A Q&A with Louisa Willcox, who has spent 30 years fighting for grizzly protections.
Wildlife
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 […]
Posted inWotr
Two legs good, eight legs fascinating
The author learned to love the spiders she used to kill
Posted inRange
Man’s (and livestock’s) best friend
It’s always fascinated me that domestic dogs are widely embraced as “man’s best friends,” while wild dogs like coyotes and wolves often elicit deep-seated animosity. So I was particularly taken by this video of livestock guard dogs by the Montana-based conservation group, People & Carnivores. The good folks at People & Carnivores work to resolve […]
Posted inRange
The future of wolverines
By Kylie Paul, Defenders of Wildlife After more than a decade of legal hand-wringing, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) finally proposed on Feb. 1 to protect wolverines in the lower 48 states as a threatened species. But invoking the Endangered Species Act alone is not going to save wolverines from looming threats on […]
Posted inGoat
The endangered species to-do list
One summer, I spent so much time fishing the stocked pond behind my parent’s house that middle-school boys called me “bass-master.” Most of my 14th birthday presents were lures. I grew up near the headwaters of the Potomac River in western Maryland, and my dad used to hike into those streams to tempt wily brook […]
Posted inGoat
Mexican wolf recovery #fail
At the end of 2007, we published a story by investigative reporter John Dougherty called “Last Chance for the Lobo,” about the “bloody mess” that had become the Mexican wolf reintroduction in New Mexico and Arizona. There were so few wolves left when the recovery effort started that many born in captivity were inbred. Ranchers […]
Posted inWotr
Killing wolves is part of the bargain
On Dec. 6, a Wyoming hunter killed one of Yellowstone’s most famous wolves, 832F, outside the park’s boundaries. It was a legal kill, yet within 48 hours, news organizations across the country ran stories mourning the wolf’s death and treating it like, well, the loss of a family friend. Wolf advocate Marc Cooke of Montana’s […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2013: Making Good on the Badlands
A world of plague and hope: A review of The Bird Saviors
The Bird SaviorsWilliam J. Cobb320 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Unbridled Books, 2012. In William J. Cobb’s lyrical novel The Bird Saviors, a mysterious virus strikes the residents of Pueblo, Colo. Some blame wild birds for spreading the disease, which leaves victims incapacitated for weeks or eventually kills them. Employees of the Department of Nuisance Animal Control, including […]