In March, the first flowers of the year can often be found above your head rather than below your feet. Here, a silver maple planted in a cemetery outside Paonia, Colorado, shows off its stuff only a few days after the snow has melted off. The swelling elm buds, below, will soon follow suit. For […]
Wildlife
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Complexities tackled
The Alaska predator control issue was an excellent one (HCN, 2/21/11). It offered information that I likely wouldn’t come across in the newspapers or journals I read — about the possible relationship between increasing salmon runs and declining ungulate populations, for example. It tackled complex matters in a way this non-wildlife biologist could grasp. And […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Hook-and-bullet journalism
The scientific bankruptcy of hook-and-bullet journalism by “outdoor” writers was on display in Craig Medred’s essay, “How my thoughts on wolves have changed” (HCN, 2/21/11). In his defense of the lethal manipulation of wolf populations, Medred uses the word “artificial” only once: to describe an “artificially high” wolf population resulting from “recent high salmon runs.” […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Who’s squeezing whom?
Craig Medred’s recent article on Alaska’s wolf dilemma raises some valid points (HCN, 2/21/11). Yes, wolves are carnivorous predators that can present a danger to humans. But it is worthwhile to consider why wolf attacks are becoming more common. One must ask whose territory is being invaded and squeezed into ever decreasing parameters. As biologist […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Mount St. Helens: A world apart?
The hummocks of Mount St. Helens’ northern slope look decidedly haphazard. Barren, knuckle-shaped hills alternate with groves of red alder. A straggly willow grows from a mound of rocky soil. Patches of yellow moss are broken by wild strawberry blossoms and the occasional flare of red paintbrush. The effect is unsettling, as if the landscape […]
Posted inRange
It’s not climate change, it’s ocean change
We tend to think of nature as a bulwark against change. We spell it with a capital “N” and imagine it to be a timeless rock of stability against a sea of discontinuity. It should not surprise us that Europeans and North Americans turned nature into refuge from modernity a full century before John Muir […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A hearty feast
WYOMING After Wyoming Wildlife published a big story called “Golden” about the hunting prowess of golden eagles, reader Jim Frailey, of Harrisburg, Ill., told the magazine about a stunning eagle attack he’d witnessed purely by chance back in the early 1980s. He was taking a break from driving a delivery route when he noticed a […]
Posted inGoat
Tumbling along
What smashes into cars on the highway, spreads wildfire and causes painful weltering scratches? It’s Russian thistle Salsola spp., more commonly known as tumbleweed, a hard-to-control invasive species that grows in disturbed soil and spreads quickly when the thorny plants break off from the ground and roll along dispersing seeds and piling up along fences […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Forestry + genetics = a blister rust solution?
In 1926, the U.S. Forest Service first found blister rust, a deadly fungus, on high-elevation whitebark pines in Montana. Since then, the Asian invader has spread through several species of five-needled pines in the West; it was first discovered in Arizona in 2009. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service is now considering whether whitebark pines, […]
Posted inGoat
The cute calamity
First, the cuteness, because I know everyone spends at least some portion of their day watching Youtube videos of cute animals doing droolingly hypnotic cute things (cat riding a Roomba, anyone? Or how about a slow loris with a very tiny umbrella?) See? This is a pika — a diminutive rabbit-relative which makes its home […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West — Image 8
This male American Kestrel took off before I could take a decent shot — but I love the blurred movement anyway. It reminds me of how mercurial a March day can be, when a sunny morning gives way to afternoon snow showers, which clears to a star-studded night. The birds and other wildlife are as […]
Posted inRange
Deflation Nation
Finally the economy seems to be creating jobs again. Last week a federal jobs survey showed an increase in 222,000 private sector jobs, a full year of growth that added 1.5 million jobs at companies and small businesses. As Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers put it in his White House blog: […]
Posted inGoat
Wrestling with wolves
The U.S. Senate last Friday proposed a 350-page budget bill with one particularly furry paragraph: Section 1709. Before the end of the 60-day period beginning on the date of enactment of this division, the Secretary of the Interior shall reissue the final rule published on April 2, 2009 (74 Fed. Reg. 15123 et seq.) without […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Life after lava
Biological diversity thrives around Mount St. Helens
Posted inGoat
Mustang management gets an overhaul
Roughly 37,000 wild horses and burros roam the West’s public lands — about 40 percent more than the feds think those lands can sustain. But the Bureau of Land Management’s efforts to round them up and adopt them out have been costly, ineffective and unpopular, with critics charging that horses are unnecessarily harmed and even […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Western wildlife commissions on the chopping block
In Washington and New Mexico, state wildlife commissions could become a thing of the past. As part of their budget-trimming measures, both states’ legislatures are considering bills that would do away with the commissions’ power to set regulations and policy for managing fish and wildlife. In theory, wildlife commissions, found in every Western state, allow […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Wild lives and wildlife
IDAHO Some poachers don’t understand the meaning of the word, or maybe they just can’t accept that they can be caught in the act. Rex Rammell, a Republican who recently ran for governor of Idaho, was stopped by a state Fish and Game agent last November just as he was hauling out an elk he’d […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Jeff Rice on documenting the West in sound
Hear the sounds Jeff Rice collects around the West and learn about why he does it. You can catch High Country Views approximately every other week. Available via our RSS feed, and for download now through iTunes.
Posted inGoat
First Signs of Spring
We asked our HCN Facebook community what signs of spring they were seeing (or looking for) in their corner of the West. Several of you mentioned birds, including western meadowlarks — which have already started singing in earnest here in Western Colorado — sandhill cranes and and mountain bluebirds. Beth Pratt, who took the photo […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Jeff Rice collects nature’s noises
Some people collect butterflies. Others amass dolls or antique cars. Armed with a microphone and recorder, Jeff Rice chases the West’s natural sounds — from the hooting of owls to the buzzing of Great Basin rattlesnakes. A relative newcomer to nature field recording, Rice worked in audio production for about 15 years. As a radio […]