“I think there was a tendency to think that the overwhelming factor (driving forest fires) was short-term weather. There’s this idea that drought matters, and it does. But it’s taking time and a lot of research to show that climate plays a big role as well.” — Anthony Westerling Six years ago, climate scientist Anthony […]
Wildlife
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
A few scientific definitions
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Is It or Isn’t It (Just Another Mouse)?“ When people think about the creatures protected by the Endangered Species Act, they tend to picture gray wolves, grizzlies or spotted owls. But the act draws finer distinctions than that, providing protection for subspecies and even […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
There was no green in this Rainbow gathering
When we tell folks that we became the unwitting hosts for the Rainbow Family’s annual gathering, the first response is “the who?” The Family’s Web site, welcomehome.org, styles the Rainbows “the largest non-organization of non-members in the world.” At the beginning of July, more than 17,000 of them gathered in Big Red Park, north of […]
Posted inWotr
Watch out for hijackers in national parks
Yellowstone National Park, spring last year. Marypat and I have stopped for a picnic break on our annual April ride through the Yellowstone. We prop the bikes against a bridge railing, take our sandwiches and stroll to a grassy patch near a creek. It is quiet and tranquil in a way it never is during […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
Falcon’s future rests on a definition
Endangered aplomado falcons in southern New Mexico may be stripped of their protections — by the very agency trying to bring the bird back to the state. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is moving forward with a controversial plan to release up to 150 captive-bred aplomado falcons as a “nonessential experimental population.” Because the […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
Prey at the waterhole
I came around a corner and there was a mountain lion. It was a big male, tail longer than my arm. I stopped in dappled ponderosa shade. I was close enough that I could have tossed a pebble and hit the lion’s tawny block of a head. He was facing the other way, lapping water […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
As states ponder protection, roadless forests unravel
Forest Service says it’s bound by the rules to allow some logging, drilling and mining
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
Failing Bay-Delta may take a living fossil with it
As farmed sturgeon thrive, wild populations are in trouble
Posted inWotr
Debunking the myth of the sand-burrowing minnow
It’s a popular refrain here in central New Mexico come summer: The silvery minnow can hunker down, bury itself in a dry streambed and outlast drought. Whenever the river slows and its bed begins to dry, I’m inevitably informed that the Rio Grande has always dried, and the four-inch long minnow has always survived. This […]
Posted inWotr
If only binoculars were cool
I’ve been a bird-watcher since I was a kid. Or to put it another way: Since I was a kid, I have not been cool. For the most part, that stopped bothering me a long time ago. Still, every now and then, I feel it. This happened recently when I got a close-up look at […]
Posted inWotr
Our coyote war in the West reminds me of the war in Iraq
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” said psychologist Abraham Maslow. As a wildlife ecologist here in the American West, I can’t help but draw analogies between the Bush administration’s foreign policy in Iraq and one of its proposed wildlife policies in the American […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson in survival
I thought about the woman’s bones for a long time — what position they might have been in when they were abandoned and covered up, what had happened to her heart and her lungs as they slowly deteriorated. The cavity of her ribs and her chest, the now-hollow cavity of her thigh bones, that narrow […]
Posted inWotr
An Idaho forest burns almost naturally
Early in May, I watched one of my most cherished forests burn. The flames and smoke were great to see. Fire is often seen as death and destruction for a forest, but here was a forest living with fire as an ecological process. Exactly 10 years ago, this old-growth ponderosa pine forest of the Deadwood […]
Posted inWotr
Cooking up a whopper on federal land in Oregon
Here in Oregon, the dinosaurs are stirring. The brontosaurs of big timber, almost at their last gasp, are making one last power play, and it’s a WOPR, pronounced — how else? — “whopper,” which stands for Western Oregon Plan Revisions. What’s being revised are management plans for six Bureau of Land Management districts in western […]
Posted inJune 26, 2006: The Tamarisk Hunter
How a tiny owl changed Tucson
As the pygmy owl nears local extinction, community leaders vow to continue desert conservation
Posted inWotr
Don’t top that tree!
One day several years ago, when the youngest was 5 and her sister 8, the youngest brought home from kindergarten a watercolor she had painted of a tree. Painted on 9-by-18-inch paper, the tree’s shallow crown stretched the 18-inch width of the paper and off both edges. My wife and I of course praised the […]
Posted inJune 12, 2006: The Perpetual Growth Machine
Mexican wolves face a rocky road to recovery
Mexican gray wolves have nearly disappeared from the Southwest — again. This spring, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inadvertently killed most of the members of a pack of 12 wolves in eastern Arizona. In April, the White Mountain Apache Tribe asked the agency to remove the Hon Dah pack from reservation lands after the […]
Posted inJune 12, 2006: The Perpetual Growth Machine
Making room for wolves
What do you get when you ask 50 people — only a handful of whom have actually ever seen a wolf — to write about new ways to “think about (wolves), imagine them, and welcome them home”? There are the inevitable odes to friendly wolf-dogs, and some wild stuff about kids suckled by volcanoes. But […]
Posted inJune 12, 2006: The Perpetual Growth Machine
On a wing and a prayer
Gunnison grouse must fend for survival without help of Endangered Species Act
Posted inJune 12, 2006: The Perpetual Growth Machine
‘Miss Fish Hatchery’
Name Jenn Logan Vocation Wildlife conservation biologist Age 33 Home Base Alamosa, Colorado Known for Her efforts to protect and save endangered fish She says “I love the challenge of persuading a person to care about suckers or toads.” The very walls were chirping: There were crickets in every crack and cupboard of Jenn Logan’s […]