Good thing I hadn't made a New Year's Resolution to not leave the Telegraph until the last day of the month! In this case, most of it's even waiting until tomorrow, as there's a key meeting tonight that should result in no end of gossip, news, and hot tips.

Briefly, though, we can't complain about '07 too much yet. Other than basically no snow, a noticeable amount of strikingly cold temperatures, and a beastly workload, but hey, I guess if there's no point in skiing, a fella might as well work, eh?

So we did. Skinned a pile of buffalo, quite often in sub-zero temperatures. At least it was sunny with no wind those days. Really not that bad. Invigorating.

Invigoration turned into fatigue by the end of the month, though, after a noticeable number of dozen-buffalo days, plus a fair bit of oilseed doings and booking interest.

So I took Monday "off" and went to Helena with a friend, to attend a couple of meetings we found out about on short notice through the usual circuituous routes. I crashed a meeting of the Board of Livestock where the main item of business was killing a proposed environmental assessment (EA) looking at an expanded bison hunt. Not very expanded either, it only included the two small areas currently being "hunted" and a proposed evaluation of the upper Gallatin area.

I don't know if I could ever get used to these sorts of affairs, where almost nothing is as it seems on the surface, and all that's really sure is you've walked into a lion's den of sorts at a considerable disadvantage.

Except for one thing. Our message doesn't change with the audience. It doesn't need to.

Anyway, in spite of Governor Schweitzer's Chief Policy Advisor Hal Harper all but begging the BOL to let this discussion move forward (and despite three of the Board members being their appointees!) the measure was killed without remorse. What I find particularly troubling is the Board member who appeared most instrumental in the process was Meg Smith, who to my dismay also sits on the Region 3 FWP Citizen Advisory Council! Oh, yes, this is looking like a very tangled web, indeed...

Tonight there's a meeting of the Interagency Bison Management Plan members here in Bozeman. It's an open house format, later breaking down into discussion groups, which I expect to find interesting to say the least. Many things about this situation aren't adding up here lately, and I'm looking forward to face-to-face discussions about them.

Stay tuned...

OK, picking up where I left off here, the IBMP meeting was an extremely refreshing change of pace. The roundtable discussions were very productive, and I believe some bridges were built between livestock producers and wildlife enthusiasts, which I know are not mutually exclusive categories. Many of the livestock producers and people from ag organizations I spoke with were considerably re-assured that their private property rights are absolutely protected, and that in fact very little if anything would have to change with livestock management in the affected areas. Existing July turnout dates on the handful of public grazing allotments reduces the risk of brucellosis transmission to effectively nothing, and we all agree that more bison need to be harvested. It's going to take more than the two existing postage-stamp areas, though, to have an effective public bison hunt.

The members of the IBMP (Yellowstone Park, the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, the Department of Livestock, the Federal Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service, and the Gallatin National Forest) agree that these processes need to be more transparent, and the open-house/roundtable format was a big step in that direction. Many good suggestions were offered Wednesday evening, refreshingly absent the degree of acrimony that has often accompanied these discussions.

Now, whether anything will actually come of it remains to be seen. In fact, that was one of the final questions brought up at the table I was at. The moderator (a Yellowstone Park staffer, who did a very good job) replied that this was basically new territory, and so it remained to be seen what would transpire. This was the first time they'd tried this open house format, but I think everyone would agree it went very well. The suggestions will be evaluated by the members, and hopefully we'll see some of them implemented in future bison management (after more meetings, of course, public scrutiny, etc.).

Unfortunately, what we're not seeing is leadership from the Schweitzer administration on this issue. Their hopes for an expanded hunt seem to hinge on negotiations with the Church Universal and Triumphant to retire their cattle feedlines (for a nice chunk of change, presumably). That's all fine and good, except it doesn't really get us much habitat at all, and what there is only lends itself to a "whack 'em at the boundary" sort of...

I was going to say "hunt". That's not a hunt. Although, that's how the existing situation was designed, and that's why members of the Gallatin Wildlife Association (among many others) have been attempting to improve it since. One would hope that a hunt would involve at least a minimal amount of year-round habitat, and not a media circus with some poor hunter competing with the Nez Perce tribe for what is at the moment the last wild buffalo in Montana.

But let's say you weren't really on board with that vision, and had decided to play it safe. At the Board of Livestock meeting Monday when the idea of even opening a discussion of a minimally expanded bison hunt was killed, it didn't appear to me that the Schweitzer-appointed members of the Board were any more open to the idea than the others.

If you wanted to make the situation go away, that'd be one way to do it. And if you didn't want it to go away, it seems to me you'd have enlisted some people who could make a case to the Board to let the situation go ahead. That most definitely didn't happen, in fact as usual the meeting was all but secret, and now we find out this was briefly presented to the Board at their prior meeting also, &...

Oh, great, now I have Elvis Presley going in my head. "We're caught in a trap, I can't walk out..." Suspicious Minds. What a great song.

All I know is I saw some things at that Board of Livestock meeting that don't add up at all. So although I'm trusting by nature, suspicion has value also. Trust, but verify, right?

That's harder when the minutes from even the prior meeting aren't going to be available until March?! Hmmm...