Each year, in early May, a pilot and a researcher fly low, long hours over the Oregon coast range, sweeping back and forth in transects two miles apart. Below the small aircraft, a rugged, uneven carpet of mature and regenerating forest unrolls: a landscape scarred by logging, but still dominated by Douglas fir. They’re in […]
Wildlife
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Eggstraction
Meet 317 and 318, a young couple in California’s Pinnacles National Monument. They are two of only 91 California condors flying free in the state – and only 349 left on Earth. This spring, the birds had no sooner laid an egg in their nest than National Park Service biologist Gavin Emmons rappelled down and […]
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
One Way to Save the Wolf? Hunt It.
Montana wildlife managers deem the first wolf season a success, for both hunters and hunted
Posted inMay 10, 2010: The Secret Lives of River Guides
Small wonders, big world
An argument for conservation
Posted inGoat
A water hog, redeemed
“A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter long.” So begins Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter,” a short story set in a dystopic future when humans must fight tamarisk for every drop of water. The story might be made […]
Posted inGoat
It’s a skunk-eat-pelican-eat-trout world out there
Each spring, on the shores of Nevada’s Pyramid Lake, fishermen in waders stand 50 feet out in the water, on stepladders, casting long, narrow loops for huge Lahontan trout. They look a little like Kodiak bears lined up on an Alaskan river. But, these men aren’t the only fishers around. American white pelicans glide long, […]
Posted inApril 26, 2010: Nevada's Pot of Gold
Pika politics
What’s the connection between pika populations and climate change? It’s complicated.
Posted inApril 26, 2010: Nevada's Pot of Gold
Reduce, reuse, re … steelhead?
A lunker case of deja vu
Posted inRange
Listing the wolverine
On a sunny day in late March 2010, a young wolverine known as F3 poked her head out of the mouth of a log-box research trap in Montana’s Absaroka Range, looked around, and then, in a blur of snow, surged off into the wilderness. Around her neck was a new GPS collar that we’d fastened […]
Posted inWotr
Wildlife fauxtography
Ever wonder how photographers get those stunning action shots of wildlife? Cougars, lynxes, lions, tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, foxes, wolverines, leaping and snarling, fur coifed, every whisker in focus? If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Nature fakery in photography is older than flash powder, but no one goosed it along […]
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
The marten chronicles
Framing the wrong guy isn’t always a bad thing
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
A poacher’s menagerie
Highlights from wildlife busts on the Western front
Posted inApril 12, 2010: The Butterfly Sting
The Butterfly Sting
How a federal wildlife agent brought down one of the world’s most notorious insect thieves.
Posted inGoat
The Trouble with Wilbur
There’s nothing like a feral pig to blur the line between free food and pest management. Days after the Arizona Daily Star published a map showing feral pig populations around the state (along with a note that Arizona doesn’t require licenses for hunting feral pigs), a dozen hunting parties converged on one of the hot […]
Posted inGoat
Oh, deer
Living where “the deer and the antelope roam” may be fine in theory, but I’d prefer that the roaming happen somewhere besides my small back yard. Alas, this winter and spring, muley doe and two fawns appear back there with some regularity — two or three times a week. It’s not as though […]
Posted inWotr
Winterkill
Not far from where I live, in northwestern Montana, the land opens up and the people disappear. Skiing through tall trees toward a ridge, we see two ravens chasing a magpie through a glade up ahead. A moment later, three bald eagles appear, all sitting at the very top of trees. These normally quiet woods […]
Posted inGoat
Big cats come and go
In early March, a mountain lion chased a Jack Russell terrier into a house near Salida, Colo., surprising a woman and her five-year-old son, who sat coloring with crayons at the kitchen table. Luckily, they were able to dash into a bedroom. When Division of Wildlife officials arrived and subdued the lion, they found the […]
