a significant amount of forest and riparian habitat affected,” Bissell said. “It’s the most productive, but also the hardest to replace or find, and also affects semi-terrestrial species like beavers and muskrats.”

She and other biologists compiled available data on regional population trends to estimate the impacts to wildlife populations. In a 1988 settlement, the Bonneville Power Administration gave $13 million to the state of Montana to begin conserving valuable habitats to offset those impacts. It allowed the agency to begin acquiring land to replace 75 percent of the acreage that was inundated, with the remainder placed in the state’s Wildlife Mitigation Trust Fund.

Bissell said that over time, her role shifted toward collaborations with other agencies, organizations, businesses and private landowners, pooling resources to win grants for conservation easements. Alan Wood, the regional wildlife mitigation coordinator, saw that ability as one of her strongest attributes.

“She’ll tell you, ‘I didn’t do this alone, I had lots of help,’” Wood said. “But it’s because of her bringing these partnerships together, focusing them on common interests and then accomplishing shared goals.”

That skill served Bissell well as a founder of the Flathead River-to-Lake Initiative, which in 15 years has protected more than 5,000 acres of wetland and riparian habitat, including about three miles of land along the Flathead River.

For that, she worked with organizations such as the Flathead Land Trust as well as many of the private landowners along the river, something Wood believes changed many locals’ views of Fish and Game.

“When she started doing mitigation studies she got to know the landowners along the Flathead River, and maintained those long-term, personal relationships,” Wood said. “That gives our agency a lot of credibility, because they’re real people, not just some bureaucrat come knocking on your door.”

All told, Bissell was able to directly fund more than 130 projects scattered throughout the region, totaling more than 24,000 acres. She was also the driving force to secure conservation easements on about 200,000 acres surrounding the Thompson and Fisher rivers, giving the public access, hunting and fishing rights on most of those lands.

In the Swan she helped the state acquire 16,000 acres in easements. Bull River, Island Lake by Lost Trail and acreage near Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge are just some of the many places bearing her fingerprints.

Migratory birds are main beneficiaries of such work, and one of Bissell’s passions is helping to protect the common loon, no longer common waterfowl partial to breeding in Northwest Montana’s lakes.

“I helped to get Fish, Wildlife and Parks involved, and to list it as a species of concern,” Bissell said. “I always say that loons are the grizzly bears of the bird world.”

In the early 1990s Bissell worked with other agencies and organizations to develop the state’s loon conservation program. Loons have since made a significant comeback, and college interns continue the outreach program in Northwest Montana each summer, educating boaters and others on the region’s importance to loons and how to recreate in harmony with the recovering species.

While Bissell’s legacy is anchored by the breadth of her conservation work in Northwest Montana, Wood noted that she has also helped to produce a new generation of biologists who share the same goals.

“She was always really good at connecting with and mentoring young people, and there are several of them that ended up becoming wildlife biologists working for Fish, Wildlife and Parks,” Wood said. “In some cases, they were high school kids interested in wildlife, wondering what they were going to do, and she took them under her wing, mentored them and helped them get grad programs that ultimately led to careers.”

Prior to her departure from the state agency, Bissell said she and Mace were planning to travel after retirement, and possibly scout out a second home farther south. But it’s hard to imagine that she would ever bid adieu to the place she has worked so long to protect.

“Northwest Montana is very unique — an extremely productive and diverse wildlife area,” Bissell said. “The rivers, the lakes, the mountains — it’s all relatively intact, and it’s something that a lot of people here know is important.”

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinaterlake.com.