I recently shared my BBC story about how bison are helping creeks recover on the Montana prairie. The gist is this. Bison are tough critters who don’t spend much time wallowing in the creek bottoms. As a result, they don’t damage streamside vegetation like cattle do. The creeks stay greener and hold water for longer in summer. The banks sprout more shrubs and trees.
My story included this line about the newly greened-up creeks: “Well-vegetated creeks are the prairie’s lifeblood. ….they provide dispersal corridors for large mammals like mountain lions and black bears. One day, they may provide safe passage for recovering grizzly bears.”
This week, American Prairie shared the news they have photographed a grizzly bear on their ‘PN property.’ They also released pictures of its tracks in the mud. The PN property is the furthest west of American Prairie’s holdings. This makes it closest to the Rocky Mountain strongholds of the great bear. But it is not that close! This patch of prairie is one hundred and fifty miles from the mountains.
American Prairie’s PN property provides access to the Missouri River Breaks, a stretch of river famous for Meriwether Lewis’s line “it seemed those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.” The Breaks is adjacent to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge which protects one hundred and twenty-five more miles of the Missouri River. In other words, there are lots of protected places a grizzly bear can go from here. It is exciting news for anyone interested in wildlife recovery.
Danny Kinka, one of the ecologists I interviewed for the bison story, wrote about the grizzly bear in a mailing from American Prairie. I’m pasting Danny’s words below. I’m also linking to American Prairie’s post about the bear here.
Enjoy!
| Last month we discovered grizzly bear tracks on the PN. It was a powerful and historic discovery, as it provided some of the first evidence of grizzly bears in the Missouri River Breaks in about 100 years. The news sparked excitement and we sprang into action, mobilized by the hope that we would find something more. And we did. A grizzly bear has been photographed on American Prairie land! I’ve been dreaming about this moment since the day I started at American Prairie almost six years ago. Some of us for much longer. Other than bison roaming, I don’t think there is any better symbol of prairie wildness than a grizzly bear. The state of Montana is absolutely festooned with grizzly iconography, and yet we find them an incredibly difficult species to coexist with. In many ways, they have come to symbolize the places we are not–what’s just past the frontier. That strikes me as a cruel mischaracterization of prairie bruins since humans persecuted and banished them to the most inhospitable corners of the map while simultaneously venerating them as symbols of that same “wilderness.”And yet, here is the “white bear” back in its evolutionary cradle after a multiyear journey of hundreds of miles through some of the least hospitable habitat Montana has to offer, to live alongside grazing cows and stalking hunters, unassumingly and all but unnoticed. This is not the “horribilis” of wilderness frontier fantasy but an indicator of a wilder, better prairie. Restoring the role of large carnivores in this ecosystem has been part of the American Prairie mission since the organization was founded more than 20 years ago. I am proud to work for an organization that gives this bear such high-quality habitat to wander. But this bear repatriated itself. Others like it continue to do so despite a gauntlet of horizon-spanning odds to overcome. How many highways and fences did it navigate? How many chickens and trash cans did it wander past on an empty stomach to avoid notice? But here it is, despite everything. Bears are returning on their own. The work of rewilding is to provide them healthy habitat when they get here, and our priority is to keep people and property safe in order to keep grizzlys out of trouble. That means we are securing attractants, putting up electric fences around homes and dumpsters, adding bear boxes to campsites, promoting bear awareness, equipping our staff and lessees with bear spray and the training to use it properly, helping to employ range riders on neighboring ranches, building-out the Wild Sky program, and much, much more. We are so excited that you are here with us to witness this incredible moment in our journey to rewild this place, and we cannot thank you enough for helping to fund the work that is bringing the American Prairie vision to reality. It makes me profoundly hopeful to know that even as we redouble our effort toward the hard work of rewilding, there are grizzlies softly shuffling back toward the plains all on their own. Reverently, |
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| Daniel Kinka, Senior Wildlife Restoration Manager American Prairie |
Christopher J. Preston 