Small Town - or No Town - Montana

Ollie. Willard. Capitol. Albion. Hammond. Powderville. Vananda. Sumatra. These are all the names of places that appear on the official Montana Highway Map(2001-2002). Last weekend, on an excursion through the Southeastern part of Montana, I passed through all of these places - at least I think I did. Many of them have only a building or two. At least one - Capitol- seemed to have only a cemetery remaining. In others such as Albion, boarded up schoolhouses are all that remain.Changes in societal structure and improvements in roads - albeit gravel - and vehicles are likely contributors to the demise of these places. Maybe some of them never did amount to anything! It appears that the only reason some of them still exist is that presence of a US Post Office. Powderville is a great example of this.It will be interesting to see if these Post Offices survive the increases in efficiency that the US Postal Service is undertaking because of decreases in mail volume. But they do provide an important public service for the farm and ranch families that live in these very rural regions of the state. It looks like the lone residence in Sumatra recently got a new coat of paint. One of the "larger" towns I passed by - Ingomar - is really a Montana icon. And its seems to be struggling to survive. It is famous for a quaint old bar and restaurant named the Jersey Lilly. Years ago, when driving this road between Forsyth and Roundup, I used to stop at this establishment for a bowl of bean soup that Bill - the proprietor - used to always keep on the stove. The town has since lost some inhabitants and the Jersey Lilly is only open sporadically. But Ingomar now boasts of a B&B located in the old schoolhouse, the only place to find a room for the night in this 100-mile stretch of highway. It is named the Bunk and Biscuit.

Oh yes, the reason for my excursion thru this rural part of Montana was to scout the area for some new dragonfly and damsel species for my Montana list. The cloudy, cold, and windy weather was not very good for this purpose, but I did manage to find at least one new new species of these fascinating insects - an American Rubyspot. It is not difficult to see how it got its name!

Nemesis Bird - Finally!!

Since I began birding in earnest and recording all sightings about 1999 or so, there are several bird species that I have tried to find on numerous occasions without success. One of the last of these was the Spruce Grouse. While I had seen many of this species in years past, I didn't want to put them on my list of Montana birds ID'ed until I had seen one in my relatively recent years of keeping records. Most spruce grouse in Montana are found west of the Continental Divide. Many times, I have searched Glacier park to no avail. Then a friend from Deer Lodge located an area in the nearby mountains where this species could be found fairly easily. But each time I tried - NO LUCK!

Several days ago, I accompanied a friend on a hike to a high mountain meadow in the Pioneer Mountains of southwest Montana to look for and try to capture a male dragonfly of a species know only from this location in Montana. After a fairly steep initial portion of the trail, we came into a beautiful meadow area with a stream flowing quietly through it. Shortly after we entered this pristine meadow, a young grouse flushed from the tall grass. Then several more made their presence known. And there she was - a female spruce grouse with a brood of 4 young ones. Finally, I could check that one off on my list of nemesis birds of Montana!!We captured only females of the dragonfly species we were after, so Nate was a little distraught with the results of the hike, but for me, it was one of the better days I've experienced in a while.

And then yesterday was icing on the cake for the week! There was a report of a Band-tailed Pigeon in the small berg of Elliston, about 20 miles west of Helena. Only about a dozen or so historic records of this species have been recorded in the state, and it would be a new Montana species for me. Immediately upon my arrival at the residence where the bird had been frequenting, I spotted it sitting in the top of a conifer tree. It was quite skittish and flew to some other trees for a while. While waiting for it to return for a closer view, I was joined by Nate Kohler and a couple from Bozeman. After nearly 2 hours of waiting, the bird made its appearance again and posed on a metal post for some pretty good photo opps. A very successful week of birding, I' say!

Return to Gipsy Lake

When I visited this lovely mountain foothill lake last week to document dragonflies present in the area, I had intended to also visit some glacial potholes located nearby to the east. But my effort to locate the potholes was thwarted by heavy timber and steep slopes along the trail from which I had searched. Several days ago, I returned to the same area - this time with dragonfly expert Nate Kohler - to do more dragonfly sampling. We spent several hours in the morning on the main lake seeing what we could capture for ID purposes. It was quite breezy and the dragonflies seemed to be able to use the breeze to their advantage to avoid most of our capture attempts. Nate was more successful than I - as usual.

After eating some lunch, and armed with Google Earth photos I printed out the previous evening, we tried a new approach to reach the pothole area. From this new direction, it didn't take long to locate the first glacial pothole - and the effort was well worthwhile! From a dragonfly point of view, this type of habitat is just what we were looking for. There was a series of 6 of these potholes, all just a little different in terms of vegetation, depth and open water area - a few with very little of the latter. One of the other really neat aspects of this relatively small glaciated pothole area is that there were no trails into it and the steep hillsides and heavy timber likely keeps visitation very limited, possibly to just a few hunters in the fall. That is in spite of the the campground that is fairly close to them. Glaciers emanating from the nearby cirque in the Big Belt mountains deposited the glacial till that provides the basins for these potholes perhaps 8,000 or so years ago. It didn't take Nate long to get his collecting gear laid out and his net ready to see what he could catch. And as we had hoped, these potholes produced a number of dragonfly and damselfly species that we had not found on Gipsy Lake. The breeze that had hampered our capture efforts in the morning had now subsided so our efforts were much more successful. Captures from this day and my previous excursions resulted in the addition of about 15 new Meagher County county records for these insects. Of course, I should mention that prior to these visits, there were NO dragonfly records for this county. Of particular interest were the Lake and Sedge darners we found here plus a rather small dragonfly named a Hudsonian Whiteface, that is usually found in more northerly regions. The darners are likely the eastern most point of their distribution in this portion of Montana.

Before leaving the area to head home, I retrieved 2 cold bottles of beer I had hidden away in my cooler to celebrate the very successful day we had just completed! Could life be any better?