“Cows not Condos” is a popular bumper sticker seen across Montana on everything from flatbed ranch trucks in Miles City to grocery getters in Missoula. The slogan captures one of the few sentiments all Montanans agree on: we value our ranchlands over our subdivisions. Senate Bill 115 seems to forget that by creating unnecessary bureaucratic red tape and trampling all over private property rights. Read more here from the Independent Record...

Prominent research ecologist Dr. Paul Hessburg began his career decades ago as a U.S. Forest Service entomologist, studying the insects that kill trees on the grandest scale. Over the years, Hessburg broadened his scope, delving deeper into the greatest force for ecological change on Earth: fire and the age we live now in, the Age of Megafire, or the Pyrocene. Listen to this fascinating deep dive into how we got here and where we must go – if we hope to survive.   To get the absolute most ...

Despite our efforts to educate lawmakers about the importance of the New River Gorge National River to hunters, we were unable to guarantee permanent protection for hunting access. As of last night, hunters now worry about the uncertainty of accessing 4,385 spectacular acres in the lower gorge area of the New River Gorge in West Virginia. The debate around a designation change of the New River Gorge National River began in the summer of 2019. Spurred on by other recreation users, the move to ...

Balancing the public’s right to know with potentially sensitive data about wildlife is the subject of a bill from an East Helena lawmaker. Democratic Sen. Jill Cohenour’s Senate Bill 2 builds off of legislation passed in 2019 that banned the use of the exact location of GPS-monitored wildlife obtained through state open records law for the purpose of hunting. The newest bill provides additional language for the release of wildlife location data by Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks by ...

  BY JANET GEORGE A hunter must earn the privilege of experiencing the rugged grandeur of mountain goat country. Each rocky step makes you more appreciative of the mountain goat’s perseverance in a world of extremes. Extreme terrain, extreme wind and extreme cold all combine to make goat country one of the most spectacular and severe environments in North America. Such extremes have molded the mountain goat, as author/biologist Douglas Chadwick dubbed “a beast the color of winter.” And ...