He reached into the sky with one arm, the palm of his hand toward the sky as the mechanical bird landed in his hand. It was early in the morning, the surrounding mountains tipped in pink and orange. The sound of calves and cows traveled across the valley. I felt the cool mountain air on my skin, looked out toward the Snowcrest Range and thought to myself, “I feel like I’m in the past while looking at the future in TJ’s hand.”

TJ is a drone pilot the Greater Yellowstone Coalition contracted to fly over public grazing allotments in southwest Montana’s Gravelly Range. He helped me and Steve Primm, an independent conservationist contracted with GYC, experiment with drones as a way to collect information about wildlife and livestock movement on the grazing allotments. Our greatest interest was learning more about cows and grizzly bears.

After decades of absence from the landscape, grizzly bears are back living in and around the Gravelly Range. As the grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem recovers and grows, bears are expanding back into their historical ranges where they haven’t been in generations. I hear this from the ranchers I work with—grizzly bear presence is increasing. They experience livestock loss due to depredation every year and the cowboys that work for them are taking more precautions to ensure their personal safety.

Over the past six years, I’ve heard from the local people who work and live in and around the Gravellies that they need more information about grizzly bear movement and how many grizzlies live on this landscape. Yet locating a grizzly, let alone conducting a population estimate is a challenging task out here; the Gravellies are a vast and rugged landscape with forests, valleys, and high elevation terrain. Let’s just say, this would be a heavy lift from the ground.

Our ranching partners who run livestock on public grazing allotments in the Gravellies were very interested in GYC looking into ways we can learn more about grizzlies in the area. Brooke Shifrin, GYC’s wildlife conservation coordinator, Steve, and I felt that getting a bird’s-eye view of the allotments might be a way to see more, and therefore, learn more about wildlife and livestock movement and interactions. We took a bird’s-eye view and elevated it, sending both infrared and standard cameras more than 800 feet in the air to gather video and still shots.

We spent four days in the field looking for cattle, bears, and signs of depredation with the drone. We strategically flew early in the morning, just as the sun was coming up, or later in the evening at sunset when bears are most active in the hopes of capturing bear activity or conflict. We saw elk, pronghorn, lots of cattle, and even a bear, but never depredation happening in real-time. Even with infrared, it was challenging to find life deep within the trees.

Regardless of what we did, and didn’t, manage to capture on film, this was a wonderful learning experience for us. Now we have a sense of a drone’s capability as an information-gathering tool and what we might be able to see and capture in the future. It reminded me that even with a drone, incredibly expensive cameras, and infrared, this mountain range is vast and rugged; even with the latest and greatest technology, the wild nature of the Gravelly Range holds true.

Despite a few shortcomings, we can imagine many effective uses for drones on landscapes like the Gravelly Range. Drones can help cowboys and range riders locate cows when they are spread out across acres of terrain. This tool could save a rider hours and miles on a horse if they can fly a drone, look for cows, and know if there is a need to ride out and bring back a few head of cattle or not. This alone is a massive benefit for any operation on a landscape this expansive.

If we are going to learn more about where bears are, their interaction with cattle, and how we can support coexistence on this shared landscape, we will need to implement more than just drones. But, the drone is one of the many tools we will continue to use.

This is just one of many stops along our journey to learn about grizzly bears in the Gravelly Range. We continue to work with livestock producers and are so grateful for their cooperation and interest in the work we want to do in partnership with them. Getting a better sense of what is happening on the landscape takes a team— we are incredibly thankful for the Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services, and Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. We all need to work together if we are going to coexist with grizzly bears in southwest Montana long into the future.

—Darcie Warden, Montana Conservation Coordinator

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is the land of 49+ Indigenous Tribes who maintain current and ancestral connections to the lands, waters, wildlife, plants, and more.