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For seven years, I pursued the jay-sized birds on Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana. That quest to observe a nesting pair turned out to be challenging. Belted kingfishers are loners, skittish, and fiendish to study. However, the rewards of a difficult journey are many—like finding something never recorded before.

The Capitol Talk team remembers a dear colleague. Rep. Rosendale keeps hanging out with some bad guys. The Legislature buckles down on budget work. And Sen. Steve Daines may back an unknown Bozeman businessman to challenge Jon Tester for his Senate seat.

Early in April, I had just spied a fox squirrel eating pine seeds from a ground cache when I felt a shadow gliding overhead on silent wings. I looked up yet saw nothing. When I looked back, there was an indistinct gray form, an apparition, in the shadows where the squirrel had been. The apparition turned its head toward me and peered with two large golden eyes. Tufted horns now held erect confirmed it was a Great Horned Owl.

One June about seven years ago, my husband brought home a bitterroot plant. It was stuck to his irrigation shovel by the clay soil from the hay fields near our house in the Helmville Valley. I marveled at the beautiful hot pink blooms and planted them in the flower bed, where they rarely reappeared.

The binoculars revealed a silver-gray owl close to two feet in height, with patches of brownish-gray barring throughout. Its facial disc was broad with a black patch under its muted yellow beak. Just below the black patch were two horizontal white patches, which looked like a butler’s bow tie. Two whitish feather mounds created an X pattern between its eyes.

Today, I stand in the same early morning sunlight but on dry ground, looking up and west at what the Blackfeet call the “Backbone of the World,” the Rocky Mountain Front. I tip my head all the way back to look way up at this reef, now transformed by time.

Near Butte, Montana we found ourselves traveling through a boulder field. It was a wonder to behold! Seeing these boulders for the first time I had to ask myself, "What happened here?"

What I have learned is that, despite the obvious difference in weight between human brains (tipping the scale at about three pounds) and chickadee brains (similar in weight to a raisin), there are commonalities in structure and function between the two species.

Cedar basket trees are an example of culturally modified trees, or CMTs, in this case identified by the large scars or strips of missing bark that the Salish peoples used to make their cedar bark baskets. CMTs reveal the behavior of Indigenous peoples and their gathering routines. Studying when and where CMT scars appeared helps uncover the Salish ecological knowledge systems and culture.

What is so lovely and reassuring, somehow, is that the migratory birds, from Montana and elsewhere, turn up on cue, as they have been doing for thousands of years.