Note: along with the sidebar at left, a separate editor’s note accompanies this story. At 6:30 on a warm spring morning, a brightly colored summer tanager flits above green cottonwood, willow and sycamore trees. Lower down in the forest, a vermillion flycatcher darts from one mesquite branch to another. A piercing cry — “ke-er” — […]
Wildlife
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: educating tramps everywhere
Winter has fully thawed and traveling season is upon you. You’ve spruced up the RV, swept the garage and a cooler full of ice and Shasta is sparkling on your fresh-cut lawn. Now you’re sweating behind the knees and the children are whining with their mouths to the sky, like hungry eaglets. It’s time to […]
Posted inGoat
Salmon song
From the outside, the sprawling new red shed at the base of Warm Springs Dam, in Sonoma, Calif., looks suited to cows, pigs and other farm animals. But a peek inside reveals several dozen above-ground tanks, resembling water troughs, and pools, resembling Doughboy Pools. In total, the tanks and pools hold roughly 200,000 young coho […]
Posted inWotr
The hoof stops here
Horse slaughter is back on the table, so to speak. What amounted to a congressional ban against the practice ended when the 2011 Agriculture Appropriations bill reinstated federal funding for inspecting horses before they’re sent to a slaughterhouse. But it’s hard to know what will happen next. The Bureau of Land Management’s advisory board overseeing free-ranging […]
Posted inGoat
A towering problem
Imagine it’s a cool autumn evening and you are a small songbird winging southward after an exhausting breeding season in Canada. The hazards of the terrestrial world — hungry cats, window-skinned skyscrapers, careless drivers — have melted away. Up here, one thousand feet above the Earth, it’s smooth sailing. South America — and its feast of insects — awaits. In the 1950s, reports […]
Posted inApril 30, 2012: A Mexican rancher struggles to shift from cattle to conservation
How conservation works south of the border
Note: This is an expanded version of a sidebar published in the High Country News magazine, accompanying a main story profiling Sonoran rancher Carlos Robles Elías and an editor’s note providing more perspective. The first nine items here correspond to numbered locations on the sidebar map of Northwest Mexico; below those nine, there’s a list […]
Posted inApril 30, 2012: A Mexican rancher struggles to shift from cattle to conservation
Map of conservation areas in Mexico
This map shows conservation areas in Mexico; numbers correspond to highlighted conservation areas described in the accompanying article.
Posted inWotr
The truth about wolves is hard to find
I spent this winter in northwestern Montana close to the border of Idaho’s Panhandle, a place well known for its dense population of wolves. To hear hunters tell it, I should have seen a deer or elk skeleton every few feet on the forest floor and a lurking wolf behind every tree. Game numbers have […]
Posted inWotr
Wolf management in Idaho is not ready for prime time
Idaho’s treatment of wolves has not yet sunk to the bygone days of state bounties and federal poisoning that exterminated all the wolves in the Lower 48 states, except for a few in northern Minnesota. But it’s not far off the mark. With at least 378 of the state’s approximately 1,000 wolves already trapped and […]
Posted inGoat
Last in line
The outbreak started in February. Migratory waterfowl heading south along the West Coast found the wetlands of northern California’s Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge — a major stopover point on the Pacific Flyway — half dry. Nearly 2 million birds passed through the area as winter edged toward spring, many crowding into the remaining 15,000 […]
Posted inWotr
When wolf-trapping goes viral
Something new and provocative came through my Facebook feed last month. The anti-trapping organization, Footloose Montana, posted photos of three trappers, all posing with wolves that they’d killed in Idaho. It wasn’t the pictures of dead animals that startled me; to motivate its membership, Footloose Montana regularly posts grotesque images of suffering animals caught in […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
Braving landfills, dodging avalanches, all for the sake of geoscience
On a chilly October morning, Fred Jenkins strides across the West Garfield County landfill. Past hunkered-down dumptrucks and mountains of appliances alive with chattering magpies, he stops at what appears to be a tripodal alien spore. It’s a global positioning system (GPS) monument that Jenkins helped install in this sage-speckled swath of western Colorado five […]
Posted inWotr
Face it: All forests are “sluts”
If you think the word “slut” insults women, how about the use of the word “virgin” to describe a forest that’s never been logged? It’s a commonly used term. Dictionary.com, for instance, defines “virgin forest” this way: “a forest in its natural state, before it has been explored or exploited by man.” Still, I was […]
Posted inGoat
Biofuel crops invade gas tanks, habitat
From bindweed to tamarisk, invasive weeds are a scourge of many Western communities; certainly not something anyone wants more of. Yet a clause in newly proposed bill to promote biofuels energy may open up a loophole that would send federal dollars to pay farmers for planting and growing certain highly invasive plants as bioenergy feedstocks. […]
Posted inGoat
All noisy on the Western front
First, a bit of shameless self promotion: High Country News recently launched two brand new monthly podcasts! Rants from the Hill, the audio version of Michael Branch’s essays on life in Nevada’s high desert, which have appeared on our Range blog for the past year or so, will be available at the beginning of each month. […]
Posted inGoat
Snakes on a plain
Ever heard of The Orianne Society? I hadn’t either until I stumbled across their website recently while searching for “rattlesnakes” and “oil and gas development”. Founded in 2008, The Orianne Society is a relative newcomer to the wildlife conservation scene. Its mission: to conserve the world’s rare and imperiled reptiles and amphibians.
Posted inArticles
The sound of silence
There are few places left in the world where you can experience the sounds of nature uninterrupted by planes, cars, off-road vehicles. Scientists are now working to quantify the impact of all that noise on the natural world, and to monitor how soundscapes — the collection of sounds in a landscape made by critters, wind, […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Loggers give unique Oregon ponderosa pine a lifeline
On a gray February afternoon, rain falls in huge drops on Chuck Volz’s 65-acre property near Springfield, Ore. It drips from the brim of his faded camouflage baseball cap and rolls off his tan jacket as he walks down a muddy path crisscrossed by deer hoofprints. He stops at a young ponderosa pine and frowns: […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: field changes, from football to strawberries
For avid news hounds, this week saw some shake-ups, showing us that we can be ever surprised. Let’s start with the important stuff. TEBOW TRADED FROM THE DENVER BRONCOS! The West will lose Bronco quarterback Tim Tebow, whose “polarizing skill set” brought us some of the most memorable football moments of 2011. Thus, Tebowmania heads eastward, […]
Posted inWotr
Deadly handouts, dependent deer
My neighbor feeds deer. He says he’s actually feeding birds so that his disabled wife and her pre-teen daughter can enjoy watching them. But when he tosses chunks of stale white bread out in his front yard, it’s not just crows, ravens and starlings that come to call. (And why anyone would think it was […]