In the summers of 1805 and 1806 along the upper Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in Montana, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery found the scene that later generations have come to embrace as the very essence of “wild” America — animals of every description abounding in an open land shared with diverse Indian cultures.

From buffalo and grizzly bears to magpies and prairie dogs, the expedition journals are full of the variety of species living in the region and of Lewis’ attempts, in particular, to collect and describe as many as possible, especially those not yet known to science.

Nearly 200 years later the picture has changed. Today it is impossible to open a Montana newspaper without finding at least one article about the ongoing struggle between people and wildlife. Debates rage about the reintroduction of large predators, economic development versus preservation of habitat, and the value of preserving biological diversity in general.

Yet while land use, past hunting practices and the growth of cities and towns have had an indisputable effect on the numbers of wildlife and their habitats, to believe that there are no more wild animals is wrong.

“A lot of wildlife issues are playing out here in Montana because this is where the wildlife is,” Professor Dan Pletscher says. Almost all the species that were ever here are still present, he says, which is not true of most other states. In effect Montana has become a laboratory of sorts for wildlife and conservation research that is attracting international interest.

Pletscher heads UM’s wildlife biology program, a joint effort of the School of Forestry, Division of Biological Sciences and the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit. Additional laboratories, facilities and research units — on and off campus — and collaborative programs with the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service extend research opportunities for faculty and students even further.

UM’s program now is ranked fourth in the country for undergraduates and attracts more than a hundred applicants each year for a handful of graduate student openings. This June 1,500 members of the Society for Conservation Biology will attend their annual meeting here, drawn partly by the Montana locale and partly because of the University’s tradition of pioneering wildlife conservationists, including John Craighead, Les Pengelly and Dick Taber.

Oh give me a home
Much of the program’s research has practical applications, Pletscher says. Outside agencies, such as the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, often ask faculty to study a particular animal or set of conditions and come up with recommendations for conservation and management practices. The driving issue behind almost all conservation efforts today, Pletscher says, is habitat.

Even where native habitat still exists, farms and ranches, subdivisions, logged areas and dams have chopped it up into smaller and smaller pieces. Depending on a species’ needs for food, a home or a mate, such fragmentation creates smaller and more isolated populations, with consequences for their overall health and long-term survival.

Research projects in UM’s wildlife biology program reflect these concerns. Projects range from surveys for the presence of rare and uncommon species to tracing the genetic relationships of separated populations to how wildlife adapts to human alterations of habitat. The following stories offer a few examples.

Seldom seen
Despite the proximity to wilderness Montanans have, knowing for sure all the types of creatures that inhabit it is difficult. Wildlife Biology Professor Kerry Foresman has been working with the U.S. Forest Service to create simple, standard methods for documenting the occurrence of rare or uncommon animals that don’t involve trapping or handling.

One technique uses bait placed inside a tunnel-like enclosure to attract all kinds of small and medium-sized forest creatures, including species of special interest such as marten and fisher. To get to the bait the animals must walk across a carbonized metal plate and then onto sticky paper, which captures their footprints in exquisite detail.

“These creatures are comfortable hunting around in dark spaces for food,” Foresman says, so the tracking plates work well for them. Other animals, such as lynx and wolverines, are more wary. They will, however, approach bait in the open, such as a hanging deer carcass. Foresman focuses a flash camera, triggered by infrared and microwave sensors, under the carcass. The sensors ensure that only warmblooded, moving things are caught on film.

Both survey methods have been tested repeatedly to prove their reliability in the field and can be adapted easily for a variety of terrains and animals, Foresman says. Using these as standard techniques means the results from diverse studies can be compared to get a more complete picture of a species’ presence — or absence — over large regions. Foresman’s work in the Bitterroots, near where Lewis and Clark first floundered through, is being used to help make decisions about how, where or whether to reintroduce scarce species.

Unpopular fellows
Halfway across the state, second-year graduate student Jo Ann Dullum is working with Foresman on reintroduction techniques for prairie dogs in the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge. The refuge covers more than a million acres along both sides of the Missouri River north of Lewistown all the way to Fort Peck.

“Barking squirils,” as Lewis called the sociable rodents, once were ubiquitous from Canada to Mexico between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. Now their numbers are estimated to be just over 1 million in the entire area. Considered pests and actively eradicated from many areas, prairie dogs are also highly susceptible to the bubonic plague, which swept through colonies in Montana in the mid-1990s.

Reintroducing prairie dogs into dead or sparsely populated colonies or into new territory is not simple. It appears they may need to be relocated in social groups, not singly or in small numbers. They also need to be able to hide quickly from predators. Dullum is experimenting with starter holes as a way to help the critters survive and stay put.

“Prairie dog conservation is more controversial even than wolves because they are so hated,” Foresman says. Contrary to popular opinion, however, he says research has shown prairie dogs compete little with cows for the same grasses, and their foraging actually stimulates more nutritional forbs to grow. Furthermore, their burrowing tills the soil and has been essential to the development of the prairie ecosystem.

A fine kettle of fish
Trout don’t suffer the same bad reputation as prairie dogs, but are nevertheless under pressure. Fred Allendorf, a biological sciences professor, runs UM’s wild trout and salmon genetics lab. His particular interest is native species — primarily bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout — and threats to their existence from habitat fragmentation and hybridization with non-native species. In both cases he uses genetic-mapping techniques to identify relatedness of fish within and between populations.

In collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service, Allendorf and post-doctoral Fellow Paul Spruell are studying bull trout and their requirements for a viable population at Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. As in previous studies in the Flathead River, it appears that bull trout that spawn in one creek are genetically distinct and reproductively isolated from those that spawn in nearby tributaries and therefore cannot be considered part of one big interbreeding population.

Cutthroat trout have a different problem. They are especially vulnerable to genetic erasure through interbreeding, in this case with rainbow trout introduced throughout the state decades ago from the West Coast. By comparing samples of DNA, Allendorf can tell which trout are native and which are hybrid. Native fish generally do not interbreed with other native fish species, he says, because they tend to occupy different niches in the system.

“Mechanisms of reproductive isolation evolved naturally over a long time,” he says. Introduction of a non-native species disrupts the established divisions and leads to interbreeding and the loss of biodiversity.

“Even in the Bob [Marshall Wilderness] and Flathead [River], which are doing the best, there is still hybridization,” Allendorf says. “The range of native westslope cutthroats is now less than 5 percent of what it was 100 years ago for native trout.”

Why do bears cross the road?
Habitat range also is an issue for grizzly bears, which now occupy only a small fraction of the area they once did in the continental United States. Doctoral student John Waller is studying how roads, in particular, affect grizzly bear movement within their range.

His work, funded largely by the Federal Highway Administration, centers on U.S. Highway 2, which is the only major paved road between the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Glacier National Park and cuts through perhaps the densest grizzly bear population left in the lower 48 states.

“We know bears cross, but now we’re finding out exactly where, when, how and whether they are keying to certain topographic factors such as drainages, riparian areas or whatever,” Waller says. “This would be good to know when considering where to put crossing structures.”

In addition to being a student, Waller is a research biologist for the School of Forestry, working with Chris Servheen, the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Since spring 1998, Waller and Servheen have been capturing and collaring bears, first with radio devices and, last spring, with Global Positioning Systems capable of more precise and more frequent position monitoring. Radio telemetry can identify a location to roughly 500 feet, Waller says, while error-corrected GPS units can pinpoint an individual to within 50 feet. The collars are equipped with an auto-release mechanism and programmed to drop off on a certain date.

Waller, who previously worked for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, calls his study “a bear researcher’s dream come true.”

“In a 10-year FWP study,” he says, “we collected roughly 3,000 positions for 50 bears by radio telemetry. Last year, we had 1,300 locations for one bear in four months” using GPS collars.

The work is not without frustrations. Of the five bears identified in 1998 as good candidates for GPS units the following spring, one was killed by a train and the others were never recaptured. Waller suspects they spent most of their time out of reach on private property or in terrain too difficult for the researchers to get to. Three new bears were caught and equipped with GPS collars, two of which worked well and collected 2,000 positions in 110 days. So far, he says, the bears never have gone near the highway.

“There seemed to be a clear line of demarcation; they wouldn’t come closer than half a mile. But that’s helpful information, too.”

Mission: Bluebird
Roads do not impact the movement of birds as much as they do bears, but manmade changes to landscape impacts birds just the same. A new study to begin this spring in the Flathead Valley will focus on mountain bluebirds, their population characteristics and how they move about in a landscape of different habitats, ranging from grassland to timbered hills.

“Not to be anthropomorphic, but birds have to make a decision about where to nest and breed when they return [from their winter grounds],” says Mark Lindberg, an assistant professor of wildlife biology. “Where will I have the greatest ability to reproduce and survive?”

By putting up bluebird houses in different locations and banding the residents, Lindberg and graduate student John Citta will try to understand what decisions bluebirds are making about nesting sites and what the consequences are.

Citta and Lindberg have received a McIntire-Stennis grant to conduct this research and will get some help from Charlo resident Erv Davis, a retired school administrator and bluebird aficionado.

“Of the 30,000 or so bluebird boxes that have been put up in western Montana, the majority are thanks to Erv Davis,” Lindberg says.

Davis also is an expert in banding the delicate creatures. The bands act as social security numbers for individual birds, providing a way to track information on age, sex, where they go and when.

“John will be walking into an established banded population,” Lindberg says, “which will be an enormous help.”

REAPing the rewards
The work of wildlife biologists typically requires long hours in the field, followed by even longer hours sorting through data and subjecting it to mathematical analysis. Many studies demand numerous field workers to cover large geographic areas over a period of several years.

As part of a National Science Foundation grant to study the ups and downs of snowshoe hare populations in the northern part of the United States and how this may affect lynx — their principal predators — Wildlife Biology Associate Professor Scott Mills came up with a way to meet his field help needs and improve undergraduate research experience at the same time.

In collaboration with the Montana Natural History Center, Mills created the Research and Education Activities Program, which recruits five to 12 undergraduates each year who have little or no research experience. The NSF grant pays their room and board for the summer, and the following semester the students work at the center sharing what they’ve learned via Montana Public Radio’s Field Notes program or in educational workshops.

At the end of the grant, Mills says, the researchers will have four years of insight into the population dynamics of snowshoe hares in the southern part of their range and, hopefully, an ongoing program in undergraduate research education.

“In the past,” he says, “good research hasn’t given much reward to teaching and vice versa. (But) good research informs good teaching, so at the college level you become better educated if you are good at research.”