Lead is banned in paint, gasoline, dishes, and children’s toys, and now California is looking at removing the largest unregulated source of the neurotoxin by also banning lead ammunition. One motivation is to generally protect wildlife and human health, but some see it as a way to improve the prospects of California condors; lead poisoning […]
Wildlife
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The latest: A cautious cave re-opening
BackstorySince 2006, a powdery white fungus has killed nearly 6 million bats in the Eastern and Southern U.S. In 2010, when white-nose syndrome spread into Missouri, the Forest Service at first kept Western caves open, but asked spelunkers to disinfect their equipment. Then, that summer, the agency closed all caves and abandoned mines in its […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Trappers catch a lot more than wolves
As the feds handed management of gray wolves to Idaho, Montana and Wyoming over the last few years, reactions were mixed. Conservationists worried that wolf numbers would plummet, while hunters and trappers were thrilled they’d get to legally pursue the predators. All three states have hunting seasons now. Idaho started allowing wolf trapping last year; […]
Posted inWotr
Look! Shooting stars!
My favorite Oregon wildflowers are called shooting stars, delicate darts whose blossoms with their sharp-pointed anthers and swept-back magenta petals seem to hurtle toward the soft spring earth from their height of six inches or so. These are among the first flowers to appear in our oak woodlands, long before the oaks themselves show any […]
Posted inWotr
Wild horses: Too much of a good thing
I grew up with a dozen horses on Colorado’s eastern plains. In winter I busted hay bales to feed them, and, under a star-strewn sky, chopped holes in iced-over water tanks so the animals could drink. I’ve always believed that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. But not […]
Posted inRange
Real bears get a helping hand from Hollywood
It’s a long way from the cold, rainy valleys of northwestern Montana’s Cabinet Mountains to the bright lights of Hollywood. But they are both bear country, in very different ways. Hollywood is about myths — taking old myths and digging them deeper. Grafting on new, odd branches to existing myths. Hollywood plays to the mythology […]
Posted inGoat
Black-backed woodpeckers and severe fire
A charred forest is an eerie place, even years after a wildfire. I discovered this last summer while backpacking through Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. Dead trunks creaked as they swayed in the wind, their branches clacking against each other like bones. We moved quickly, as if walking past an avalanche-prone slope. Had we […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Are whale watchers taking a toll on Puget Sound’s orcas?
Some orcas won’t tolerate being tagged, but a few, Candice Emmons says, are willing to play ball — like K33, who on a gray September day is swimming high and slow in Puget Sound. Emmons, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist, angles her boat at the big male, who almost seems to like the […]
Posted inArticles
A long-time defender talks grizzly conservation
A Q&A with Louisa Willcox, who has spent 30 years fighting for grizzly protections.
Posted inGoat
Return to the bat cave
Since 2006, a powdery white fungus has killed at least five and half million bats that would otherwise be eating insects, pollinating flowers and hanging out in caves. But as far as scientists know, the disease called white-nose syndrome, which grows on bat snouts and wings, hasn’t infected a single bat in the Western United […]
Posted inRange
Feral vs. wild horses
The question of whether mustangs in the West are feral versus wild is a controversial one; it’s got a knack for appearing in the comment section of many a mustang story. Mustang advocates are adamant the wild horse is a bona fide North American wildlife species – on par with deer, elk, bison and pronghorn. […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
Strolling San Francisco with a special guidebook to street trees
Note: This story is part of a special HCN magazine issue devoted to travel in the West. San Francisco, California Let’s say you’ve freed up a couple days and more than a couple bucks to visit San Francisco. Unlike the hordes of tourists who visit this city each year, you’d rather not spend your entire […]
Posted inGoat
Snow not falling on cedars
I remember the moment when, drinking strong coffee under a tin roof pattering with the relentless southeast Alaska rain, I first cut yellow-cedar with a chisel. A clean curl of cream-colored, sharp-scented wood peeled from the big beam. My patient teacher, whose whole house was built from the stuff, just grinned through his bushy beard […]
Posted inWotr
What do you do when you meet a predator?
The March day in western Colorado was crystalline clear. North-facing mountain slopes held up to a foot of snow; the south faces, however, were bare. I made my way up a favorite isolated mountain valley along a stream of beaver ponds. I saw no beaver, but I did see a small mountain lion track. It’s […]
Posted inWotr
When a dog is part wolf
I sit on the porch, waiting. It could go either way, because Aluco is part dog, part wolf, and one side will win out depending on the day. Today is a good day. Aluco steps toward me and lightly touches me with his black nose. Slowly, I extend my hand and pet him. I know […]
Posted inGoat
An upside to the gun-buying frenzy
The last five years have been quite nice for the firearm industry. Gun and ammunition makers had a bonanza in 2009, thanks to fears that a newly-elected President Obama would sent out jackbooted, United Nations thugs in black helicopters to steal their guns (and maybe build bike paths, too!). It didn’t happen, of course. Yet […]
Posted inGoat
The West’s best critter-cams
In the usual Monday-morning email deluge, one message caught my eye: “Live Webcam Captures Peregrine Falcons Laying Eggs.” The advertised falcon was in Maine, not around here, but who can resist peeking at a rare bird on her nest? It’s sort of like looking in somebody’s windows, except in a non-creepy way that won’t get […]
Posted inGoat
Moose in need of a boost
A few years ago, I was driving through Northern Maine on my way to hike Mt. Katahdin, the state’s highest peak and terminus of the Appalachian Trail. A small crowd of hunters had gathered outside a game inspection station, and I stopped to see what they’d shot. A jolly man in an orange vest was […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Book review: The Wild Wyoming Range
The Wild Wyoming Range Edited by Ronald H. Chilcote and Susan Marsh. 120 pages, hardcover: $35. Laguna Wilderness Press, 2012. Eastern Wyoming travelers speeding toward the jagged spires of the Tetons or the Wind River Range might overlook a more gentle silhouette rising from the sagebrush. “Until recently the Wyoming Range has been known less […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Will Los Angeles bring its cougars back from the brink?
In fall of 2011, biologists Dan Cooper and Miguel Ordeñana installed 13 remote cameras in a 4,000-acre patch of wild hills known as Griffith Park, above Los Angeles, Calif. Each month, they combed through predictable images of a near-urban ecosystem: Coyotes marking, bobcats stalking, deer browsing the chaparral. One evening last March, however, they got […]