Living up to our name in the Swan Valley

A wetland in a valley with a swan swimming by would have looked pretty enticing for a westward settler on the heels of Lewis and Clark, and not just because it was beautiful scene. The habitat's maker could likely be guessed, and at the time, the real value seen in a wetland was in the beaver pelts it could offer, or, once the industrious rodents were removed, in the pasture it could promise. Although wetlands were buggy, fickle, and, well...wet, few homesteaders would have passed up a flat swath of land that beavers and floodwater had cleared. The soil would have looked moist and composted enough, and such sites spared the labors of felling trees with crosscut saws and excavating roots with fire and oxen. In this way, wetlands became easy targets for conversion, first by the fur traders, and later by the homesteaders who proved up their land by having it ditched, diked and drained.

In this the Swan Valley is not unique. Across the contiguous United States, wetland cover shrank by 53 percent, from 221 million acres in the 1780s to 104 million acres in the 1980s. By the time the environmental movement formalized with federal legislation in the 1970s, people were starting to appreciate wetlands' myriad ecosystem services: filtering pollutants, buffering floods or fires, recharging groundwater, storing carbon and providing rockstar habitats for diverse plants and animals. This wetland revaluation culminated in President George H.W. Bush's 1988 "no net loss" policy, which aimed to prevent wetland destruction or degradation, with mitigation efforts that restore or create new wetlands to balance out those that were converted. The policy has found success through both non-regulatory conservation incentive programs (like the Wetland Reserve Program) and regulatory protections under the Clean Water Act. But as we continue to struggle to define which wetlands need protection and how to prioritize them, the policy is not perfect.

Meanwhile, as the pressure of habitat fragmentation marches on, SVC cannot wait solely for policies to give wetlands the respect they deserve. Here in the Swan Valley, we're lucky to have 16 percent of our acres covered in surface water, compared to a mere one percent statewide. Our watershed even hosts the state's sole population of water howellia, a Threatened plant listed on the Endangered Species Act that thrives in the vernal pools that fill in with snowmelt each spring. And, we have diversity among our wetlands, too: "potholes" pocked by glaciers, woody swamps made by beavers, off-channel and oxbow wetlands along the river, marshes, wet meadows and even fens. As climate change makes Montana warmer and drier, such a diverse, vulnerable and abundant gift demands our care.

To protect these local wonders, SVC uses non-regulatory programs and support from the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Partners Program to help advance wetland restoration on private land with willing landowners. From plugging ditches that restore functional hydrology to coordinating solutions for coexistence with beavers, SVC is committed to helping landowners benefit from the wealth of goods and services these habitats provide. It's easy to take them for granted, kind of like our valley's name, which originated back when trumpeter swans gathered at Swan Lake. Due in part to wetland loss, there have been few visiting – and zero nesting – swans seen in our watershed since at least the mid-20th century. But guess what? This year, perhaps with a boost from Blackfoot Trumpeter Swan Restoration Program, a pair of swans nested on a wetland in the upper Swan Valley for the first time in decades. And they had cygnets, almost as if to remind us how precious and promising that wetlands can be.