U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hosts public meeting Tuesday in Kalispell

A proposal to designate critical habitat for the threatened lynx, including some 1,600 acres of private land in Montana, will be the subject of a public hearing in Kalispell next week.

The Jan. 10 hearing at the WestCoast Kalispell Center Hotel will be preceded by an informational open house from 4:30 to 6 p.m. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is taking public comments on the critical habitat proposal through Feb. 7.

The proposed designation includes 10,760 square miles in Flathead, Glacier, Granite, Lake, Lewis and Clark, Lincoln, Missoula, Pondera, Powell and Teton counties in Montana, along with lands in Boundary County, Idaho.

Designations also have been proposed in Maine, Minnesota and Washington.

The Canada lynx was listed in 2000 as a threatened species, and a lawsuit filed by Defenders of Wildlife resulted in a court order directing the Fish and Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat for lynx.

The proposed listing does not include any federal forest lands in Montana, because those lands are being managed with guidance from a lynx conservation agreement between the Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service.

But the proposal does apply to 1,691 acres of private land in Montana, raising concerns among groups such as Montanans for Multiple Use. A recent action alert sent out to group members raises questions about how the designations could affect winter recreation, logging, thinning, fire management, road management and construction on lands designated as critical habitat for lynx.

"I have some real heartburn with this critical habitat proposal," said Flathead County Commissioner Gary Hall, vice president of Montanans for Multiple Use. "There's just so much that causes me concern."

Information distributed by the Fish and Wildlife Service pitches critical habitat as an innocuous designation that will have few practical impacts, particularly on private land.

"Critical habitat provides nonregulatory benefits to the species by informing the public and private sectors of areas that are important for species recovery and where conservation activities would be most effective," the service says in press information.

Landowners would be required to go through a formal "consultation" process for activities on their property only when a so-called "federal nexus" exists.

"Critical habitat has no regulatory impact on private landowners taking actions on their land, unless they are doing something that involves federal funding or permits," according to the press release.

The private lands proposed for designation are difficult to see in detail on a maps provided by the service, but in general they are along the west front of the Whitefish Mountain Range, on the perimeter of the Swan Valley and in scattered areas west of Kalispell.

The service says the proposed designations were focused on lands that "provide the elements considered to contribute to the conservation of lynx: boreal forest landscapes supporting a mosaic of differing successional forest stages containing snowshoe hares and their preferred habitat of dense forest understories, winter snow conditions that are generally deep and fluffy to favor the morphological and physiological adaptations of lynx, and sites for lynx denning habitat supporting abundant, large, woody debris, such as downed trees and rootwads."

More information on lynx critical habitat is available on the Internet at

http://mountain-prairie.fws.gov/species/mammals/lynx/criticalhabitat.htm.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.