Environmental
The Yellowstone Gateway Museum Foundation’s Speaker Series continues in the third week of May. James C. Halfpenny, Ph.D. will be speaking on “The Yellowstone Wolverine Revealed.” In addition to the featured lecture, a reception is planned at the museum, as are presentations to students at East Side Elementary School and at Park High.
On Wednesday, May 20th, the museum will feature a reception for Dr. Halfpenny at 6 pm. The event is free and open to the public. Dr. Halfpenny will then speak at the Empire Theatre on Thursday, May 21st at 7 pm—our first event at the Empire venue. Like the reception, this lecture is free of charge and open to the public. Jim’s books will be available in the lobby for sale and signing.
James “Jim” Halfpenny, known as the “Track Doctor,” is often the go-to guy when it comes to credible wildlife tracking identification and behavior. He is an intrepid explorer, scientist, and educator whose research has spanned all seven continents.
For many in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, Jim can read tracks the way other people read books. He has authored or co-authored more than 30 books, including Charting Yellowstone’s Wolves—the genealogy and brief biography of individual wolves living in Yellowstone. His specialties include the ecology of alpine, polar, winter environments, as well as climate change and wildlife tracking and forensics, with a special emphasis on mammalian carnivores both large and small. Dr. Halfpenny operates a nature center near Yellowstone National Park called “A Naturalist’s World,” hosts a speaker series called “Gathering of Naturalists,” and has provided working accommodations to multiple generations of researchers. He is a long-time resident of Gardiner, where he maintains a community fund that provided aid and relief in the aftermath of the historic 2022 flood.
Jim is a member of amateur radio service K9YNP, an emergency coordinator for Park County, and served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War. In a time when conservation fights are increasingly fought on screens and in courtrooms, Halfpenny’s legacy is deeply and insistently physical—instead, it resides in plaster, chewed bones, broken vertebrae, chalk dust, and snow pits dug each year to measure how the winter season itself is changing.
Cold and snow are central to much of Dr. Halfpenny’s research. The Mountain Research Station Director of the Long-Term Ecological Research program, he has worked extensively on a project focused on alpine tundra and monitoring snowfields, including the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains. His video “The Last Cold,” featuring the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, is on the YouTube channel “Gathering of Naturalists”—showcasing our very own backyard here in Southwest Montana. He has also been a contributor to CNN News.
Jim earned his Ph.D. in 1980 in Biology, Ecology & Mammalogy from the University of Colorado. He received his Bachelor of Science in 1969 and Master of Science in 1970, both in Botany and Ecology from the University of Wyoming, where he was a four-year letterman in diving, swimming and water polo.