By the time you read this blog, I will be on my second day of hunting gray wolves in Montana. An old friend of mine in Livingston introduced me to some ranchers in Paradise Valley to write a story of their hunt. We will be trudging through a wilderness of snow on horseback, hoping to […]
Wildlife
Posted inGoat
The bark beetle feedback loop
Trees, you might say, are nature’s ultimate do-gooders. A compound in the bark of Pacific yew trees fights cancer. Dead trees become nurse logs, nurturing forests’ next generation of fungi and vegetation. In the ocean, rotting leaves boost the growth of plankton, fortifying the foundation of the sea’s food chain. Living leaves scrub the air of […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Cowtowing to ranchers
While this article was informative and generally balanced, it only hinted at the intensity of cattle grazing and how it compares to the wild horse population (“Nowhere to Run,” HCN, 11/12/12). The BLM factsheet on grazing states that in 2011, BLM lands were authorized to support 8.3 million animal unit months (AUMs). The BLM estimates […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
Altered amphibians
This August, University of Colorado-Boulder disease ecologist Pieter Johnson made a ghoulish discovery in an Oregon pond: an “octo frog,” with eight hind legs. It was a particularly disturbing example of the kind of amphibian malformations Johnson has recorded in 17 states, six of them Western, since 1996. A common, period-sized flatworm, Ribeiroia ondatrae, plays […]
Posted inWotr
Washington wipes out a wolf pack
A wildlife tragedy began in Washington state on Aug. 7, when the state Department of Fish and Wildlife announced that a wolf in the Wedge Pack had killed a calf on a ranch close to Canada. Afterward, the rancher said that wolves were continuing to kill or maim his cattle. Wildlife staffers examined his claim […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
Is there a way through the West’s bitter wild horse wars?
On a sunny spring day, T.J. Holmes creeps up a dusty arroyo in southwestern Colorado. The 41-year-old former journalist and mountain-bike champ wears beat-up jeans, her blonde curls unfurling from a sun-bleached visor and a big gun slung over one shoulder. The chalky hills of Disappointment Valley look as if they deserve their name. This […]
Posted inWotr
Planting the millionth tree
The Arbor Day Foundation sent me a Tree Survey a few months ago. At least it called itself a survey, but it turned out to be more of a pitch for donations in the form of a questionnaire. Still, I decided to finish reading the thing before I tossed it in the wood burner with […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
BLM “ecosanctuaries” unlikely to provide relief for wild horses
On a crisp May morning, Madeleine Pickens, a 65-year-old businesswoman and the soon-to-be-ex-wife of billionaire financier T. Boone Pickens, steps out onto the weathered porch of her old Nevada ranch house wearing taut white riding pants, suede boots and movie-star glasses under glossy platinum hair. She points briskly, using a dachshund mix named Tommy that […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
Feds reluctant to kill wild horses
If caring for captive wild horses costs so much, why not just sell them for slaughter? It’s the “simple solution,” former Bureau of Land Management wild horse and burro program chief Don Glenn, now working for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, told a federal advisory panel this spring. “It makes no sense for the taxpayers […]
Posted inRange
Like a rogue net
Oregon’s salmon politics have taken a curious turn. In late September several sportfishing groups publicly disavowed Measure 81, a voter initiative they had earlier sponsored to ban gillnets on the Columbia River. The reversal followed an announcement by Oregon governor John Kitzhaber that gillnets were his latest cause du mois and he wants them gone […]
Posted inWotr
Moose, the popular wild animal
As I shut the door on my way to work last month, something caught my eye: Two moose, a cow and a calf, stood just 20 yards away, looking as though they hoped I hadn’t noticed them –– something hard to avoid doing, given their size. As I scrambled for my camera, they vanished into […]
Posted inGoat
Endangered razorback sucker discovered in Grand Canyon
On Oct. 9, biologists electrofishing in Grand Canyon National Park caught a razorback sucker — the first one seen in the park in 20 years. The endangered fish, known for its distinctive humpback, huge size (up to three feet long!) and long life (40-plus years!) was once common in the Colorado River and its tributaries. As […]
Posted inGoat
Amphibian alterations
Parasites have always filled me with fear. I still experience the occasional bout of night terrors when images of Guinea Worms wriggling out of weeping lesions in my flesh flicker across my dream state subconscious. Over the past few days, while working on a piece for the next issue of High Country News, I’ve become […]
Posted inWotr
A grisly death in Alaska
A man from San Diego was killed by a grizzly bear recently, on the Toklat River in Alaska on the same overcast day that my son and I played in the woods outside of our cabin, 30 miles away. The Toklat River bar is a place my family has often hiked, saturated in Denali’s scenery. […]
Posted inRange
Putting a price tag on existence
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House There’s an important change brewing in the protection of endangered species. It appears to push economic considerations higher up in the part of the law dealing with critical habitat designation. The shift comes in the form of a proposed rule by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and […]
Posted inGoat
Wild horses to the slaughter?
On Monday, the Bureau of Land Management began its helicopter-assisted roundup of 3,500 wild horses and burros from public lands. Horses gathered from the range are corralled temporarily around the West and then shipped to pastures in the Midwest, where they’re either adopted or spend the rest of their lives chomping on grass at the […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Can pallid sturgeon hang on in the overworked Missouri River?
Chrrrrp, chrrrp: Our headphones echo with the tinny peeps of a radio-tagged pallid sturgeon (Scaphyrincus albus). Dave Fuller, a Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries technician, maneuvers the jet boat up and down the Missouri River on a beautiful October day. The sapphire sky has yet to succumb to winter’s haze, and the […]
Posted inGoat
A horny problem
Running a rhinoceros horn smuggling operation is a lucrative affair. Take father-and-son team “Jimmy” and Felix Kha, from Garden Grove in California, for instance. The pair had to surrender $1 million in cash, $1 million worth of bling (gold ingots, precious stones, Rolex watches and other essential “playa” accessories) and two cars to the feds, […]