Montana Circuit (unpublished) The most rapidly developing type of travel is the nature excursion. Tens of thousands of nature enthusiasts are spending vacations seeking out exotic wildflowers or animals across America and in foreign countries as well. In particular bird watchers who wish to add to their life lists are venturing ever farther in search of the cactus wren or whooping crane that they have no chance of seeing at home. But sometimes that tight focus on a single purpose blinds these travelers to other attractions of the areas they visit. Here is an account of a recent adventure in which we were able to add to a search for new bird species an appreciation of the history, geography and literature of one of our most interesting states. It took some additional preparation before we left, but that preparation was well worth the time. * I had been to Montana just once before. At the end of World War II I was bumped off a military flight at the Great Falls airport and had to hitchhike by road across the country to get back to New York State. So I was delighted when Scott Shalaway, the West Virginia natural history author, and I were invited to observe some of Montana's wildlife in late April. On that earlier hitchhiking adventure my first day rides took me down along the Big Belt Mountains through Helena and Bozeman to Gardiner, just across the Wyoming border from Yellowstone Park. That day prepared me for something we Easterners must get used to in the west: a difference in scale. A look at a map of the Lower 48 confirms this. The western states are larger, the distances greater. Montana in fact spans the entire mountain time zone. But there is more to it than that. The mountains are higher there, the rivers longer. In the East we see cows grazing contentedly on a few acres; feeding range for western cattle is measured in square miles. And people are spread out too. In New York we average over 350 people per square mile; in Montana there are less than six. In Montana your nearest neighbor is usually over those next hills. Now Shalaway and I have less than five days, hardly enough to see a few of the state's birds and animals to say nothing of its geography and history, but those days prove absolutely spectacular nonetheless. Our first half-day confirms my expectations. We meet our host, Victor Bjornberg, at the Billings airport in midday and set out on a 300 mile drive down the Yellowstone River to Culbertson in the northeastern corner of the state. This ride brings us into our first of many contacts with the Lewis and Clark expedition. We are following William Clark's 1806 return route. Coming back from the Pacific the two explorers had separated after crossing the Bitterroot Mountains, Lewis continuing directly east toward the Great Falls of the Missouri River, Clark returning over their earlier route south until he turned east to join this Yellowstone River. A few miles east of Billings we come to the solitary high butte that Clark scaled to carve his name and date at its top. This bit of historical graffiti is now encased in glass where it remains one of the earliest artifacts of the press of European civilization on these ancient lands. Clark named the butte Pompy's Tower after his Indian guide Sacagawea's young son, a name now modified to Pompey's Pillar to conform -- goodness knows why -- with an Egyptian monument. In his log Clark told of observing from its top immense herds of buffalo and elk as well as troops of wolves. We see only a few small homes, wild open country, a small flock of snow geese speeding along the river flats and as always in Montana distant mountain peaks. As we speed northeast we pass over small streams that tell of another, less attractive period of our nation's history. The Little Bighorn and the Rosebud Rivers, flowing into the Yellowstone from the south, announce that this is also Custer country. Our next stop is Makoshika State Park outside Glendive where Manager Mike Sullivan shows us a sterile yet fascinating region that will always serve for me as the definition of ""badlands.'' Stark gray cliffs rise all around us and we see our first table rocks, huge flat stones that lie atop chimneys of softer rock. In many cases the bases of these towers have eroded until it seems that the tables will fall at any moment. Sullivan tells us how many of these towers were indeed collapsed by early cowboys who, as a break from their harsh lives, enjoyed roping them and pulling them over. Now only a turkey vulture soars among these columns. This is also dinosaur country. In other mud rocks like these that were formed on stream and ocean bottoms, five of the only eleven existing Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons have been unearthed in eastern Montana badlands. Those carnivorous monsters have been extinct for over 65 million years so we are looking at a lot of geology here. As we pass among these high beetling scarps, I find myself also impressed by small things. We discover the soft blue tints of prairie pasqueflowers beginning to color the harsh landscape that is otherwise only gray rock and tumbleweed, white alkali seeps, and barely green cactus, small twisted conifers and shortgrass. The quality of the pasqueflower petals remind me of those gardenia corsages that look wilted even before they are pinned on your date. I also note the sign at the entrance that reads, "Rattlesnakes have been seen: Please stay on sidewalks." Even this early in the year I follow instructions. The next morning we rise long before daylight to visit a sharp-tailed grouse lek on the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge north of Culbertson. This is an experience not to be missed. With refuge manager Tedd Gutzke we watch from a tiny blind as the male grouse strut and dance, trying to impress the few seemingly unconcerned females who stand along the sidelines or occasionally venture across the dance floor. Tails high, the males expose fluffy white rump feathers, flutter their wings and beat their feet against the ground. Goetzke points out that western Amerinds imitate these grouse in one of their ceremonial dances. Here we also see the first of the many thousands of ducks, geese, swans and pelicans that we will find as we travel west across northern Montana. Shallow lakes near the Canadian border provide stopovers for migrants like the snow and Ross's geese that will travel to the far north and they also serve as breeding grounds for many ducks like the beautiful cinnamon teal that we rarely see in the East. On our stops here; at the state-managed wetlands near Malta; at Bowdoin (in Montana pronounced beh-doyn'), Benton Lake, Mission Valley and Ninepipes National Wildlife Refuges; at Fort Peck Lake; and farther west at Freezeout Lake we add dozens of waterfowl species to our lengthening list. Among them I count red-necked, eared, western and Clark's grebes, several Eurasian wigeon, those cinnamon teal and many ruddy ducks, yet everywhere we go we are offered apologies for the small numbers. We are several weeks late for the major flights. And we are too early for some of the grassland birds that will be common here in May. But everywhere across the shortgrass prairie are western meadowlarks and chestnut-collared longspurs, the latter a species I have never seen before. The richly colored black and cinnamon male longspurs sing from the tops of small bushes or tumbleweed or fly with an accompanying female back and forth over their acre of established property. I know the western meadowlark's song -- so different from our eastern meadowlark -- but I am surprised to find how similar is the song of the longspur. Our two day trip west across the state takes us along the Missouri and the Milk Rivers, now through country much of which Lewis and Clark explored in 1805. Their outward voyage took over two months to traverse this same territory and I would enjoy spending at least that time here. This day also takes us through Poplar, a small town that enjoys a footnote in history: here in 1881 the great Native American leader Sitting Bull surrendered. Then near Chinook which is 22 miles east of Havre (in Montana pronounced hav'-er) we pass within a few miles of the Bear's Paw Battleground, the 1877 site of the Nez Perce surrender. In retreat from the United States army Chief Joseph led his small band of Nez Perce from central Idaho down through the Rockies into what is now the Yellowstone Park area of northwest Wyoming, then north across Montana almost to the safety of Canada. Heavily outmanned and outgunned, he yet fought four battles along this thousand mile journey, outgeneraling the federal forces and finally giving in only when his people were near starvation. His famous words of surrender, "I will fight no more forever," remain an American legacy. Indeed, not all was lost for news of these encounters changed Eastern attitudes and the army's harsh policies became increasingly unacceptable. Eastern Montana is rolling open country with a strong west wind constantly blowing. Dust devils swirl and move east. Locals tell us that the state is rapidly moving to the Dakotas. Travelers who think only of their next stop would describe this part of the state as boring; instead I find it both restful and challenging. This is the world A. B. Guthrie so aptly named in his novel title, "The Big Sky." It is about this country and the mountains to the west that his elegant series of western novels are written. Over the broad prairie, itself only marred here and there by fence lines and of course by the long stripe of highway, that infinite blue sky seems broader and more expansive than ours in the east. In fact it is. Our horizon is always broken by buildings and trees. Seldom is it so in Montana. Until we reach the mountains trees are indeed at a premium. Only around the few houses or in an occasional stream bed a few cottonwoods and chokecherries grow. Although we see fewer birds on these "in-between" drives, they are to be found. Meadowlarks and longspurs perch on fence wires and occasionally we see short-eared owls on posts. I record my first ferruginous hawk flying directly overhead. This is a common summer resident in Montana, but again we are too early to see them in large numbers. We also see two majestic golden eagles, one soaring flat winged across a coulee, the other perched high up on a rock outcropping, its massive shoulders exuding power. Here we also observe our first jackrabbits and antelope. The antelope seems out of place here to me: it is more like an animal of the African plains. One small group of them bounds off in their stiff-legged way up over a hill with two coyotes ranging along nearby ever on the watch for a possible meal. White- tailed deer are abundant and occasionally we see mule deer as well. Two stops along the way are notable. The giant Fort Peck flood control and power generating dam was, when it was built in the 1930s, the largest earthen dam in the world. It backs up the Missouri for hundreds of miles to form a lake well used for boating, fishing and waterfowl observation. Local birder Chuck Carlson shows us our first loon and a Caspian tern here. Then in Malta we stop to bathe luxuriously in their natural hot springs. At every stop we find reproductions of the paintings of those remarkable western artists: Charlie Russell, Frederic Remington and George Catlin. Evocative of the cowboys and Indians of earlier times, their backdrops still accurately portray the countryside through which we are passing. On our third day we visit more refuges. At Benton Lake, biologist Erich Gilbert shows us hundreds of avocets and dozens of black-necked stilts, big spectacular shorebirds, and he helps us to identify California gulls, the western replacement for our herring gull and the species that rescued the Mormons from a locust plague farther south in Utah. We spend little time passing through Montana's second largest city, Great Falls, population 55,000 -- about 2/3 that of Cheektowaga. Instead we head northwest toward Choteau. To describe the stark realities for the early homesteaders of the foothill country around Choteau in his autobiography, ""This House of Sky,'' Ivan Doig quotes his father: "Scotchmen and coyotes was the only ones that could live in the Basin, and pretty damn soon the coyotes starved out." On the warm April day we visit this country, it is hard to visualize the difficulties Doig's sheepherding family faced. Instead we find in these mountain valleys rolling fields of grain and open pastures. We've reached those mountains that have until now hovered in the distant haze like a movie backdrop. And we now find trees as well. Not many of them, but small groves of pines follow the gullies up extremely steep slopes. The next morning Choteau birder Mike Schwitters shows us small dots on those distant slopes. Through his telescope we see that they are mountain sheep, the males with those huge curving horns. Mike takes us on into the high country along the Sun River where we find, along with several boreal bird species, two dippers, stream-loving birds that do much of their foraging underwater. Finally at Freezeout Lake Mike tries unsuccessfully to find a few remaining Ross's Geese among the hundreds of snows. That night Steve Shimek takes us canoeing for several miles down a mountain stream through a heavily forested area just outside Missoula. This is a different world from that of the prairie we have crossed. It is just like paddling in the Adirondacks of our own state. Shimek is an expert kayaker; he tantalizes us with information about the many Montana streams open to canoeing and the easy access to outfitters. We also spend our final day north of Missoula first with Indian wildlife biologist Bill Swaney, who shows us Cassin's finches and red-naped sapsuckers near Flathead Lake on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Then we meet Denver Holt and Mike Maples of the Missoula-based Owl Research Institute to trap and band long-eared owls. And finally we drive through the National Bison Range near Moiese where we have good views of not only buffalo, but also antelope, deer, mountain sheep and those ubiquitous gophers of the prairies: yellow-bellied mormots and Colombian ground squirrels. We even see a single badger skulking at his burrow. But it is the bison that steal the show: big dirty straggle-haired beasts of the prairie. In "Blue Highways" William Least Heat Moon captures their value to native Americans, describing how they dried buffalo meat and mixed it with wild berries to form pemmican that "lasted indefinitely and had ten times the nutrient value of fresh meat. Tanned bison hides gave the Sioux shelters and bedding, moccasins, leggings, shields, boats, buckets, even vessels to boil food in. Horn and bone gave spikes, drills, knives, scrapers, axes and spoons. Ribs and jawbones provided children with snowsleds. The hooves furnished glue, the scat heat." I cannot envision the time when 60 million of these one ton short-tempered beasts wandered these hills and plains, but they were here. When they were purposely destroyed by the army, the way of life for the Plains Indians was destroyed as well. Now buffalo numbers are increasing across the West and bisonbergers are listed next to beefbergers on restaurant menus. Too late. As we head for the airport and the trip back to New York State, I realize how much this trip was like a movie preview, whetting my appetite for further adventure. Shalaway and I agree that we could spend at least a month in each part of this state: visiting or revisiting sites of special interest, canoeing or kayaking the swiftly flowing streams, hiking along mountain ridges or simply soaking in the remarkable scenery. Montana is heavily pressed by new immigration, largely from the West Coast and Minnesota. Despite this, the hospitality to visitors of everyone we met was outstanding. Mike Schwitters expressed this contradiction perfectly, "We love to have you visit, but remember: the winters here can be very harsh." To obtain detailed information and assistance, travelers need only contact, as we did, the Travel Montana Office of the state Department of Commerce at 1-800- VISIT MT or their Glacier Country office at 1-800-338-5072. I recommend to anyone interested in this interesting state and particularly to those who plan to visit Montana, the following books: any of the novels and autobiographical books by Ivan Doig, especially ³This House of Sky²; Andrew Garciaıs delightful but suspect autobiographical ³Tough Trip Through Paradise²; David Lavenderıs ³The Way to the Western Sea² about the Lewis and Clark expedition; Dayton Duncanıs "Out West" and "Miles from Nowhere", two insightful books about contemporary westerners; and, of course, the novels and autobiography of A. B. Guthrie, Jr., who won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for "The Way West."