Familiar face brings local experience to job as Blackfoot Challenge director

After two months as the new executive Director of the Blackfoot Challenge, Seth Wilson is settling into the role that brought him back to the Blackfoot Valley.

Wilson, who served as the first Wildlife Coordinator for the Blackfoot Challenge from 2001 to 2014, took over the position Sept. 3 and has been re-acquainting himself with the watershed and the organization's partners.

"As I get a bit more settled in as executive director, I am grateful to our amazing Board of Directors and staff who are a delight to work with--their passion for the Valley and their incredible work ethic make the Blackfoot Challenge a true team power house," Wilson told the BVD last week. "When you take the landowners, residents, managers and all of our communities together, our collaborative approach is a winning combination for the future."

Wilson's hiring ended a nationwide eight-month search for a new director. The positons had been vacant since September, 2018, after the Blackfoot Challenge parted company with the previous director Charles Curtin, who held the positon for just seven months.

Wilson credited Blackfoot Challenge Board Chair Jim Stone with holding things together as the interim executive director during the intervening year.

"We had amazing leadership by the chair of our board Jim Stone, who stepped in as our interim director and we had amazing staff," he said. "Together during that transition there was strong leadership."

Wilson said it shows that Blackfoot landowners like Stone are "in it for the long term."

In the September press release announcing Wilson as the new executive director, Stone touted Wilson's passion for people, community, and the Blackfoot watershed. "He brings with him a tremendous amount of experience in team leadership, partnership-building, and a strong connection to the values and vision of collaborative conservation."

Although Wilson holds a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Studies and Government, a Masters in Environmental Studies, a Ph. D. in Forestry and has more than 20 years' experience in applied conservation biology and wildlife conflict resolution, it's his knowledge of the Blackfoot that makes some believe he's a good fit for the job.

"He knows the Challenge, he knows the system, he knows the people," said Lincoln's Brent Anderson, who became a member on the Blackfoot Challenge shortly before Wilson left. "He isn't coming in blind and he's got a good background for it."

Amber Kamps, who worked with Wilson while she was the Lincoln District Ranger, had a similar assessment.

"I think he's a neat individual to be in that position because he has so much history in the Blackfoot and working with our more controversial issues, like grizzly bears," she said. "It's a position for him to be able to utilize all those skills and all the information and knowledge and his partnerships he's had for all those years and bring that into this position.

Kamps, who now owns property near Ovando, said she never had experienced working with him as a landowner, but has worked with some of the programs he created.

"I don't see that he is going to be any different, working as a land manger side by side with him, versus now as a landowner. He's the same great guy. It's just a good fit," she said.

During his earlier tenure with the Challenge, Wilson was instrumental in establishing baseline data for the wildlife committee and in developing strategies for reducing the conflicts with wolves and grizzlies, but he credits the stakeholders for their success.

"We had a great partnership with Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Fish and Wildlife service, the landowners and the ranching community. It was a collective that made those innovations possible," he said. ""We rolled our sleeves together. That was a really amazing time for me to be able to work with an amazing group of landowners and our different partners... to address it together."

Wilson carried the lessons for that experience with him after he left the Challenge and applied them to his recent work with the Slovenian Forest Service in eastern Europe. Wilson spent three of the last four years working there on a Eurasian Lynx translocation effort aimed at preventing the localized extinction of the animals in the mountains in Slovenia and Croatia.

The job gave him the chance to learn about how they do things in Europe and to see the role that Slovenian and Croatian hunters played in reintroduction effort. It was also an opportunity to help the translocation team give more thought to the importance of open communication and local support in such efforts, something that the former communist countries in Europe are still getting used to.

"During the communist times, there was a lot of top down regulatory approaches to many sectors of the society, but they're shifting that thinking and recognizing how important it is to have local people at the table when we're talking about wildlife issues," Wilson said. "That was really exciting to take part in that sort of new approach."

While wildlife and human/wildlife conflict issues have been Wilson's main focus for much of his career, he said the Blackfoot Challenge Wildlife Committee is going strong under Coordinator Eric Graham. His new focus in on the future of the Blackfoot Challenge as a whole.

"The most important tasks for me is to be sure were being responsive to the needs of our community, and to keep the organization sustainable moving into the future," he said. "I'm interested in thinking about how to secure a permanent, long term way to fund the Blackfoot Challenge. Whether it's an endowment or other ways to diversify our revenue streams so we can maintain long-term financial health. That's important to me. Personally, I'm excited about tackling some of that. "

Wilson said the Oct. 5 tour of the Upper Blackfoot Mining Complex also served as a reminder of the opportunities to engage with the current and next generation throughout the watershed.

"This is a big watershed and there's diversity in every community. There are a lot of issues and opportunities in every part of it. I'm excited to connect with Lincoln and all our communities and to be responsive to what landowners and residents and partners are interested in in those parts of the watershed," he said. "I'm super excited and energized and I feel really lucky to be back home in Montana."