Fueling fowl - Bob Greene has been nurturing state’s birds since 1951
By KEILA SZPALLER/Photographed by MICHAEL GALLACHER of the Missoulian
WARM SPRINGS - Ahh, life, it’s been so much fun for Bob Greene, Greene and his birds. He’s trapped and banded wild turkeys, raised and released pheasants, and helped build ponds for ducks and coots and even pelicans.
So Greene’s had fun, 88 years’ worth so far. But it’s hard to say if the pleasure his work has given him will ever match the joy of bird lovers and fish catchers who encounter his handiwork.
The smiling octogenarian first came to the town of Warm Springs more than 55 years ago, when Montana Fish and Game offered him a job as director of the pheasant farm. The job came with a small house on a pond where the water warmed for swimming in the summer and froze for skating in the winter.
Bob Greene has worked most of his 88 years: assuring that wild birds will always have a home in western Montana. Greene was instrumental in building the first ponds near his home in Warm Springs so wildlife, especially game birds, would have a refuge to call home. Photo by MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian
“When I saw that place, I thought, 'Gee, that’s a neat place to live.’ And it is,” he said.
Greene figured it didn’t get any better than that, so he took the job, and he and his wife, Kay, moved into the home. The game bird biologist was only the third person to run the pheasant farm, and so he settled into a life’s work with birds.
In the end, Greene would turn out to be the last farm manager there, too, but no one knew that then. At the time, the state supplied pheasants for people to hunt, and the farm opened in 1927. Greene took over in 1951, and the work of nearly three decades satisfied him, he said, every single day of it.
“Never had a bad day,” Greene said.
Nor a bad night, even the one when the earthquake shook Yellowstone National Park and cracked Hebgen Dam. Pheasants felt the temblor rolling toward the farm before Greene ever knew the quake had hit. That year, 1959, he heard the birds crowing a terrible noise before he saw the ground slide under the cottonwoods.
“There was an unbelievable ruckus of several thousand pheasants raising Cain,” he said.
The earthquake registered a magnitude of 7.1, according to Missoulian archives, but Greene said it left no damage on the farm. The birds soon quieted, too.
On regular days, he and his helpers gathered eggs, sometimes almost constantly, he said. In the winter and spring, they cared for 1,000 hens and 100 roosters. When eggs sat on incubators, they turned the eggs every three hours to make sure the embryos sloshed around and developed. Greene gave farm tours to elementary school children, too.
“The kids still talk about that, (and) they’re grown up now. That was always a big day for the school,” Greene said.
Occasionally, when a pheasant was killed, Greene said he and his family would fry it or roast it and eat it up.
“They’re better than chicken,” he said. “They’re supposed to be the best in the world ... . Royalty always ate pheasants.”
And so did the hunters who killed them. When it came time to release the birds to the fields, Greene and an assistant went out to their pens. They pushed the pheasants into corners and captured them in crates.
Then, they loaded the crates onto a truck and drove all night long to Fort Peck or Moiese or elsewhere, and Greene said the birds only fussed if the truck stopped humming.
“As long as you’re moving, why, they enjoy it,” Greene said.
When the crates opened, the birds stretched their legs and ran off, or spread their wings and flew away. The pheasant keepers released the birds in the mornings, and Greene said he liked seeing them go.
“It was kind of nice,” he said.
At one time, the farm produced as many as 20,000 pheasants a year, he said. Later on, though, raising the birds became too expensive for the state because hunter return from the birds wasn’t good. Also, the birds were reproducing naturally, so the department, now called Fish, Wildlife and Parks, phased out the pheasant farm, Greene said.
At the same time, he was phasing in some of his own projects and helping with others. Greene helped restore wild turkeys to Montana. During some of his favorite work, he captured turkeys and grouse and banded their legs for research.
“I love to trap birds. That’s more fun than hunting,” he said.
Jerry Gallagher, who worked for Greene for more than a decade, said the biologist was a natural, too.
“He was good at it,” Gallagher said. “He had a lot of patience. He could set there and wait for those turkeys to come in, and it didn’t matter what time of the day he caught them.”
The bird lover also wanted to see ponds built in good marshland for waterfowl. When the Department of Highways built the interstate, he asked if the workers could build ponds along the burrow area.
Construction workers were digging gravel out the area anyway, and they agreed. Knowing his birds, Greene asked if the crew could leave some mounds untouched, because he knew the hills would turn into islands where geese would nest.
Many agencies helped: the Job Corps Service, Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Department of Highways, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service and the United States Forest Service.
Greene also saw promising land on property that belonged to Arco, and he said the then-Anaconda Copper Mining Company agreed to lease 5,000 acres.
Now, he said, people come from all over to catch rainbow trout and brown trout in The Hog Pond. Another pond, No. 3 Pond, is one square mile, and Greene figures trout probably swim in all the ponds. Some pools even draw foreigners chasing trophies.
“Our little fishing ponds are some of the best fishing ponds in the whole world right now,” Greene said.
His wife passed on last year, but he still lives nearby, there in the same home where he and Kay raised two daughters. His own pond is busy with birds and human visitors, but he heads to the other ponds frequently, too.
A few days ago, he saw shovelers and swans carving lines in the water, willets walking the shores and geese waddling along the trails. In one pool, he also watched a fuzzy gosling tailing its parents.
So ordinary for spring, but the sight he saw filled him with wonder.
“They’re hatching already. Imagine that.”
