Montana Untamed, hosted by Thom Bridge, covers the state's rugged landscape from hook and bullet to policy and science.
AI has come for the animals.
When the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks unveiled its 43rd annual photo issue of Montana Outdoors on Jan. 1, the magazine carried an explanation on page 1: Magazine staff, editor Tom Dickson wrote the magazine had gone to great lengths to verify that photos submitted for the issue were, in fact, photos.
Dickson's concern was that images produced by generative artificial intelligence — AI programs that create new material in response to a prompt — now often appear as realistic as actual photographs and could be submitted to the magazine for publication.
On today's episode, Joshua Murdock, natural resources reporter for the Missoulian newspaper, discusses his reporting on AI-generated wildlife imagery.
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According to Dr. Matt Rinella, The grass-roots traditions that have defined hunting in America are being displaced by a hyper-commercialized pay-to-play model.
In response, he has created an organization called Hunt Quietly, and what he calls a movement to combat this tainting of the principles of hunting.
Through his writing and podcast he has stirred controversy and prompted plenty of debate in the hunting community.
Rinella, a research ecologist by day and lifelong hunter joins me on today's episode to explain his stance.
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As the year comes to a close I thought it would be a good time to gather our team of outdoors writers and put a bow on it.
I asked the reporters to send me some of their most important stories from 2023 so we could re-hash them for folks as the last episode of the year.
So with me today is Rob Chaney and Joshua Murdock, from the Missoulian, Brett French from the Billings Gazette, and Duncan Adams from the Montana Standard. All familiar voices if you’ve listened to the show in the past.
Some of these stories will also be familiar to habitual listeners. Topics we’ll discuss today will be E-Bikes in National Parks, Snowbowl ski area, tribal Bison hunting outside Yellowstone, and Anaconda’s urban mule deer.
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As the federally-protected grizzly bear continues to make its life outside of the wilderness enclaves of its recovery zones it is met with human civilization and the problems that arise as a result.
The folks whose lives and livelihood are on the line in these situations are the farmers and ranchers who work the land where civilization and wilderness meet.
In 2017, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks created the prairie grizzly bear team in response to the expanding grizzly bear population of the NCDE making its way from the mountains to the prairie.
What follows is a conversation I had earlier this year with Wesley Sarmento, the head of that prairie bear team.
This episode was recorded as we bumped along dirt roads outside Conrad, Montana. Sound quality may vary.
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The Endangered Species Act turns 50 this December. Often called “the pit-bull of environmental statutes,” the ESA has given federal protection to more than 2,000 animals and plants.
It has also drawn critics who claim it takes away property rights and hurts economic development.
After half a century of recovery efforts, only a few hundred species have got delisted. On the other hand, the whole world faces a biodiversity crisis, with more than 44,000 species threatened with extinction. And the ESA has been the international model law for how to save what the world has left.
Some of the ESA’s biggest struggles have happened in Montana, including fights over gray wolves, grizzly bears, bull trout and sage grouse. As the law reaches its 50-year anniversary, a group of reporters scanned the state to see how it’s working and what its future holds.
With me today is Rob Chaney, leader of the project, to give us a primer on 50 years of the law and what readers can expect from the reporting,
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Last April, Scott Snelson was quietly transferred from his post at the Spotted Bear District to a desk job at the Flathead National Forest headquarters at the behest of then Forest Supervisor Kurt Steele. Snelson finished his career as a staff officer of recreation, engineering, heritage and land. He retired a few weeks ago.
Snelson had a long career with the Forest Service before being named district ranger in 2017,
He expected to spend his final years of his career managing one of the most coveted ranger districts in the U.S. The Spotted Bear is more than 1 million acres, with 850,000 of those acres part of the 1.6 million-acre Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.
But instead of being a dream job, it became increasingly difficult under Steele’s leadership, Snelson told the Hungry Horse News in an interview last week.
That’s an excerpt from a piece written by Chris Peterson, editor of the Hungry Horse News, and he’s with me today to discuss his reporting.
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Thirty-one years ago, 1,321 mule deer were shot by hunters in Hunting District 502 — a record high.
In 2021, the total mule deer harvest in HD 502 was 477.
There are a number of hunting regulations being proposed for big game species in Montana that the Fish and Wildlife Commission has on its Dec. 14 meeting agenda.
Anyone interested in their hunting district or region should check out the online information to be informed about what is going on. Ideally, most hunters have already taken part in one of the many meetings offered around the state.
In looking at the proposals before the commission, Billings Gazette outdoor editor Brett French noted one common theme popping up across the state, declining mule deer numbers.
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In late October, what appears to be an adult male grizzly bear was captured on a game camera in the Missouri Breaks.
Although tracks of grizzlies have been found farther east, in the Winifred area, this was the first photographic evidence of a grizzly so far from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.
The photo is both surprising, in that a bear made it so far without getting into trouble with humans, and not surprising, because grizzlies have been pushing east for more than a decade.
What may help this bear survive is that it has reached a large swath of public land, including the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument and the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.
Here to talk about his reporting on the subject is Billings Gazette outdoor editor Brett French.
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It's no secret that glaciers in Montana and the world over are disappearing. But now a new study puts a number to the losses, at least for the Western U.S.
Of the West's 612 officially named glaciers, 52 no longer qualify as glaciers. That's according to a study released last month by Portland State University.
The research, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, delineates a glacier as a slowly moving mass of ice with an area of at least 25 acres, and a snowfield a stationary area of snow and ice that persists all year. The study found 52 glaciers have been demoted to snowfields.
Six of those 52 demoted glaciers are in Montana.
With me today to talk again about receding ice is Joshua Murdock, natural resources reporter and Rob Chaney, managing editor of the Missoulian newspaper.
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The Interagency Bison Management Program partners met at Chico Hot Springs Resort in early November. The partners include tribal representatives, state and federal officials.
When the Park Service attempted to change some language in the group’s adaptive management plan, the executive officer of the Montana Department of Livestock protested.
But, there’s a lot more to this story than this one meeting. At play are simmering tensions between the State of Montana and the Park Service over managing the migratory bison that call Yellowstone National Park home for most of the year.
With me today is Brett French, outdoors editor at the Billings Gazette, who attended the gathering and has reported on Yellowstone bison for years.
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For decades, the freight trains trundling over Marias Pass toward Glacier National Park and the Great Bear Wilderness along a 206-mile stretch of tracks between Shelby and Trego have posed a threat to the grizzlies living in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem grizzly bear recovery zone, particularly when a derailment causes a grain spill, or a train-killed deer or livestock carcass draws the bears onto the busy tracks.
And for decades, a host of state, federal and tribal wildlife management agencies, as well as non-governmental organizations and conservation groups, have worked with the railroad to mitigate the hazards to threatened and endangered species like grizzlies, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Three years ago, BNSF Railway Company proposed the most comprehensive solution yet when it applied to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for an Incidental Take Permit (ITP) and formally submitted a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) outlining measures it would take to reduce train-caused grizzly mortalities in the region.
But that hasn't happened yet.
With me today is Tristan Scott, the managing editor of the Flathead Beacon newspaper, who’s recently reported on the situation.
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