CALIFORNIA
Sidney Woodruff, an ecology Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis, wants to save the northwestern pond turtle — and other critters, too — from an invasive amphibian, Lithobates catesbeianus, or the American bullfrog. It’s hard to imagine that Kermit’s distant cousin could threaten the delicate ecosystem of Yosemite National Park, but looks are deceiving: These particular frogs, Woodruff told NPR, can grow to “the size of a grapefruit” and “will literally just feed on anything that fits into their mouth,” including salamanders, snakes — even small birds, rodents and other frogs. (Talk about having a frog in one’s throat!) According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, biologists have been trying to rid Yosemite of bullfrogs since the 1990s, a challenge for both the biologists and the bullfrogs. Native to Eastern North America, they — the bullfrogs, not the biologists — were brought West in the late 1800s, often for food, and have been a problem ever since. Over the course of several years, Woodruff and her colleagues set about removing the adult bullfrogs by night and their egg masses by day, about 16,000 bullfrogs across two sites. This is good news for Yosemite’s northwestern pond turtles, which have made a resurgence, along with other water critters. “As the bullfrog population went down,” Woodruff said, “you started to hear some of our native chorus of frogs again. They’re the ones that have this iconic Hollywood ribbit sound.” Or, as NPR put it, “Once the bullfrogs croak, the native frogs can finally croon.”
THE WEST
Sometimes a gal just has to get away and spend quality time alone, with her friends. That’s what Patricia Petrina set out to do, accompanied only by her four horses and a dog named Piglet. She wanted to have plenty of time to enjoy the scenery — about 3,000 miles’ worth — all the way from the U.S.-Mexico border up to Canada, KSLTV reports. And the best way to travel and have time to take it all in? The old-fashioned way — on horseback. Petrina, who grew up around horses in northern Idaho, felt called to adventure and wanted to do something big. The trek hasn’t always been easy, but she and her companions are taking it one step, or four hooves, at a time: “It’s doing the hard things and knowing that you can and pushing through hard stuff.” She left Arizona in early March and expects to reach Montana’s Glacier National Park by September, in the process answering Mary Oliver’s question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
WASHINGTON
Bee-lieve it or not: When a commercial truck carrying 14 million honeybees, including 70,000 pounds of hives, rolled over, dumping its precious cargo all over Weidkamp Road in Whatcom County, beekeeping experts and emergency personnel grabbed their gear and rushed to the scene. Matt Klein, deputy director of the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Management, told KOMO News that he was given a “little beekeeping suit” that turned out to be useful, since he was instantly covered in the insects. Derek Condit, author of The Natural Beekeeper’s Path: Treatment-Free Practices for a Living World, was one of a dozen beekeepers who responded. They worked on rebuilding the hives for several hours, dispensing smoke to calm the bee-fuddled bees — which were justifiably as mad as, well, hornets — in the hope that they might make a bee-lated beeline back to the hives. But not all are likely to return. “It’s a percentage thing, and in this case, no, the bees … there’s going to be massive losses,” Condit said. The bees, he noted, would swarm to local areas to start new hives. Though we hope no new cases of hives. …
WASHINGTON
For 60 years, the “Uncle Sam” billboard along Interstate 5 in Lewis County has been notorious for its controversial right-wing messaging. No longer, however: It was purchased by the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation. The price for the 3.5-acre property that hosted the roadside landmark? $2.5 million. The tribe wasn’t thinking about the billboard, though; the property is a good site for economic development, The Seattle Times reports. But the contentious political messages are definitely a thing of the past. Jeff Warnke, the Chehalis Tribe’s director of government and tribal relations, said the tribe “had a good time thinking of crazy stuff we could put up there.” Also some not so-crazy stuff: The property represents tribal LandBack efforts, after all. Why not a message reminding people that it really is tribal land?
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This article appeared in the August 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Heard Around the West.”
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