Swan Lake biologist honored by RMEF

Swan Lake Ranger District wildlife biologist Jane Ingebretson went to Las Vegas for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s annual conference in February expecting to help work their booth.

What she got was the 2012 Elk Country Award — an honor she received because of her work during the last two decades that has contributed to increasing elk and other wildlife habitat along the Swan Range.

“I was totally surprised,” Ingebretson said. “Everyone else was dressed for it; I showed up in my jeans and flannel shirt.”

She was one of four U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management employees awarded for their work in conserving elk habitat.

Ingebretson held seasonal jobs with the Forest Service doing wildland fire fighting and timber management in Utah, Oregon, Washington and Alaska before coming to the Flathead in 1982, where she started working as a wildlife biologist.

Ingebretson’s work centers on the western slope of the Swan Range. It consists of expanding existing shrub fields, areas of forest that consist of low-lying shrubs, trees and grasses rather than coniferous trees, through slash projects and prescribed burns. Since 1995, the projects she’s headed up have affected more than 5,200 acres of elk habitat.

Many of her projects were funded in collaboration with the elk foundation. Ingebretson said getting the Forest Service to allocate money for things like large prescribed burns can be hard sometimes, but the RMEF actively looks for projects that could potentially protect or expand elk and wildlife habitat. In the Swan Lake Ranger District’s case, the burn projects Ingebretson proposed were exactly what the RMEF was looking for.

“You find someone that has the same interests as you and you pool your money together,” Ingebretson said. “I’ve just been successful at having projects that they wanted to help fund.”

The way the burns expand habitat for ungulates like deer and elk is by opening up thickly forested areas to sunlight.

“The sun hits them, the snow melts off and so you have good spring feeding habitat,” Ingebretson said.

The vegetation that replaces the burnt off trees is nutrient rich, green and adds a diversity of plants that draws in animals like birds and bears.

Ingebretson said the process of creating these open spaces was started that broke out in the 1980s when a shrub field was created by a fire in Red Owl, a Swan Range creek drainage.

The Forest Service noticed the field that was created had a lot of animal usage, so they decided to maintain it and make it bigger.

This is the process Ingebretson is trying to replicate by holding prescribed burns in the spring and fall.

The two dozen or so prescribed burns Ingebretson spearheaded along the western slope of the Swan Range were meant to mimic a historical process. Mid-to late-summer lightening strikes that used to burn freely are now actively put out by the Forest Service because of the range’s proximity to people.

“If people weren’t here and we didn’t put out the fires, we would have opening on the hillside, and we would have the elk and other animals,” Ingebretson said. “That’s not an option anymore. If there’s going to be a fire on the landscape, we have to control when it is and where it is.”

She is currently holding approval from the Forest Service and the RMEF for prescribed burns on 1,000 more acres of land. The areas to be opened up are in Rumble Creek, Kootenai Creek, Smith Creek and just below Holland Creek.

The RMEF helps pay for thinks like the helicopter drip torch that helps start a fire and the forest service provides the fire crew that maps out the prescribed burn.