The Griffith Park mountain lion, discovered wandering the urban wilds above Los Angeles in the late winter of 2012, has been celebrated like none other of its kind. While mountain lions menace suburbs in Colorado and distress ranchers in Arizona, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California, the rare cougar is widely viewed as […]
Wildlife
Posted inWotr
Neighbors who visit my backyard in the dead of night
Not long ago, in the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of snickering outside my bedroom window. I lay still, ransacking my brain for ideas on who might be out there, playing a trick on me, though by this point I had a fairly good idea of the culprits. I reached for […]
Posted inWotr
My chickens lay their own Easter eggs
My first baby chicks arrived 10 years ago, just after midnight on Easter Sunday. The post office, of course, was closed, but I got the call to come get them, as happens when live animals are shipped. I’ve been rocking a flock ever since. Those who raise backyard chickens will inevitably go through an obsessive […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Backpacking with monster skeeters
An Alaska encounter with the fiercest of the 176 mosquito species that roam the U.S.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Strange little museums and zoos enliven the region
British ColumbiaAs you wander the West, keep an eye out for the tiniest, quirkiest museums and zoos tucked in unexpected and obscure spaces. They often provide outsized amusement and – fair to say – unrivaled learning experiences. You can see, for instance, “Canada’s largest ant farm,” along with hulking tarantulas, Malaysian rainbow frog beetles and […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Best place to see a crowd of grizzlies
A few tourists get close to amazing numbers of bears catching salmon at Alaska’s McNeil River Falls.
Posted inGoat
Threatened lynx are bycatch in Idaho trapping resurgence
Last January, in the snowbound mountains that crease northern Idaho’s Boundary County, an unnamed trapper found what he thought was a live bobcat in his baited wire cage. He shot the creature on sight, hoping for a pelt that would fetch up to $2,000 on the fur market. But when he lifted the carcass from […]
Posted inWotr
Save sagebrush, and good things happen
High in the Desatoya Mountains east of Fallon, Nev., and just east of Route 50 — famously dubbed “The Loneliest Road in America” by Life Magazine in 1986 — a curious congregation gathers in the predawn light. It is a congregation made up of two parts: one, of sage grouse, preparing to strut their stuff […]
Posted inGoat
Feds and state officials square off on Alaska hunting regulations
The morning of Friday, February 21 dawned bright and clear in the rolling boreal forest of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, east of Fairbanks, Alaska. The temperature topped out at eight below zero. Earlier in the week, a family of 11 wolves known as the Lost Creek pack loped beyond the preserve’s boundaries as they […]
Posted inGoat
Hatcheries make for happy anglers, but at what cost to wild fish?
This spring, millions of Americans will snap together rods, tie flies and spinners to monofilament, and, from a boat or streambank, cast to a rising fish. In many places, their quarry will be the born-and-raised products of hatcheries, facilities in which fish are artificially bred for the benefit of anglers. Nevada will stock a million […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
A plague of tumbleweeds
A handy pamphlet on how to dig out from a tumbleweed takeover of sci-fi proportions.
Posted inWotr
The tortoise is collateral damage in the Mojave Desert
Large solar arrays can harm threatened species.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
A solution to our biological crisis
I was pleased to see the sobering article by Emily Guerin, “Crisis biology,” regarding the fungal diseases now wiping out the world’s amphibians and bats (HCN, 2/17/14). Here in California, we import some 2 million American bullfrogs for human consumption, sold mostly in the state’s many “Chinatown” live-animal food markets. The majority of the market […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Win-win win
It’s probably proper for me to mention that I have worked for the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, and have been a Sierra Club member in the Southwest or Northwest for much of my adult life. In the context of the Feb. 17 HCN issue featuring collaborative […]
Posted inGoat
Crane migration depends on agriculture and sustainable groundwater management
Last Friday morning, as a cold sun struggled to rise above the eastern wall of the San Luis Valley – the 125-mile-long, 7,000-foot-high, Oklahoma-flat basin that lies between the San Juans and the Sange de Cristos in southern Colorado – a throng of birdwatchers climbed aboard a yellow school bus to observe one of the […]
Posted inWotr
When poisoning is the solution
A victory for an endangered fish, though some environmentalists fought hard to prevent it.
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Cows are not a ‘tool’
When I read “The Odd Couple,” I saw my career flash before my eyes (HCN, 2/17/14). From 1984 to 2006, I was the hydrologist on the Beaverhead National Forest, and for most of that time, my fellow “ologists” and I were involved with the grazing issue. Occasionally, we would get the right combination of permittee, […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
The little fish that could
An endangered Oregon minnow recovers, while many native fish still struggle.
Posted inGoat
Fire suppression and illegal marijuana cultivation threaten rare Pacific fishers
The Pacific fisher, a small, carnivorous forest-dwelling mammal, is a candidate for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act this year, and big wildfire could be to blame – or rather, the lack of it. Ecologist Chad Hanson’s recent research on the fisher population of the southern Sierra Nevada shows that the animals – aptly […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2014: The Gila $olution
Crisis biology: Can bacteria save bats and frogs from deadly diseases?
As populations plummet, biologists race for a solution.