Wildlife

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

With thick fur and snowshoe-like feet, wolverines are well-adapted to live in snow caves and run straight up mountains. Their high elevation lifestyles have helped them stay out of harm’s way in recent decades, and stage a slow comeback from the rampant carnivore persecution of the early 1900s. Though elusive and tenacious, they won’t be […]

Ours is an increasingly urban nation – over 80 percent of the U.S. population now dwells in cities and towns, a figure that’s only rising. Nowhere is that trend more pronounced than in the West: Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Denver are among the country’s fastest-growing cities. Our metropolitan migration has environmentalists and planners dreaming of […]

In the 1980s, when ecologist Brian Linkhart first started digging around in old woodpecker holes in Colorado for flammulated owls – fuzzy, black-eyed creatures weighing just one to two ounces – his research was all about the birds. He wanted to understand if and where the secretive little animals were breeding – questions he pursued […]