>> male narrator: Montana.

People come here for the stunning natural beauty... [sweeping orchestral music] ♪ ♪ Wide open spaces... ♪ ♪ Recreational opportunities... ♪ ♪ And abundant wildlife.

♪ ♪ In the years following Lewis and Clark, people also came to Montana territory, but for entirely different reasons.

They came for fur and hides, gold, silver, and copper.

They came for free land and a new life, but not without a price, because as human activity increased, Montana's wildlife was exploited, its habitat altered, and many native species began a rapid decline.

In time, Montanans responded to this challenge with determination and creativity, hard work, and hard science.

Over the decades, landowners and hunters, citizens, government agencies, and universities cooperated in a wide-ranging wildlife restoration effort, an effort that spread across the state with a single goal in mind: replenishing what had been lost.

This is the story of a people's dedication to reestablish Montana's wildlife; a story of exploitation and depletion, need and greed; ultimately, a story of restoration, renewal, and rebirth; the story of how Montana's wildlife was brought back from the brink.

In the early 1800s, the Lewis and Clark and David Thompson expeditions explored the area now recognized as Montana.

They found prairies, valleys, and riversides teeming with wildlife.

>> When the expedition entered Montana and passed through, they certainly must have been very impressed with the many vistas that they would see.

You had the rolling Plains of eastern Montana, the Missouri River Breaks, and the magnificent Rocky Mountains.

When they got to the headwaters of the Missouri, they certainly must have been impressed with the vast and diverse landscape as they overlooked the scene.

They observed large herds of buffalo, elk, antelope.

In addition, they observed bighorn sheep and quite a few grizzly bears, so this was really a wildlife utopia as they passed through.

>> narrator: The news of this plentiful wildlife soon reached trappers, traders, and mountain men representing the dominant companies of the day: the North West Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the Missouri, Rocky Mountain, and American Fur Companies.

This great abundance was the catalyst that opened the American West, but it was also a magnet, attracting a population surge that led to decades of abuse.

Beaver and buffalo were the first species exploited.

People's efforts to stay warm toward the end of the Little Ice Age, from 1450 to 1850, brought beaver hats and Indian-tanned buffalo robes to the height of fashion in both Europe and America.

Soon, larger and more numerous parties of trappers and hunters descended on Montana.

By 1835, the food requirements of the fur trading industry and local residents began to have a noticeable impact on wildlife populations.

During the next 15 years, competition between Great Britain and America for control of the Oregon Territory decimated fur resources west of the Divide.

The Hudson Bay Company in particular ordered its trappers to create a fur desert in the Pacific Northwest.

The beaver was trapped to near extinction.

>> "The direct and best protection we can have in opposition is keeping the country closely hunted.

A first step the American government will take is through their Indian traders, and if the country becomes exhausted in furbearing animals, they can have no inducement to proceed further."

>> narrator: As these natural assets declined, trappers and traders began to abandon Montana.

By the 1850s, the fur trade was over.

But right on its heels, a new enterprise increased the human population once again and once again intensified the pressure on Montana wildlife: gold.

It was discovered at Gold Creek, Montana Territory, in 1854 and spawned a rush of prospectors.

Mining camps sprung up almost overnight: Bannack, Virginia City, Last Chance Gulch, Butte.

In their quest for this elusive treasure, prospectors labored feverishly.

Creek bottoms were literally turned upside down.

These rich, riparian areas that sheltered many species of wildlife were replaced with piles of gravel.

In the boisterous mining camps, the demand for meat led to heavy subsistence in market hunting.

Deer and antelope sold for $1 each.

The price of elk varied, depending on the size and quality of the animal.

Ducks and grouse brought $2.75 a dozen, and geese were 75¢ each.

Local game was severely impacted.

>> And much of the wildlife was really starting to take a dip in the late 1800s, and I think a lot of that was because of market hunting, not only for subsistence, but for sale, for livelihood.

>> They had to pretty much live off wild game, those old-timers.

>> narrator: During the gold rush, timber resources also declined.

Entire hillsides were logged to supply wood for smelter furnaces and mine shaft supports, wood to build homesteads and heat them, wood from forested wildlife habitat.

At the height of the Montana gold rush, 1,000 cords a day disappeared from the Butte/Anaconda area alone.

In 1862, the federal Homestead Act granted free ownership of 160 acres to anyone occupying or cultivating western land for a period of five years.

People came in droves.

Montana counted more homesteaders than any other territory or state.

Its population grew from 39,000 in 1880 to 143,000 in 1890.

By the turn of the century, 243,000 souls called Montana home.

To accommodate this massive influx, primitive wagon roads quickly developed, connecting mining towns and homesteads with the outside world, heavily used by oxen, mule, and horse-pulled wagons.

Wildlife habitat took another hit.

The first steamboat navigated to the eastern border of present-day Montana in 1832.

By the 1860s, steamships were common along the upper Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.

These wide vessels carried as much as 500 tons of freight on as little as 50 inches of water.

The steamboats required wood for fuel, up to 30 cords a day.

Along the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, wood-cutting operations set up shop and, in some areas, stripped the cottonwood groves clean.

On board, the crew and many passengers hunted wildlife.

>> "We saw another big band of buffalo, thousands of them, crossing the river going south, and the boat was headed for them and struck about the middle of the herd.

Then the wheel was reversed in order to hold the boat amongst them, and everybody commenced to to shooting with pistol, shotgun, or rifle.

Three or four cows were hauled aboard, and this ended the slaughter."

--John Napton, 1867.

>> narrator: The arrival of the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific railroads in the 1880s added another layer of transportation to the mix.

[train whistle blowing] They were followed by the Great Northern and Milwaukee Road, and Montana lost a little more of its frontier isolation.

Wagon roads, steamships, railroads--these shipping and commerce links spawned an extensive hide-hunting industry.

Throughout Montana, elk and deer hides were actually used as currency.

>> "It was said that deer hides in those days passed as currency.

The settled price for each hide was 25¢.

They were accepted at the grocery store and the cobbler's shop or at the restaurant or in the newspaper office as the currency of the country."

--J.M.

Kennedy.

>> narrator: So pervasive was this assault that buckskins, or bucks, eventually passed into general parlance as meaning a dollar.

Yet the sheer abundance of animals was reassuring.

Most people believed Montana's wildlife resource would last forever, but the fate of the American bison quickly changed this perception.

[gunshot] Tens of millions of bison once roamed between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains from Saskatchewan to Texas.

>> When Lewis reentered Montana, he traveled down to the Sun River, and as he stood on a little prominence and looked over the landscape, he observed that there was a massive herd of buffalo.

He estimated that he would see not less than 10,000 buffalo in a two-mile circle.

>> narrator: For the Plains Indians, the buffalo were not only a major food and clothing source, they were the foundation of their culture.

>> The buffalo was, in fact, everything to the Crow Indians as they were to other Plains Indians: food, clothing, shelter, spirituality, and ways of worship, and held in high esteem, so it was important to all these people around here, including the Flathead, the Blackfeet, the Shoshone, the Crow, the Hidatsa, all these Indians in the Plains, including those over the mountain who would come over the mountain to hunt buffalo.

>> narrator: In the 1860s and '70s, Indian-tanned buffalo robes were still fashionable as warm outerwear, but as the Industrial Revolution reached a full head of steam, it transformed rawhides into mass-produced leather goods such as shoes and drive belts.

The rising demand for hides resulted in even more buffalo hunting.

The devastation of the vast bison herds was one of the most wasteful exploitations of a natural resource in American history.

It is estimated that only 5% of the buffalo meat taken was actually consumed.

>> "Buffalo all around us.

Huffman and Eugene couldn't resist the temptation to have a run, so they crossed the Rosebud, went for a bunch that was grazing along the edge of a ridge.

[gunshot] After a lively chase across the benchland, they killed one.

Only took the tongue, 'cause we had all the fresh meat that we could use."

[gunshot] >> We talk about the disappearance of the buffalo, and among the Crow, it is told that it was almost an overnight thing.

They would go to the places where they usually found them.

They were not there.

They would try to follow the trail, and then sometimes they'd find a lot of them slaughtered and abandoned, the meat no good.

Just the hides were gone.

And in their place, they found more white men, more settlers, more frontiersmen who seemed to kill the wild game wantonly, almost without any shame.

>> narrator: As the nonnative population of Montana continued to grow, many more people were living off the land.

Market hunting supplied commercial meat markets with additional wild game.

Hide hunting was pervasive.

>> "In many parts of the territory, deer, antelope, and elk are openly killed for the hides only and no part of the carcass used for food.

If this wholesale slaughter is to continue, the game of the territory will soon be exhausted."

>> narrator: By the late 1800s, cattle grazing was widespread in Montana.

Large livestock companies from all over the West ran herds on open rangeland throughout the year.

And like the introduced diseases that afflicted the Native Americans, domestic cattle infected vulnerable native wildlife with maladies such as anthrax, Pasteurella, and hoof-and-mouth disease.

In 1890, a large sheep industry was developing in eastern Montana.

By 1910, it numbered over 5 million animals.

Profound changes in rangeland vegetation accompanied the domestic livestock industry.

Big game populations continued their decline over much of the state.

By the turn of the century, the result of all this change added up to large-scale alteration of wildlife habitat and a diminished wildlife presence.

The once seemingly endless buffalo herds were gone.

Deer, elk, and antelope survived only in remote areas or in remnant groups.

The Audubon mountain sheep were near extinction.

Subsistence and market hunting still prevailed.

Many species of Montana wildlife were in desperate trouble.

Time was running out.

The Montana Territorial Legislature began passing laws with the intention of preserving wildlife.

The first conservation law of 1869 closed the hunting season on introduced game birds.

In 1872, hunting seasons were imposed on big game.

The legislature authorized the first Fish and Game board in 1895.

But for the most part, these laws were so confusing and poorly written, the settlers ignored them.

The few scattered county game wardens, who traveled by horseback over districts that averaged 18,000 square miles, could simply not enforce them.

People became concerned.

National periodicals, like American Sportsman, Forest and Stream, and Field & Stream appeared on newsstands.

They were published by and for sport hunters with a new priority: wildlife conservation.

Sportsmen's clubs dedicated to wildlife conservation also began forming.

The Boone and Crockett Club, the first national organization, was created in 1887.

Montana sportsmen's clubs were organized as early as 1877: the Helena Rifle Club, the Deer Lodge Rod and Gun Club, the Bozeman and Butte gun clubs.

Although begun for social and sporting purposes, these clubs also worked to improve wildlife protective measures and enforce game laws.

The hunt, fair chase, and honor among sportsmen were their core principles.

As the 20th century drew near, a conservation consciousness was dawning, and one of conservation's main proponents just happened to be president of the United States.

>> "The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method."

>> 100 years after Jefferson's presidency, Theodore Roosevelt is our president.

And Theodore Roosevelt enters the White House, and wildlife on this continent is almost stripped clean, because our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, none of those addressed fish and wildlife.

And during his 7 1/2 years as president, he set aside 230 million acres, and they were rich in wildlife refuges, wildlife management areas, game ranges.

It didn't happen with Roosevelt alone, but I don't think there's any figure in American history that is more responsible for the assets we have and the cultural attitude we have and the wildlife that's running around on this continent right now than was Theodore Roosevelt.

>> narrator: The Montana legislature also picked up the pace of its conservation efforts.

It consolidated the county game warden model, and Governor John Rickards appointed W.F.

Scott as the first state Fish and Game warden in 1901.

This marked the beginning of a statewide system of officers enforcing fish and game harvest laws.

Nonresident hunting licenses were established to help fund wildlife programs.

The fee was $25 for big game and $15 for game birds.

Montana residents paid nothing, until 1905, when a hunting license cost $1 per family.

>> And this letter is dated 10/2/16, 1916.

And in this letter he says, >> "Glad to hear there was a lot of ducks in Michigan, but our nonresidents license in Montana is $25, and as you know as a resident, the license is only $1."

>> narrator: The legislature also created a large number of game preserves throughout the state.

These preserves were established with good intentions, but did not take into account the biology of the species they were trying to protect.

Most were abolished in later years.

>> All the game preserves that they had created during that period became a management dilemma.

Every time you wanted to open up an area, why, it was, half of it was game preserve.

>> narrator: Liberal bounty payments were also instituted by the legislature to save livestock.

Killing predators was wrongly equated with saving game.

Coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, lynx, and raptors were trapped, shot, and poisoned by federal and state trappers, hunters, and sportsmen's clubs.

>> And then, of course, they saw they had to protect it, and then, of course, they tried to eliminate all the predators and found out that was a mistake.

>> There were a suite of predators that were pursued and a sense of agency responsibility to remove them from the landscape because they were affecting ungulates and other species that humans wanted to pursue or consume.

>> narrator: Planting farm-reared animals was introduced as a way to preserve wildlife, especially birds.

>> The first game farm, as I recall, was built at Warm Springs in 1927.

Close to 100,000 birds a year were being released in Montana, and in Montana, a new area with no competition, they really took off.

>> narrator: The people of Montana also tried to improve game stocks, often without the consent of the Fish and Game Commission.

Local conservation clubs planted game in their areas.

By now, almost every community had a sportsmen's club interested in promoting hunting and fishing.

They began to unify their efforts and became major social and political influences in wildlife management.

>> They started forming clubs all over the state and improving wildlife.

>> The sportsmen's clubs at that time were very influential in the state of Montana.

Almost every small town had a sportsmen's club.

>> narrator: Through these state-sanctioned and private efforts, wildlife populations began to temporarily recover, but because the science of wildlife biology was a fledgling discipline, most of these programs were based on myth, faulty assumptions, and miscalculations.

They believed all that was required to fix things was to plant farm-reared wildlife, control predators, and close hunting seasons.

But the real problems were rogue, market, and subsistence hunters and loss of habitat.

The idea of too many big game animals and not enough rangeland was unimaginable to most Montanans, but that is exactly what happened during the winter of 1919-1920.

That season, over 14,000 elk died of starvation due to lack of habitat and severe winter conditions.

>> "I call the attention of those who do not hunt to the fact that, under our law, they are joint owners in the wild game and birds of this state, and we beg of them to help conserve these things before it is too late."

>> narrator: Still, the settlers came.

From 1910 to 1920, the honyockers, a derogatory term used by cowboys and ranchers for these new farmers, colonized east central Montana.

Seduced by the huge promotional efforts of the railroads and the enlarged Homestead Acts of 1909 and 1912, these settlers tore up the prairie and altered wildlife habitat in an attempt at dryland farming.

At first, they were successful because of a number of nontypical wet years.

By 1917, however, a ruinous five-year drought and a precipitous drop in international wheat prices suddenly reversed this prosperity.

The farmers compounded the effects of the drought by planting crops on lands better suited to grazing.

Hordes of grasshoppers appeared and ravaged the remaining crops.

Hail and howling winds followed.

The parched soil turned to dust and blew away.

For many families, there was simply no income.

To them, the remaining wildlife meant one thing: survival.

In the early 1920s, land values dropped dramatically.

Mortgages were foreclosed and farms abandoned.

By 1922, 60,000 homesteaders had moved on.

>> I think I saw, probably, the classic example of people leaving the land.

North of Forsyth, there were two drainages out there.

There was Starved to Death and Froze to Death.

I don't know where they possibly ever got the names for those, but it was tough conditions.

And a fellow was digging an irrigation ditch across the Gumbo Flat, and he had his plow behind the horse, and you could see he had come to the last row.

The plow was still in the ground, and he walked away from it.

He could see it was no use.

He couldn't make it.

>> narrator: But the worst was yet to come.

More drought, financial panic, and hard times spread across America and Montana during the 1930s.

By 1935, 1/4 of all Montanans were on relief.

People were hungry, hopeless, forced back into a near frontier economy.

Ammunition was cheap, however, and game provided high-quality protein.

Poaching and habitat devastation reached new highs.

>> Those were what they called the "dirty '30s."

They had to almost live off the land, so many of them did, you might say, poach.

They were getting what they needed to live.

>> During the Depression, a lot of people--sure, they poached deer.

They had to get a little meat to eat, and it was tolerated.

>> narrator: The extreme drought dried up ponds, potholes, and other aquatic habitat.

Waterfowl hit all-time lows.

The modest gains in wildlife restoration since the turn of century began to erode.

There was a growing concern about lack of wildlife habitat.

>> "Approximately 90% of the water areas of Montana were dry during the past summer, all of which were formerly great nesting areas."

--Ken Roahen, 1932.

>> narrator: In Montana, people simply wanted more game.

The need for new approaches, for technically trained people, for factual scientific information was obvious, but the Montana Fish and Game Commission did not have the power or the money to meet these needs.

>> "Hence, with surplus funds of the State Fish and Game Department exhausted, and with current funds at the lowest point in years because of mandatory demands for needed expenditures, the biennium has recorded achievements of which state sportsmen are justly proud, but left departmental revenues in dire need of undivided attention."

>> narrator: Although some research was conducted in Montana as early as 1915, wildlife science developed slowly during the early decades of the 20th century.

Not much was known about habitat--the food, cover, and water on which wildlife depend--or the biological needs of wildlife.

All that changed with Iowa-born Aldo Leopold, a wildlife researcher and professor of forestry at the University of Wisconsin.

In 1933, Leopold published a perceptive textbook on game management principles.

It challenged old ideas of game sanctuaries and artificial propagation.

Instead, it focused on caring for the land and preserving wildlife habitat to achieve abundance.

Game Management became an instant classic.

>> "Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the Earth.

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators.

You cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges.

You cannot build the forest and mine the farm."

>> narrator: Energized by Leopold's philosophy and his encouragement, scientists, conservationists, and educators quickly established a system that employed these fresh insights.

Wildlife management became a scientific discipline studied at universities across the country.

At Montana State University in Bozeman, a fish and wildlife management program was established in 1936.

In Missoula at the University of Montana, a wildlife cooperative unit was launched.

Young conservationists emerging from these programs in Montana and across the nation began pressuring the United States Congress to act on behalf of wildlife.

Then in 1937, landmark legislation was introduced in Washington, D.C., legislation that would change wildlife management in America forever.

In June of 1937, Carl Shoemaker, an investigator for the U.S. Senate Wildlife Committee and cofounder of the National Wildlife Federation, drafted a bill devoted to wildlife restoration.

Senator Key Pittman of Nevada and Representative Willis Robertson of Virginia sponsored it.

The bill proposed a wildlife restoration program financed by a federal excise tax on the sale of sporting guns and ammunition.

A powerful alliance of conservationists, scientists, sportsmen and, most importantly, ammunition and firearms companies supported it.

To qualify for Pittman-Robertson funds, hunting license money collected by states could only be spent to support wildlife research and management and nothing else.

This important amendment insured that all dollars were actually committed to conservation, and not diverted to a state's general tax fund.

The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act--better known as the Pittman-Robertson, or PR Act--was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on September 2, 1937.

>> Pittman-Robertson, from introduction to the president's signature, took 90 days because of the commitment of the people.

They were willing to tax themselves for the restoration of wildlife, and that, of course, became the foundation in which Montana could then go beyond refuges, beyond enforcement, and start getting into management and reconstruction and acquisition.

And I think that was probably the single most important congressional act in the history of wildlife conservation.

>> narrator: But individual states had to ratify Pittman-Robertson before they could receive money.

After lengthy debate, the Montana legislature approved measures making Pittman-Robertson funds available.

It was a turning point for Montana wildlife conservation.

With Montana's acceptance of the Pittman-Robertson Act, Dr. Joe Severy was appointed head of the Montana Fish and Game Commission.

Dr. Severy, a professor of botany at the University of Montana and a dedicated conservationist, began building the program immediately.

This marked the first step to the scientific management program in Montana.

Dr. Severy quickly hired Bob Cooney as the state's first wildlife biologist.

Cooney had previously worked as a range biologist for the U.S. Forest Service.

>> Well, the one thing I remember about Bob Cooney--and I think about him a lot--he was very influential in the state back then.

I guess he was the very first biologist hired.

>> So I often think how lucky I was to be around at the beginning of things.

>> When the PR Act came in, why, Bob Cooney, out of the University of Montana forestry school, made it very clear that one of the main thrusts of the PR Act, as far as his understanding was concerned, was to manage wildlife in a manner which was consistent with university training.

>> narrator: Cooney soon brought other Montana biologists on staff.

Individuals like Faye Couey, Bill Bergeson, Lloyd McDowell, Merle Rognrud, and Ken Thompson would have a dramatic impact on the future success of the Fish and Game Department.

Their first assignment was to survey game populations statewide, with proposed solutions to wildlife problems.

This investigational fieldwork would lead to a foundation of facts about game animals and their relationships with the environment.

In the summer of 1941, the new wildlife restoration division set out to inventory Montana's upland game bird population.

>> July of 1941, when the state of Montana Fish and Game first started the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Program, the first budget that year was $100,000.

So they had a number of surveys to carry out.

Faye Couey was gonna take the counties north of the Missouri River, and myself and Bill Bergeson were going to work the counties between the Missouri River and the Yellowstone River.

And then Hector LaCasse and James Beer were going to take the counties south of the Yellowstone River.

We put our backs against the North Dakota line and started westward.

>> narrator: These biologists ran sampling transects in every township along the way.

>> All those original people were hired out of school to make that census.

They traveled all over the state counting pheasants and other game birds and also setting up survey routes.

Out on the prairie, we would walk around a section and keep track of all the birds we flushed, and the flushing distance and those maps were used year after year to try to get a census.

>> narrator: This work produced a database that became the cornerstone of Montana game management.

Scientific wildlife management was now basic policy for the Montana Fish and Game Commission.

A new era was dawning.

Then in December 1941: the attack on Pearl Harbor.

World War II set in for America and set back the momentum of wildlife management.

With the war taking Montana's finest, an accompanying reduction in hunting licenses brought a new set of problems.

>> The budgets in War II--there were not as many hunters.

The number of hunters was low so that the budgets went from $100,000 to $75,000 to $25,000.

>> narrator: In spite of limited funding and the restrictions of World War II, Bob Cooney and his crew flew aerial surveys of elk and other big game species and laid the foundation for Montana's modern wildlife management program.

Cooney's job was considered so vital that he was stopped at the Salt Lake City airport and returned home when he tried to enlist.

World War II was a time of great uncertainty for America.

[explosions] >> The Allied lightning strikes.

[gunfire] This is the supreme moment of invasion.

This is frontal assault on an entrenched enemy.

>> narrator: Wildlife was now viewed from an entirely different perspective: as a national asset.

In the event of an invasion on either coast, an inland retreat would at least be able to count on a good supply of meat.

But there was additional wartime trouble on the home front regarding wildlife.

The war effort demanded sacrifice and increased food output, but improved wildlife numbers were often in conflict with agricultural production.

The Fish and Game Department initially ignored wildlife damage complaints from private landowners.

The idea of an excessive number of game animals causing crop damage was unbelievable to many Montanans, but it proved to be true.

The clash between rapidly recovering wildlife and agricultural landowners came to a head in the landmark Rathbone case.

In March 1939, C.R.

Rathbone killed a wild elk on his ranch out of season in what is now the Sun River Wildlife Management Area.

He contended the elk had damaged his property.

A game warden investigated, and the landowner was subsequently arrested and convicted.

He appealed his case at the Montana Supreme Court.

The high court reviewed the case and returned it to the lower court with some guidelines.

>> "Montana is one of the few areas in the nation where wild game abounds.

It is regarded as one of the greatest of the state's natural resources, as well as the chief attraction for visitors.

Wild game existed here long before the coming of man.

One who acquires property in Montana does so with notice and knowledge of the presence of wild game and presumably is cognizant of its natural habits."

--Montana Supreme Court ruling.

>> narrator: In short, the guidelines recognize both the state's right to preserve free-ranging game animals and citizens' rights, under certain conditions, to defend their property.

It concluded that each case be judged on its own merits.

The Rathbone case established a valuable legal precedent for game damage complaints.

It also spurred acquisition of big game winter range by the Fish and Game Department.

>> "One point is very clear: no matter how curtailed the personnel of the department or its facilities, there is an obligation that will not be broken.

Wildlife must be so managed that when the boys who are fighting for us return, they will be able to again enjoy the pleasures and the solace of the out-of-doors and the wild things that are so much a part of it.

We can certainly do no less."

--1941-'42 Montana Fish and Game Commission biennial report.

>> narrator: Veterans came back from the war with a can-do attitude.

Many went to college under the GI Bill.

Some pursued careers in wildlife management and received masters degrees.

>> I persuaded him to go back to college and use up his GI Bill, and he was in game management and the forestry--I think it came under the forestry department.

>> narrator: Wynn Freeman, a Navy veteran now in the Montana Fish and Game Department, joined forces with an army infantry veteran, Don Quimby, professor of wildlife management at Montana State University.

Together, they convinced the department director and commission to mandate that all newly hired biologists have masters degrees.

A joint education program between both Montana universities and the department was instituted to develop these wildlife biologists.

The mold was set.

It was the beginning of the scientific era in wildlife management.

Now it was time for action.

One long-standing game management practice that worked in the past was live trapping and transplanting.

It began with birds.

>> Prior to the Fish and Game Commission purchasing birds, why, there were individuals that had gotten eggs--primarily they would get eggs and hatch them, but there had been some birds released privately on different farms.

Marcus Daly always released some bobwhite quail.

>> Transplanting of birds has, of course, been a very popular--that's something that people can see.

"Look, we raised some birds.

We put them out."

And it usually is not quite that simple, but nonetheless, obviously, with both the pheasant and the Hungarian partridge and the chukar, all three of those are exotics, and so they obviously were brought in successfully at one time.

>> narrator: In the late 1890s, private individuals imported ring-necked pheasants into Montana, but these efforts were not successful.

>> Most of these transplants were not official, although some of them were.

The game commission at that time approved bringing birds in.

>> narrator: Soon the state game bird farm program began planting pheasants, and by 1929, over 7,000 birds had been released.

>> As superintendent of game farms, I was in charge of the game farm at Warm Springs, also one at Billings, one at Fort Peck, and one at Moiese.

They were putting out 15,000 or 20,000 birds from each of the game farms; distributing them all over the state of Montana.

>> narrator: But during the war years, landowners complained about crop damage caused by dense pheasant populations when food production was such a high priority.

>> It must have been at the start of the war when hunting slowed up and pheasants began interfering with agriculture, eating the grain that we needed to feed the world.

A lot of complaints began coming in from Hardin and the Billings area.

>> At that time, the Yellowstone Valley around Billings was made up of a lot of small farms, and they raised different crops from what they do today.

But some of the plants that were planted, like a bean or a corn, the pheasants would go along, and when that came up, they'd pluck it.

>> narrator: Nevertheless, the dense pheasant populations in the irrigated valleys of the Milk and Yellowstone rivers was the source of 5,600 birds used in transplants from 1941 to 1948.

>> So that's the way all of the plants all over the state of Montana were made, by trapping from one spot and moving them to another.

>> narrator: Pheasant eggs were also provided to individual landowners and sportsmen clubs.

Once hatched, payments were made for birds released into the wild, but these efforts proved to be a costly failure.

Before the state Game Farm Program was discontinued in the early 1980s, almost 800,000 pheasants were planted around the state.

>> The pheasant farm was finally phased out, and they no longer raise any pheasants in the state of Montana.

The emphasis was placed on habitat development rather than release of game farm stock.

>> narrator: Pheasants remain a popular part of Montana's fauna.

Recent efforts to increase their abundance focuses upon improving winter cover and habitat conditions necessary for survival.

Hungarian partridge originated in central Europe and were brought to the eastern United States in the 1870s.

They first appeared in Montana between 1914 and 1921 from populations started in Alberta, Canada.

The state also imported 6,600 huns from Europe in the 1920s for plants spread over 45 counties.

>> The upland game birds have a great reproductive potential.

Hungarian partridge, for example, average 18 eggs on a clutch.

They can go from virtually nothing one year to abundance in one or two years.

>> narrator: As a result, huns became the most widely distributed game bird in Montana.

Today, the highly prized Hungarian partridge, or feathered fox, is found in agricultural, foothill, and prairie grassland habitat.

The chukar partridge from India were also raised on game farms.

Plants were made from the 1930s to 1958 and in 1978 in the Bitterroot area of western Montana.

90 chukar plants were made in total.

They've been successful in a few semiarid sagebrush and bitter brush grassland areas.

Additional populations have survived in the Bighorn Canyon/Pryor Mountains area of south central Montana.

>> The chukar partridge was introduced in different places, and we still have some in Montana.

Some are still harvested in Montana, but very restricted area and very limited.

>> narrator: Five species of grouse are native to Montana.

Sage and sharp-tailed grouse inhabit prairie environments.

Columbian sharp-tailed grouse were planted during the 1980s and 1990s in Northwest Montana's Tobacco Valley on the Canadian border.

Blue, Franklin, and ruffed grouse are found in mountainous terrain.

[birds chirping] [wings beating] >> Forest grouse--all three species are native.

They're native to this state.

They've never been raised in captivity for transplanting, and it's doubtful that they could be for that matter.

They're just--they're habits are too specialized in terms of food habits.

>> narrator: Two historical episodes of chemical pest control severely impacted Montana's sage, sharptail, and blue grouse populations.

During the drought of the 1930s, Montana was plagued by massive migratory swarms of grasshoppers.

The pests swept across large areas of eastern Montana, devastating everything green in their path.

So voracious were their appetites, they ate root vegetables down into the ground.

They chewed weathered wood off fence posts.

They were even known to consume laundry hanging on clotheslines.

To fight back, state and federal agencies supplied farmer's grain laced with arsenic and molasses.

[machines pumping and hissing] They spread this concoction across thousands of acres of eastern Montana by air and ground.

[airplane engine roaring] It killed the grasshoppers, but it also reduced prairie grouse populations and had adverse effects on many other bird species.

To overcome this loss, native sage grouse were trapped and transplanted in 1942 without success.

Sharptail grouse were also transplanted to little effect during this period.

During the 1950s and '60s, chemical warfare once again raged across the American West.

DDT was sprayed on national forests to combat spruce budworm.

The Forest Service was into a big spruce budworm spraying thing, and they happened to spray the area, including where I had the blue grouse study, so we had marked birds and things that got sprayed and so we decided we better follow up on what we could.

>> narrator: Problems related to the spraying were soon discovered.

>> The bottom line is that that is the last--'63 is the last year that DDT was used in Montana.

I think Montana's Fish and Game was the first state agency anywhere to make a policy objecting to that.

>> narrator: Following Montana's lead, DDT was subsequently outlawed on a national level after many species of birds showed high levels of DDT in their systems and produced thinned egg shells resulting in lost chicks.

Even though they were affected by DDT spraying, the ban came in time to protect Montana's native forest grouse.

Wild turkeys are not native to Montana.

Soon after settlement, many individuals tried unsuccessfully to introduce them into the state.

Merriam's turkey, native to Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, were first transplanted into Montana's Judith Mountains in November of 1954 with limited success.

Subsequent plants near Ekalaka in 1955 and Ashland in 1956 and 1957 were highly successful.

These populations became the source for all future transplants in Montana.

>> Most of the trapping was done with a cannon net-type where the birds would be baited into an area, and then a large net would be shot over the top of them... [explosion] Then they'd be gathered up from there.

I was probably involved in trapping and transplanting over 1,000 birds.

>> narrator: A bird hunter successfully planted eastern wild turkeys in the Flathead Valley in the 1960s.

Today these large birds comprise the bulk of the turkey population west of the Divide.

Many special interest groups have a 100-year legacy of turkey transplanting.

These magnificent birds are still planted today by National Wild Turkey Federation volunteers working with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.

>> When you look at the number of turkeys that we introduced into this state, it was-- basically, you could call it a handful from what we have now.

We have--I don't know how many turkeys there are, but there's thousands and thousands and thousands of turkeys.

>> narrator: Ducks and geese were heavily impacted by the ecological changes of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Montana alone, 90% of the water resources dried up during the drought of the '30s.

State and federal agencies as well as landowners swung into action.

Ranchers built thousands of stock ponds and small reservoirs in the dry eastern areas of the state.

Waterfowl quickly colonized this new habitat.

>> They built into thousands of ponds, and this was a substantial boost to recovery after the drought.

>> narrator: With biologist Dwight Stockstad working in the field, the Ninepipe Wildlife Management Area was created south of Flathead Lake in 1953.

This area still provides valuable waterfowl and upland bird habitat today for both hunters and bird-watchers alike.

Federal waterfowl refuges also provide a habitat base for waterfowl species.

Of the 21 federal refuges created in Montana, 19 were specifically for waterfowl.

>> And they were put in because people felt that they had great potential to begin with.

They recognized them as a waterfowl producer, so probably, by making refuges out of them, they did more just to preserve them than to do anything specifically with the habitat.

>> narrator: Using sportsmen's money from Pittman-Robertson funds, Montana converted environmental disaster sites into productive wetland areas.

Freezout Lake near Choteau, Montana, was a by-product of the Greenfields Irrigation District.

This saline sump area was unsuitable for waterfowl or agriculture.

Avian botulism killed thousands of birds each year.

>> Freezout itself, the area where the water stands now, was a big sump.

Surplus water would drop down into this basin, which had no outlet or any pronounced inlet.

First of all, it started to take out the railroad which ran between Choteau and Fairfield and then started to take the highway, and so the bureau decided that something had to be done.

One of the stipulations was that they put a drain in so it could be controlled.

>> narrator: Wynn Freeman spearheaded the effort to convert Freezout Lake into an important and safe freshwater area.

A system of dikes was constructed to control water levels.

Today Freezout Lake hosts up to a million ducks, geese, and swans during peak spring and fall migrations.

The Canyon Ferry Reservoir near Helena was drawn down every year in late summer or fall, leaving bare soil flats that triggered severe dust storms.

>> The dust apparently was wrecking homes in Townsend.

It was covering fields, and it was bad for a while.

>> narrator: Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built a system of dikes to keep areas flooded and engineered it specifically for waterfowl.

>> And it boomed just almost in a spectacular manner.

It went from, say, like, 9 to 30 to 60 nests on these islands.

>> narrator: The Clark Fork River in western Montana figured into another waterfowl reclamation effort.

Areas along the Clark Fork were heavily contaminated with heavy metal mining wastes.

>> It has since been increased with department money and Ducks Unlimited money until now it's one of the better wetland areas in the state of Montana.

>> narrator: A ruling against the Atlantic Richfield Company by the state of Montana and the Environmental Protection Agency made the funds available for this project.

Canada geese began populating these new habitat management areas and dramatically increased their abundance during the last 1/3 of the century.

A program to import geese to new areas supplemented their natural colonization.

>> At one time, believe it or not, the state of Montana had very few Canadian geese, and it became a project of the Fish and Game Department to increase the number of Canadian geese.

And it was found out that Canadian geese would tend to home to the area where they learned to fly, so by trapping young geese in areas before they learned to fly and moving them into desirable spots, why, we were able to establish goose flocks in a number of places in the state of Montana.

>> narrator: Plants of pheasants and grouse, partridge and turkeys; bans on dangerous chemicals; creation of wildlife management areas and refuges.

The success of Montana's bird programs is a story of state and federal cooperation and the volunteering efforts of individual landowners, sportsmen's clubs, and citizens.

The next challenge was repeating this success with something a bit harder to handle: big game and furbearing animals.

In part two of Montana's wildlife legacy, meet the people who worked to restore Montana's big game and furbearers in some of the most spectacular and remote country in the state.

[upbeat banjo music] ♪ ♪ >> ♪ It's the dawning ♪ ♪ of a new day ♪ ♪ here in America, ♪ ♪ a nation born ♪ ♪ of many people's dreams.

♪ >> ♪ We're the stewards ♪ ♪ of the stories ♪ ♪ of those who came before, ♪ ♪ the keepers of the mountains ♪ ♪ and the streams.

♪ >> ♪ Captains Clark and Lewis ♪ ♪ and the Corps of Volunteers, ♪ ♪ their bones are buried ♪ ♪ in this sacred ground.

♪ ♪ We pay homage ♪ ♪ to their western odyssey.

♪ >> ♪ To the rivers ♪ ♪ and the trails ♪ ♪ that they found.

♪ >> ♪ Pass it on.

♪ ♪ Pass it on.

♪ >> ♪ Honor the spirit ♪ ♪ of this land ♪ ♪ they walked upon.

♪ >> ♪ We walk upon.

♪ >> ♪ Hear the wildland's ♪ ♪ healing song.

♪ ♪ Heed the gift ♪ ♪ that we've been given.

♪ ♪ Pass it on.

♪ >> ♪ The U.S. owes ♪ ♪ a mighty debt of gratitude, ♪ ♪ one that we can ♪ ♪ never quite repay.

♪ >> ♪ But for all ♪ ♪ the native peoples ♪ ♪ who gave of themselves, ♪ ♪ so many would be lost ♪ ♪ along the way.

♪ >> ♪ Our voices ♪ ♪ join together now ♪ ♪ in freedom's song.

♪ ♪ There's counterpoint ♪ ♪ and harmony to know.

♪ >> ♪ We are writing ♪ ♪ out the chorus ♪ ♪ of our nation's song.

♪ >> ♪ Learning from each other ♪ ♪ as we go.

♪ ♪ Pass it on.

♪ ♪ Pass it on.

♪ >> ♪ Honor the spirit ♪ ♪ of this land we walk upon.

♪ >> ♪ They walked upon.

♪ >> ♪ Hear the wildland's ♪ ♪ healing song.

♪ ♪ Heed the gift ♪ ♪ that we've been given.

♪ ♪ Pass it on.

♪ >> ♪ Pick it up, pack it out, ♪ ♪ pass it on.

♪ >> announcer: Back from the Brink: Montana's Wildlife Legacy was made possible by production support from Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Foundation.

Additional support for this program was provided by: Back from the Brink: Montana's Wildlife Legacy, a two-part historical documentary, is available on DVD or videocassette through Montana PBS.

Call 1-800-426-8243, or send a check to Montana PBS, or go to our website at montanapbs.org.