With a little help from their friends, another batch of Canadian wolves will be released in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho this winter, despite congressional budget action designed to halt the project in its tracks. Environmental groups have pledged $40,000 so far, enough money to find and identify about 30 appropriate wolves in British […]
Wildlife
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
`Goddamn goshawks’
Last summer, loggers discovered a nest with two rare goshawk fledglings on the Headquarters timber sale, west of Laramie, Wyo. With permission from the Forest Service they cut trees within yards of the nest, causing the adults to abandon the nest and the fledglings to die. Environmentalists blasted the agency and loggers for failing to […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Hunger striker to head East
The so-called “logging without laws’ salvage rider signed by President Clinton last July has catalyzed many people to commit acts of civil disobedience. But one person has mounted an unusual protest in front of the federal courthouse in Eugene, Oregon. Tim Ream, 33, set up a tent on the courthouse steps Oct. 3 and has […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Thundering against Thunderbolt
When the U.S. Forest Service set aside a steep and damaged portion of the Boise National Forest for a timber sale called Thunderbolt early this fall, environmentalists in Idaho filed one of the first lawsuits against a salvage sale. Now the 13 million board feet has sold for $1 million, and the Sierra Club Legal […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Logging opponents lose – again
In Moscow, Idaho, you can tell it’s fall when Cove/Mallard timbersale protesters start showing up for trial. In the last four years more than 100 people have argued their cases before a variety of magistrates and federal judges, and nearly all have lost. This year was no exception. The largest trial this year involved 12 […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
John Mumma takes another helm
Four years after jumping out of the political frying pan, John Mumma has leaped into the fire. The former Northern Region forester for the Forest Service has been hired as the new director of the embattled Colorado Division of Wildlife. Mumma quit the Forest Service after 28 years rather than accept reassignment to Washington, D.C., […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Idaho hunters ask public to bear with them
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. Lynn Fritchman is used to spending time with dead bears. The third-generation Idaho hunter inspects bears for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game after they’ve been killed by hunters. But over the years Fritchman heard […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Forget cattle, the money’s in the buck
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. Rancher and farmer Milo Hanson from Saskatchewan, Canada, never imagined that hunting would change his life. That was before judges from the Boone and Crockett Club scored a whitetail buck that he shot near his farm […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
For this hunter, there was only one elk
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. It was mid-afternoon and the bowhunter found himself working up a small knob covered with thick, second-growth lodgepole pine. The knob was part of the north slope of a larger mountain not far from the Continental […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
The politics of hunting creates fluidalliances
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. While nonprofit groups like Ducks Unlimited or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have sharply defined positions on hunting, most environmental groups – composed of both avid hunters and anti-hunters – waffle somewhere in the […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Organizations from ‘Get a gun’ to ‘No way’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. Wildlife Legislative Fund of America: “Our sole purpose in life is to protect the right to hunt, fish and trap,” says staffer Allan Wolter. This umbrella organization for 1.5 million sportsmen was founded in 1978 to […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
I like to hunt, but I don’t like to kill
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. I always edge away from the subject of hunting. I’ve hunted and shall hunt, but I don’t talk about it much – those late-night, throaty recitations of travels and kills make me nervous. It’s miserable standing […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Why a son won’t hunt with his father
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. “You always kill coyotes,” my father would tell me, with a seriousness that both frightened and fascinated me. “Always. They are bad animals. You shoot them whenever you get the chance.” The words rang through my […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
By the grace of old pines
Fish Creek murmurs to itself in a voice like rustling cottonwood leaves as it curves past Montana’s biggest ponderosa pine on its way to the Clark Fork River. Sunlight animates the tree’s trunk and ripples on the underside of its lowest branch, 30 feet overhead. Its bark is a smooth sheath of gold flakes with […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting
Lee Metzgar took up hunting as a youngster, as soon as he could handle a rifle. At first he hunted mostly birds; then he moved west to teach ecology at the University of Montana and, as he phrases it, his hunting got serious. For the next 22 years, stalking in the Rockies, Metzgar bagged deer, […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
1995: Did toxic stew cook the goose?
BUTTE, Mont. – For 342 migrating snow geese, the infamous Berkeley Pit became their final stop. The birds were first discovered Nov. 14, their carcasses floating in the toxic waters of the shut down, open-pit copper mine. The initial body count at this federal Superfund site was 149; the total rose when officials realized the […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Is hunting morally acceptable?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. Editor’s note: The people she most wants to talk to are the men and women who stalk animals and shoot to kill – the people who make moral choices in a split second. She is Ann […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
He stuffs what they kill
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. John Stevenson, who runs Wyoming Taxidermy in Evansville, near Casper, used to mount 500 kills a year. But bad winters have taken a toll on local antelope herds, the number of hunting permits has been reduced […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
One does not hunt in order to kill
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted. If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Watch out for guns
It was killing season again, and in Colorado it might have been safer to romp through the woods in blaze orange than to stay near a hunting camp. A 16-year-old girl in the Uncompahgre National Forest hopped off her four-wheeler while unloading her rifle Oct. 21, only to shoot her father in the leg. He […]