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A Snowflake’s Chance

10,000 Birds

The species that calls western Montana home is the black cottonwood, while plains and narrowleaf cottonwood call the rest of the state home. Humans have not helped. The result is a slow retreat of the cottonwoods, not readily noticed by a human with a human lifespan and attention-span unless we know what to look for.

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The “Birds” in the Brush

10,000 Birds

When you move on to Montana, you discover that there are worse things that one species of tiny screaming mammal tricking you each year as you try to cope with an influx of songbirds and a winterized memory bank that contains only Black-capped Chickadees and Dark-eyed Juncos (and only about half their calls at that.)

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Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans

10,000 Birds

In each instance they start with a striking anecdote — my particular favorite took place on the University of Montana campus, where in 1964 an American Crow learned to call and taunt stray dogs into causing perhaps the most adorable college riots of the decade.

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Noxious: Montana’s Battle With Spotted Knapweed, and What Birders Can Do

10,000 Birds

It’s bad enough to be an invasive species — the term shows a major fall in public esteem from the days when acclimatization was the rage. But as a descriptor, ‘invasive species’ doesn’t have a patch on ‘noxious weed’ Call something a noxious weed and there’s no doubt where you stand on it.

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Sage Grouse — The Other Kind of Listing

10,000 Birds

A week ago today, the federal government proposed a “threatened” listing for the Greater Sage Grouse in Nevada and California , as part of a larger study considering whether the species as a whole should be listed. Conservation Endangered Species Act Greater Sage Grouse sage-grouse'

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A Birder’s Guide to The Wilderness Act

10,000 Birds

And it prohibits human infrastructure, e.g. , roads, buildings, dams, and pipelines, etc. There is also a research institute dedicated to wilderness: the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute is an interagency facility located at the University of Montana.

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Snow in the Air

10,000 Birds

And yet, perhaps ironically, the biggest sign of spring in a Montana March is when the skies fill with white. Snow Geese overgrazing their breeding grounds, displacing other Arctic-breeding species and setting themselves up for a fall.