Something pretty important happened in Helena today: The Fish & Wildlife Commission issued the following proclamation in support of the Land & Water Conservation Fund:

Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is a Federal Program that was established by an Act of Congress in 1964 to provide funds and matching grants to federal, state and local governments for the acquisition of land and water, and easements on land and water, for the benefit of all Americans. The main emphases of the fund are recreation and the protection of national natural treasures in the forms of parks and protected forest and wildlife areas.

The sound of splashing and laughing children drifts through a dense thicket of willows and cottonwood saplings. It’s a hot, mid- Saturday morning in early August at Grey Owl Fishing Access Site on the Yellowstone River, crowded with a row of parked pickups and SUVs and Subarus left behind by the early wave of fishermen and guides boats already far downstream. Late arrivals like my son and daughter and I are everywhere. A cowboy-hatted man and his three kids drag a sun-bleached raft to the water, while a woman in a new Toyota 4-Runner waits her turn to launch an elegant Lavro driftboat.  A yellow Labrador pup trots by, nose-to-gravel, pursued by a swift barefooted toddler in shorts, who has outdistanced a young woman bearing a swim bag in one hand and a picnic cooler in the other.  We’re here to wile away an hour or two, just passing through on our way home. Like everybody else here, we’ve come to enjoy one of the coldest, cleanest, most accessible big rivers in the world.

We're happy to join the chorus of folks endorsing Neil Kornze as the new director of the Bureau of Land Managment. Neil has a giant task ahead of him: balancing the needs of wildlife, hunters & anglers, energy development and agricultural users.

I've got a pocket full of tags and a loose knit plan on how to fill them all. This Saturday, 130,000 fellow Montanans and I will begin our five week journey where we fall in love with Montana all over again. Fall in the high country, coulees & fields of Montana is about as close to heaven as you can get without meeting your maker.

The Government is shutdown, Yellowstone and Glacier are closed for business, costing local businesses much needed revenue during the fall season. Archery hunters in the CMR have had to pick up and get out. Federal Fishing Access Sites along Fort Peck, the Bighorn River and Missouri are closed. Forest Service campgrounds sit empty as hunters pack up and move on. Nobody knows when it will end and it doesn’t look like congress has a plan to get us back to normal before pheasant opener on the 12th. The petty politics of Washington DC are throwing an unneeded monkey wrench into Montana’s hunting season.

I haven’t anticipated a duck season like this since I was a kid. I’ve got a serious case of duck fever.  Thanks to the conservation ethic of America’s hunters, the prairies are full of birds.  Slightly down from last year but the second best numbers since they started counting in 1955, at 45.6 million ducks, there will be plenty of opportunity.  I have freshened up both my goose and duck spreads with some finely crafted birds. 

Fall in Montana is about as close to Heaven as you can get and September 28th is a day that every hunter knows is a good day to be in the field. Tomorrow, Saturday, September 28th is National Hunting and Fishing Day. The bill establishing this day was signed into law in 1972. It’s a day when elk will be moving because of snow in the high country, trout will still be slamming hoppers and Montanans will be out in force, as usual, enjoying our public lands and public wildlife.

If there’s one species that signifies Montana’s place in the Boone & Crockett Record books, it’s bighorn sheep. We produce monster rams. It’s what we do.

Has the Gauntlet been laid down?

Last session, while we were all embroiled in fighting legislation to test & slaughter elk in the Northern Yellowstone Herd, hand control of our wolves back to Washington D.C. and take your resident hunter opportunity away, something good did happen.