In a state where regal mountains and unconfined rivers demand attention and esteem, there exists also the less obvious, but no less significant creatures that call these places home. And one would be hard-pressed to find a Montanan who hasn’t acknowledged a simple creed: our state wouldn’t be as special if our wild landscapes lacked wildlife.

“These animals are part of Montana’s history, and when some of these species start dropping off, like you lose a lynx here or some grizzlies there, then you lose the essence of our state’s culture,” said John Squires, a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula.

Squires has devoted decades of his life to researching some of Montana’s most elusive animals, the ones most humans will never witness in their natural habitats. At the heart of those efforts is the threatened Canada lynx, an incredibly rare and snow-dependent cat facing potential removal from the federal Endangered Species List despite there being a lack of sufficient scientific evidence to support delisting.

Little was understood about lynx in Northwest Montana until his monitoring efforts launched in 1998. Many weren’t sure where the animals existed in the state, or whether they existed here at all.

“Everything you see as far as lynx research here is part of a legacy that was started by John. He was the first to start on these amazingly complicated and time intensive studies on an animal that is so rare and so elusive,” said Michael Schwartz, conservation genetics team leader at the Rocky Mountain Research Station. “The ultimate goal that Squires and all of us are trying to accomplish is a mechanistic understanding of the species.”

Squires, Schwartz and others at the research station have spearheaded the creation of comprehensive databases and reports, contributing significantly to the public’s understanding of the species’ presence in the Southwestern Crown of the Continent. The vast region, which forms the southern boundary of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and communities in the Blackfoot, Clearwater, and Swan River Valleys, is the lynx’s southern-most natural periphery.

The ongoing research and monitoring is considered the longest-running study on the species. The goal of the work is to provide the clarity on what lynx populations exist in the Southwestern Crown, how the animals maneuver multi-use landscapes, how they respond to human and natural disturbances, and more. According to Squires, who has been nicknamed “Godfather of Lynx,” the 20 years of research is helping to build bridges between different forest constituents who wish to not only manage their forests, but manage them in a way that benefits the wildlife.

Teams feel they already can answer many questions with confidence. They have tabs on at least 40 cats in the Southwestern Crown, give or take. They know at this time, many of the lynx seem to frequent the Seeley Ranger District area. And they know populations have essentially blinked out of areas where they used to have a larger presence, such as in the Garnet Mountain Range.

But hard answers to other questions will require months, or in some cases years, of additional research and analysis. Why specifically did they disappear from the Garnets? How do lynx respond to wildfires after their preferred dense understory vegetation is destroyed? Or how can agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, best manage both its forests and its rare carnivores such as lynx?

ONE OF the most comprehensive lynx datasets was released in January 2018. Deemed the “SWCC Carnivore Monitoring Baseline Report,” the document was the result of four years of collaborative tracking and monitoring by the Southwestern Crown collaborative and was funded and supported by the Forest Service, Swan Valley Connections, the Rocky Mountain Research Station, The Nature Conservancy and many others. The project was chosen as one of the first 10 project areas nationally to be awarded funding under the federal Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. Goals of the project include maintaining or restoring a healthy landscape that supports various species and many others.

From 2012 to 2016, crews tracked and monitored lynx, wolverine and fisher — three incredibly rare forest carnivores. The ultimate objective was to establish a baseline understanding of the relative abundance of the three animals, primarily lynx and wolverine, throughout the Southwestern Crown so that changes over time could be tracked.

“This was a huge undertaking and later on when we look at populations again, we’ll be able to compare those datasets to this one and see how these species are doing,” said Luke Lamar, conservation director of Swan Valley Connections. Over the four years, Lamar and others gathered fine-scale field data on the animals from January through March through multiple non-invasive survey methods.

A typical day for the crews includes going out on snowmobiles in search of tracks. When lynx or wolverine tracks are identified, they backtrack the animal’s path, taking notes on its specific location, the type of vegetation it was moving through, and gather evidence such as scat and hair. That evidence is then sent to the National Genomics Center for Wildlife and Fish Conservation at the Rocky Mountain Research Center. There, specialists use highly sophisticated technology that has been developed over decades to retrieve specific details of the animals, including whether crews have “seen” that animal before, its sex and even which family it belongs to. For lynx, this information was combined with broader-scale GPS data gathered from cats that Squires has trapped and collared throughout the years.

“We were able to determine which species are out there and how they are moving,” Schwartz said. “These two sets of field data and GPS data play with each other beautifully and will be used for years to come.”

THE BASELINE report, although a monumental task, is a jumping-off point. And research crews hope to establish a comparative dataset in the coming years, assuming partners and funding continue to become available.

“We can’t continue to do work like that without the help of every partner involved,” Lamar said. “Over the years dozens of people from multiple organizations and agencies have come together to make this a possibility.”

The 2018 report is just one of the groups’ official documents that many will use when making decisions that impact lynx, whether those decisions are being made from the forest or at the Legislature.

“This is what’s going to be in the record,” Squires said. “We monitor the species, we analyze our data and we then compile and publish our work, which makes it defensible. So if something is challenged we can say ‘this is our best, unbiased estimate of how lynx operate.’”

While the studies were pursued with the intentions to inform decisions by wildlife and forest management officials, many hope lawmakers and others with the power to impact lynx in Montana will reference the documents as well. Those impacts can be anything from logging operations and prescribed burns, to a decision to remove the lynx from its current spot on the threatened species list.

“This is a huge responsibility we’ve been tasked with in a lot of ways,” said Schwartz, who has worked with Squires to identify lynx since the project’s inception. “We have a strong conservation mission, and making sure that this species persists for all Montanans is wildly important.”

The recovery and management of lynx is a high-profile issue for numerous agencies and organizations in Montana. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service first listed Canada lynx as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2000, but in 2018, the agency and Trump Administration announced a recommendation to remove protections.

The recommendation was made despite the agency’s failure to create a recovery plan for the lynx. The Endangered Species Act requires a recovery plan, which guides agencies on how to minimize threats to listed species and aid their recovery, be issued within five years after the animal is listed. That means a recovery plan for lynx is about 15 years overdue.

A decision on whether to pull the lynx from the threatened list is still pending and is one researchers are urging be informed by science, not politics.

Reporter Kianna Gardner can be reached at 758-4407 or kgardner@dailyinterlake.com