} WM^ July, 1960 — Montana Fish and Game Department Official Publication Information-Education Division X Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from IVIontana State Library http://www.archive.org/details/montanawildlifejuly1960mont Governor. STATE OF MONTANA J. Hugo Aronson Chairman Vice Chairman. Secretary. MONTANA FISH AND GAME COMMISSION H. W. Black, Poison John T. Hanson, Sr., Malta E. G. Leipheimer Jr., Butte Ralph D. Shipley, Miles City E. J. Skibby, Lewistown Walter J. Everin DIVISION DIRECTORS Walter J. Everin Don L. Brown Frank H. Dunkle William Alvord Robert F. Cooney Orville W. Lewis R. H. Tumbull Director Deputy Director Chief, Information and Education.... Chief of Fisheries Management Chief of Game Management Chief Law Enforcement Officer Chief Clerk Editor — V. E. Craig Cover Photo — R. F. Cooney TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Trail Trout III.. 4 More Hunting For Everyone 8 Fisher Are Returned to Montana Forests 16 Your Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit 19 Montana's Stream Rating Map 28 McKee Print. Bill Sweet was one of the few men still to remember the squeak and rattle of horse-drawn stage coaches. For his sev- enty-six years he watched the near wilderness of Montana give way before an ever encroaching tide of humanity, the wilder- ness invaded, stage trails covered with pavement. His also were memories of market hunters, unrestricted shooting of wildlife, and the ups and downs in game numbers. Bill served Montana on the Fish and Game Commission for eight years. His intimate knowledge gained from keen interest and years of observation were graciously shared and diligently applied. He shall long be remembered as both an ardent conserva- tionist and a good friend among men. By Frank Dunkle, Chief, Information & Education Division Two men stood in the cold white wilderness with a strange pack on the ground between them. It consisted of a scale and a long metal tube. What were these men doing high in the back country on a cold winter day? They were making an annual snow survey that woud give the U. S. Geological Sur- vey and the Soil Conservation Service information necessary to predict the water available for summer use in Montana this year. These men will ac- tually weigh the snow. The weight will indicate the moisture content. As it stands, water may be critical in the coming months. The snow packs indicate we are slightly below normal in water available for all of the uses in Montana. Water is rapidly becoming one of the most controversial natural resources in this nation. Confusion and conflict hinder wise management of this very necessary and important resource. Water laws are a hodgepodge and it is one of the most difficult fields to practice for attorneys. Many states have over- hauled their laws within the last five years. Others have made some changes. Many more are undecided whether to overhaul or make any changes at all to their water laws. Problems in water range from international difficulties down to two men with conflictiug claims for a few second feet of water on very small creeks. Critical problems are developing in the areas of irrigational, industrial, lecreational and domestic use of water. Many times irrigation draw-down on streams causes a complete dry-up of the area. This of course complicates the fisheries management program. With the growth of industry in the state, more and more water is being channeled into this use. The water is being used in processing as well as to carry away waste products. Recreational use of water has increased many-fold. More and more boats are being used. People are swimming, water skiing and, of course, fishing. Domestic use of water with our ever-increasing population becomes more critical each day. Water is used throughout our cities in our everyday needs as well as the vehicle to carry away the waste products. One of the major problems facing Montanans today is not the amount of water, but the quality of water. Pollution comes from three major sources — agri- cultural, domestic and industrial areas. Agricultural pollution consists of heavy siltation due to overgrazing and improper irrigation processes. Domestic sew- age, of course, is the result of dumping raw sewage from cities into the streams. Industrial pollution is the dumping of waste products from industry into the rivers. New findings from research are helping us to solve many of these prob- lems. New techniques of irrigation are helping to reduce the amount of topsoil carried away through improper and inadequate agricultural processes. Do- mestic pollution is receiving a great deal of notice throughout the state. Many of our large cities are now rapidly constructing sewage treatment plants and reducing the amount of raw sewage being dumped into our streams. Industry is placing a great deal of emphasis on research pointed toward reducing indus- trial pollution. With a reduction of pollution, and an understanding of water needs and uses, Montana will be on the way to solving the water problems of the state. By Tom Smith, Education Assistant (Following is the third in a series oi articles about the Montana Fish and Game Department's high mountain lake surveys. These surveys are conducted each summer to secure basic in- formation for the management oi remote lakes.) After unloading the horses from the truck, hobbling and feeding them, we built our fire and studied a map of the area which we would be rid- ing through. We had driven twelve miles northwest from Wisdom to the end of a dirt road. Tommy Schurr, long-time fisheries employee of the department, knew most of the Big Hole country, but had never been into the Thompson, Howell and Hope Creek drainages before. According to our plans we would survey Lion, Mosquito, Crystal and Continental lakes in the Thompson Creek drain- age, Mystic Lake on Howell Creek, Hope Lake and two small unnamed lakes on Hope Creek. Thompson Creek Lakes and Mystic Lake lie on the east side of the Con- tinental Divide in the Anaconda-Pint- lar Wilderness Area and northwest of Wisdom. They are a port of the Big Hole River drainage. Hope and the two unnamed lakes lie just over the mountains on the west side of the divide in the Bitterroot drainage. The nearest — Lion Lake on Thompson Creek — is about seven miles by- trail from the end of the road, and is the first one you would reach by the Thompson Creek trail, (see map) Mosquito, Crystal and Continental lakes are scattered upstream from there at intervals of one or two miles. About two miles north, on the main Forest Service trail from Crystal and over a long ridge, lies the Howell Creek drainage with Mystic Lake its source. From townspeople and Forest Serv- ice personnel at Wisdom and from sportsmen groups in central Mon- tana, we had heard that fishing was excellent in Lion and Mystic lakes but poor in the others. The Montana Fish and Game Department receives numerous requests each year to stock high mountain lakes — -either because of poor fishing or to sustain good fishing. The policy of the department is to survey lakes before making stocking recommendations in order to get a knowledge of their capa- bilities— that is, their abilities to sus- tain adequate fish numbers, their spawning facilities and other quali- ties which would influence fish num- bers and fish condition. In addition, samples of fish are collected to get an idea of what fish are in the lakes to begin with. We discovered all of these things that night and decided to pack into Lion Lake the next morning, set gill nets in it, and possibly set up our base camp there. It looked like a good location for a camp from which we could take daily trips to survey the other lakes. The next morning, after an easy ride through rocky, lodgepole pine- covered country, we arrived at Lion Lake. It lies in a pocket of steep, timbered ridges at an elevation of 6,500 to 7,000 feet. Most of its mar- gins are rimmed with sedge grass meadows extending back from the shore 10 to 50 yards. Parts of the shore that appears to be solid ground are actually floating bogs. They will support a man if he is walking; but we found that if we stood in one place very long we would sink through the mat of moss and sedges. For this reason anglers fish from log rafts rather than stand on the bogs. Although horse feed was limited, we decided to set up base camp here. Using a collapsible rubber life raft we set gill nets to collect a sample of fish. The sample would indicate fish numbers and provide age and growth information. After checking water depths throughout the lake and taking water samples, we drew up a map showing the lake and surrounding area, vegetation, and inlet and outlet streams. The map also showed fish spawning areas. Our fish samples showed that Lion Lake contained thin, snaky rainbow trout with large heads. The situation was one of too many trout, so further stocking of hatchery fish was not recommended. Fish foods seemed abundant for a lake so heavily popu- lated with fish and there were ade- quate spawning facilities to sustain high fish numbers. The lake varies in depth from 30 to 40 feet except for narrow shallow areas near shore. For the next five days we made daily trips to the other lakes in the area, gathering the survey informa- tion. Mystic and Crystal Lakes were quite similar to Lion — large numbers of unusually thin rainbow yet ap- parently plenty of food and adequate spawning areas. They both have ex- tensive areas of over 30-foot depths and narrow shallow areas around their margins. All three are beautiful high mountain lakes that would benefit by heavier fishing pressure. More fish taken out of the lakes could very well result in larger, healthier fish. Mosquito Lake is a very small body of water lying off the trail about one-half mile through heavy timber and windfalls. Because of its size and inaccessibility it is not worthy of a plant of hatchery fish. Continental Lake is a very shal- low, rocky-bottomed lake whose only water source is melted snow. It con- tains no fish and likely could sup- port none through a winter. Just over the divide and two to three miles south from the Thompson Creek and Howell Creek Lakes are Hope Lake and two small unnamed lakes on Hope Creek. One of the unnamed lakes is merely a very shallow stagnant pond which could not support trout, and the other — although it would be suitable for a few trout — is too small and inacces- sible to warrant planting with hatch- ery trout. Hope Lake, lying under the west rim of the Continental Divide, is sur- rounded on three sides by steep cliffs. On the west of the lake is a sharp drop-off to the East Fork of the Bitterroot River and a magnificent view of the Bitterroot Mountains. Most of the lake is 40 to 50 feet deep, but there are some shallow areas near the shore. At the time of the survey there were a few rainbow trout in Hope Lake. These averaged about 20 inches long and were in good condition. From the survey, fishery workers determined that there was little or no reproduction of fish in Hope Lake and that a plant of hatchery rainbow trout would pro- duce some very good fishing for several years. A month after the survey the department planted ap- proximately 2,700 fingerling rainbow in the lake by airplane. After completing the field survey of these groups of lakes we packed up our equipment and survey data, including fish-scale samples, water samples and maps. Riding back through the rugged wilderness to- ward the Big Hole Valley — typical of Montana's wealth of mountain lake country — our only regret was that we did not have the time to do any fish sampling by rod and reel. Sportsmen who enjoy a touch of the wild with their trout fishing will find it by packing into the Thomp- son, Howell and Hope Creek lakes. We saw mountain goats and elk and frequent black bear and moose sign. We surprised a mink on the shore of Lion Lake and often passed within a few steps of blue grouse that stood motionless in their naive "I see you but you don't see me" poses. When he is in country like this, a sports- man knows that he has gained much more than the fish he has cought. Anaco nda ■ Pintlar Wilderness Area River SCALE 1 MILE to Wisdom 14 miles MORE HUNTING FOR EVERYONE By Harold Titus, Conservation Ed., "Field & Stream" Reprinted by permission of author. Some time ago a Michigan sports- man whom we'll call Clarence Mc- Bang went rabbit hunting. Clarence loved rabbit hunting. The year be- fore the Michigan rabbit season had run 78 days and Clarence had been out every possible day of it. This year, the season had been lengthened to 104 days — enough, you'd think, to delight the heart of a real, serious rabbit hunter. But Clarence, as he clomped out at down on the season's first day, was not a happy man. Clarence, as he clomped out at dawn, was not a happy man. The trouble with Clarence was that he was a thinker. What's more, as a lifelong rabbit hunter, he had strong opinions about his favorite sport, based on his own experience. And Clarence was sure that this new season, a third again as long as the old one, was too much. Left to himself, Clarence would have stuck to the old season. But he had to recognize bitterly that there would be no sense in that. With everybody else hunting 104 days, he wouldn't accomplish any- thing by limiting himself to 78. Over that long a season too many rabbits would be killed, too few would be left — and where would his hunting be next year? But if rabbit hunting was going to be ruined anyway, he might as well get his share. With some mis- givings, Clarence set forth. His season was successful, if not joyful. On one tract where he'd got 12 rabbits the year before, he got 15 in the longer season, and every- where else the results were about the same. It ought to have been the best rabbit hunting he'd ever had, but Clarence couldn't enjoy it. He looked at the extra rabbits in his bag and shook his head, convinced no good would come of it. More rabbits this year — fewer next year. It stood to reason. Clarence had never met Burton Lauckhart of the State of Washing- ton's Department of Game, who might have told him the extraor- dinary case of Whidbey Island. 8 Whidbey is a long, narrow island, about three miles by 50, in Puget Sound. Twenty years ago the straw- berry farmers on the island rose in wrath and demanded loudly of the state game commission and every- one else within earshot that the deer on Whidbey Island be eliminated. Under the state's buck-only law, which applied to Whidbey as else- where, the deer had become a men- ace, said the farmers, consuming large quantities of strawberries with- out paying for them. The deer, said the farmers, must go. The game commission considered the situation. The annual take of deer on Whidbey was only about 100, the deer herd there probably only about 1,000. Isolated as it was, the island could be given special treatment in the law without affect- ing hunting anywhere else. Th,e game commissioners shrugged. All right, they said, open up the hunt- ing. Let Whidbey have an any-deer law. That'll do it. The next season, the deer take on Whidbey was 380. The game com- missioners smiled, satisfied. The deer were half gone already. The next year the take was 400. This time the commissioners did not smile. According to the numbers, there should be hardly any deer left. Yet reports indicated there were a lot left. The commissioners waited another year. The take was close to 500. Frowning, the commissioners inves- tigated Whidbey, to find out what in the world was going on. They found the deer herd in fine shape. In the 17 years since then, the har- vest has averaged more than 500 a year. The herd is still in fine shape. There is no report on the shape of the strawberry farmers. With hunting as good as it is, maybe nobody cares any more. If Clarence had heard this remark- able tale, he would have been aston- ished. But he probably wouldn't have wholly believed it. As a horse- sense thinker, he would have been sure there was some gimmick. How can you go on shooting 500 deer a year out of a small herd, stepping the kill up to five times the accus- tomed rate, and still have as many deer left as before? Obviously, you can't. It's like one of those fairy tales, with a magic box or salt shaker or whatever it is that keeps on pouring out and never gets any emptier. Fantasy, for chil- dren. But Clarence was no child. He didn't want fantasy, he wanted hunting. Now it happened that one of Clar- ence's friends was an enthusiastic bird shooter. Eager to try something new, he'd been out to Nevada to hunt chukar partridge. Great sport, he said, when he came back. But then, keeping track of news from Nevada, he got worried. There was a drought there. Chukars, he explained to Clarence, like dry coun- try, but they don't like drought — can't survive it, in fact. Shooting ought to be closed down, he said, until the drought was over. 9 Clarence figured it like one of those fairy tales, with a magic box that keeps on pouring out and never gets any emptier. The Nevada authorities seemed to agree. They closed down chukar shooting — but not entirely. For some reason or other, they left it open in three counties. Clarence's friend was good and mad. One of the open counties was the very place he liked to hunt. Those fatheaded fools, he told Clar- ence indignantly, were going to ruin the shooting there. He was so sore that for three years, while the drought lasted, he wouldn't go near Nevada. Then shooting was opened up again and he went back to the old place, just to see what had be- come of it. The shooting was fine. Clarence's friend couldn't understand it at all. It the places where shooting had been closed down it was good too, but no better than in the places where it had remained open. It didn't make sense, but there it was. Back home, the friend told Clarence about it, shaking his head in baffle- ment. Clarence couldn't make head or tail of it either. The puzzle annoyed him, like a bothersome tooth. He couldn't let it alone. He knew what he knew and this was impossible — and yet it was a fact. There had to be an explanation. For his own peace of mind, Clar- ence set out to find it. He began reading conservation reports. As a practical man, he'd never paid much attention to them before. They turned his world upside down. 10 He found, for instance, a report on a seven-year study made by two men of the Arizona Game and Fish Commission on G a m b e 1' s quail. Twenty-five years ago this quail was Arizona's top-ranking game bird, with a limit of 15 a day and a season of two months. Then, rather sudden- ly— within a few years — the number of birds dropped sharply. Shooting was tightened up more and more severely until it was vir- tually stopped altogether. But the birds didn't come back. Something was wrong. The game commission assigned two men to find out what. The men set up study areas. Shoot- ing was allowed in some, not in others. Careful arrangements were set up for census, for frequent check- ing in season and out. The work was detailed, exact and thorough. Of every 1,000 birds counted in Sep- tember, hunters — where hunting was allowed — took an average of about 200. Oddly — to Clarence — hunting pressure made practically no differ- ence in the number of birds taken. In one case a rise in the number of hunters from 277 to 510 - — nearly double — brought an increase in the total bag of only 3 percent. Losses to natural causes, sickness and predators, were something else again; these accounted for more birds than the hunters did. Going a step further, the game commission men trapped birds after the hunting season was over, to bring the population down to just half of preseason. The next year the population was right back up again where it had been before. Plainly, overhunting wasn't cut- ting down the quail. Throughout the study the bird density was never higher on the unhunted land than it was on the land where hunting was encouraged. Whatever had cut down the quail, the hunters weren't to blame. For In places where shooting had been closed down, hunting was no better than in places where it had remained open. 11 years they had done without sport, thinking they were helping the birds. But in fact they hadn't helped the birds at all, and could have gone right on shooting without hurting the quail population — even if their aver- age of hits had been twice as high as it was. Pouring over this report and others like it, Clarence began to sense an inadequacy in his arithmetic. He saw reports on deer, quail, squirrels — all kinds of game — and essentially all of them were alike. Gradually he got the hang of a new way of thinking. Start with 1,000 deer, take away any number up to 500 or so, and the following year you'll still have 1,000 deer. Reproductive capa- city, of course — the old well-known urge, in full operation. Clarence had no trouble understanding that. What he couldn't grasp so easily was that if you took none away you'd have no more in a year than if you took away 500. You might even have fewer. Where was good old reproductive capacity in such a case? Take what happened in Colorado when state officials decided that their mountain sheep might be ready for some hunting. Such an uproar of protest went up that the officials didn't dare to issue permits. The sheep remained fully protected. And instead of flourishing and multiply- ing, they all but died out completely under no hunting at all. Take the case of bobwhite quail in Ohio, where the bird has been on the protected list, no hunting per- mitted, for years. Are there more quail in Ohio than in the neighbor- ing states, all of which have open quail seasons? The answer is. No. According to expert estimates, there are probably fewer quail in Ohio, per unit of land area, than in the states next door to it. The single most important factor in game population isn't whether hunting is allowed or not, or even the old reproductive urge; it's what is called carrying capacity. Clarence became used to a new kind of arithmetic. A tract of land can feed so many deer, or quail, or pheasants, or squir- rels, or whatever. Put that many on it, and everything's fine. But leave them alone there and you'll have trouble. The reproductive urge works, only to bang its head against the ceiling of the food supply. With not enough food to go around, weak animals sicken and die. As pressure against the limit of food supply continues, females, ill-nourished, bear fewer young, and often the young they bear are runty and deformed. The longer the pressure keeps on, the worse it is for all, until at last even 12 the reproductive urge itself may weaken and all but atrophy through frustration. If that happens, your game is gone — and all without any hunter ever firing a shot. Most hunters, like Clarence, see t h e problem backward. They're afraid that if they shoot too much game the game population will be diminished. They ought to be more afraid of diminishing the population by shooting too little. The ability of game to reproduce, where carrying capacity doesn't limit it, is astonishing. When chukars were released in the State of Wash- ington, according to Burton Lauck- hart, they increased so fast that much of their suitable range was saturated within five years. Much of the same thing happened when Hungarian partridge were in- troduced in Saskatchewan. But once they hit the ceiling, the Huns began to fade again, even though they were only lightly gunned. In Pennsylvania and some other eastern states, 20 to 30 years ago, logging operations suddenly and greatly increased good habitat for deer. The result was an almost explosive upward surge in the deer population. It hit the food-supply ceiling soon, like the Huns in Sas- katchewan, and began to fade. "Too much hunting!" cried sportsmen in a state of great alarm. But the real trouble was that there hadn't been enough hunting to keep the habitat from being over-browsed. And unless there's more hunting, the deer herd will keep on going down. Consider the pheasant. As any sportsmen knows, the life of a hen pheasant on a game farm is about five years. Taking that figure, a man with good sound arithmetic, like Clar- ence McBang, can "prove" that a kill of 20 percent a year will just keep the population in balance. Right? No. On a range whose carrying capac- ity is fully occupied, the life of a hen pheasant is not five years, but one. This has nothing to do with losses by hunting. Assume there is no hunting. As- sume each hen raises two young a year, one of these a hen. Increase of her population at end of one year: 100 percent. If you assume the orig- inal birds and all their descendants live, the population increase in five years would be 1,600 percent. But the carrying capacity of the range was full to begin with. There- fore, this explosion never gets going. The first hen bom, together with its mother bird, makes one too many. By the end of a year, before any more are born, one must die. So your population turnover per year is not 20 percent, the way Clarence figured it out. It's 100 percent. And the amount hunters ought to take each year isn't 20 percent, but 50 percent — in order to keep the popu- lation stable. The way you figure the proper harvest for hunters to take is not by considering the life span of the game 13 under ideal, noncompetitive condi- tions. The way you figure it is by combining reproductive capacity. If the reproductive capacity is 20 per- cent a year, the life span on the actual wild range will be five years, no matter what it may be for the same animal on a game farm, and the correct harvest will be 20 per- cent a year to keep the population in balance. What it all boils down to is that you can't stockpile game. If you don't harvest enough, nature will. You get it when it's there, or you don't get it at all. Around the country, game biolo- gists are trying to drum this fact into the heads of hunters. It's a tough job. Too many, like Clarence McBang, just can't grasp that the way to have more game next year is to take more, not less, now. Others do grasp this all right but hesitate to come out and fight for more hunt- ing. Some of them have been bat- tered before, by well-meaning ani- mal lovers who apparently think that if it weren't for hunters all ani- mals would live forever. These are vocal people, and their appeal to sentiment is strong. But they're contradicted by the facts of wildlife, and more often than not the protection they demand for wildlife does the game itself more harm than good. Time and again, when game man- agement men hove proposed longer hunting seasons, or shooting doe deer as well as bucks, the first to oppose them hove been sportsmen, who either don't understand the facts themselves, or are reluctant to stand up openly and assert them. Clarence McBang, beginning to see the light, took another look at his new rabbit-hunting season. In the 78-day seasons the rabbit popu- lation in Rose Lake region of Michi- gan ran from 16 to 84 per hundred ^3 acres, with an average of 41 just before the season began. In the four years of 104-day seasons, the population per hundred acres ran from 34 to 50, with a preseason aver- age of 42. In the 78-day seasons the hunters' average take of rabbits per hundred acres was 12, or 28 percent of the preseason population. In the longer seasons hunters averaged 15 rabbits per hundred acres, or 38 percent of the preseason number. Better hunt- ing than ever before - — and just as many rabbits to hunt next year. Clarence was convinced. When Michigan's game management men suggested that still more rabbits ought to be taken, he didn't fly off the handle. The season was length- 14 ened to 131 days. With a calm smile Clarence went out to enjoy it. At last report, he was having a fine time. That's the way most sportsmen have to learn — by seeing results with their own eyes. There is cer- tainly nothing wrong with that. It is, in fact, a very good thing. Game biologists, being human, can make mistakes too and the observations of good sportsmen can do much to correct them quickly, before they do any serious damage. But it is important that sportsmen see honestly and clearly, that they look at the facts and not at their own ideas of what "must" be so, or at their fears of what somebody else might say about them. There's an immense amount of iact, and more coming in all the time. Most of it contradicts flatly what the majority of sportsmen think about game sup- plies. And the longer sportsmen shut their eyes to the facts or refuse to stand up and call attention to them, the worse things will be for the sportsmen and for the game they think they're protecting. If recent recommendations by wild- life researchers are heeded by the officials who make our hunting regu- lations, there will be proposals in many parts of the country to lengthen seasons or increase limits of game. Among the men who know the facts, the view is almost universal that we are not hunting enough to keep our game supply at its best and most plentiful. But when these proposals are made, what will sportsmen do? That's the question and the right answer to it is worth a lot more than $64. Clarence McBang, for one, knows it now, after considerable self-educa- tion. If enough others recognize it and will say so, we can all have more and better hunting than we've ever had before, not just now but in all the years to come. 15 ^id^£^ ;4%e l^etcci^ecC tO' '7ft(^^ta^a ^