Montana may not strike you as the perfect place to spend the winter, but every year thousands of travelers disagree. Most of the feathered ones from the north flit past, true, but others recognize the Treasure State as the ultimate place to chill out for months. They migrate here every year: rough-legged hawk, snowy owl, northern shrike, common and hoary redpoll, American tree sparrow, Bohemian waxwing, snow bunting and Lapland longspur.

The next time he saw it, he was luckier. His shot hit the beast. According to Israel's son, the animal tried to attack the Hutchins family in its last moments, tearing through a half-inch rope in one champing bite. He said it bled to death trying to reach and attack the family.

Its scientific name—Gulo gulo, Latin for glutton—reflects its striking character as a ferocious predator that can contend with prey many times its size. Stories tell of the 30-pound wolverine successfully hunting injured caribou and chasing grizzlies away from their kill, though during the summer months these animals most commonly feed on small mammals such as rabbits or rodents, as well as plants and berries.

Montana’s native tribes relied on the bounty of bison in nearly every aspect of their daily lives. In addition to depending on them as a primary food source, native peoples also developed ingenious methods that enabled them to use every part of these colossal one-ton giants.

Enormous bear tracks wended their way along the shore and in between the heaps of ripening meat, but a disappointed Lewis wrote that "we have not as yet seen one of these anamals... the men as well as ourselves are anxious to meet with some of these bear."

Intelligence in other species can be hard to define and even harder to prove. And there is risk in anthropomorphism. Nevertheless abundant observations suggest special skill sets.

There was a market for their tongues in the trendy restaurants of the East, selling for $8 - $9 for a dozen. And "buffalo hump" was also a Christmas tradition for many in the West - an 1846 holiday feast at Fort Edmonton served "boiled buffalo hump," "boiled buffalo calf," and "whitefish browned in buffalo marrow." 

Like the city they call home, Butte pigeons thrive in adversity. There they manage to propogate in astonishing numbers despite living in an environment that is, more often than not, entirely hostile to them. 

Before they set out, Lewis and Clark received unofficial orders, a secret mission, if you will: find a living mastodon out there in the uncharted wildlands of the Louisiana Purchase.

Prior to the mid-1800s, the diminutive Swift Fox, like the bison and wolf, abundantly roamed the short grass prairies east of the Rockies in Montana, heading north into Canada and south through the 10 states that make up the Great Plains. Admired across Native American communities for its hunting abilities and speed, the one thing the fox couldn’t outrun or out-maneuver was westward expansion.

Sign of North American beavers—whittled sticks, canals, dams, lodges—are conspicuous, but the animals themselves are relatively quiet, nocturnal, and discreet. So take heart: you are not alone if you reflexively stop to admire the singular textures of a wetland, only to find yourself nearly submerged in surprise at the SLAAP! from the tail of the habitat’s maker.

I drop my backpack in my office and start my rounds, as I call them, checking on each and every animal including fish, frogs, salamanders, snakes, ground squirrels (if they’re not hibernating), river otters, raptors, gray wolves and grizzly bears to make sure all is well.

Over the past decades, morel hunting has changed quite a bit. In the 1980s, the fire reports were issued in single line entries, with the name of the fire, township and range (later to lat/long coordinates), aspect, slope, elevation, vegetation cover, and start date. Go get ‘em, boys! That was all you had to go on. So out we went, tracing our way along whatever roads were open to get as close to the start point as we could, scanning the ridges for brown or red trees to locate the burn site.

What is it about owls that intrigues us? Is it their brilliant yellow eyes and their bulky looking bodies? Maybe it’s their elusiveness, the fact that they’re not readily seen like other birds of prey. Photographing them and creating compositional impact