Colorado’s bark beetle epidemic is unlike anything in the state’s still-brief recorded history. Foresters say 95 percent of our lodgepole pines will be dead within just a few more years, with beetles likely to burrow next into the ponderosa pine along the urbanized Front Range corridor. To some people, this has been like a sucker […]
Wildlife
Posted inAugust 17, 2009: From Corn to Cabernet
Chilling forecast
We might have to say goodbye to California apples, walnuts, pistachios, cherries and other stone fruit over the next century, according to a recent report from scientists at the University of California-Davis. Between 1950 and 2000, the winter chill hours essential for fruit and nut tree growth — defined by temperatures between 32 and 45 […]
Posted inGoat
A bear ate my old landlord?!
The title of this blog has a horror movie ring to it. It even sounds a little too ridiculous to be real. But for High Country News staffer Tammy York, it’s the truth. This isn’t the sort of thing we usually report on, but it’s a pretty incredible (and tragic) story to have so close […]
Posted inGoat
Don’t feed the animals
Sad proof that it’s not wise to feed wildlife: Last week, a housekeeper found the partially eaten body of 74-year-old Donna Munson outside of Munson’s Ouray County, Colo., home. Munson regularly fed nine bears, and had been repeatedly warned by officials to stop. Authorities have since determined that Munson was killed by a 394-lb male […]
Posted inAugust 17, 2009: From Corn to Cabernet
A slow-moving disaster
Communities struggle to adapt to a beetle-ravaged landscape.
Posted inHeard Around the West
Careful with that chainsaw…
If a hungry mountain lion comes after you, how should you respond? Most experts recommend that you stop and make yourself look as large as possible, aggressively defending your position. But Dustin Britton, a mechanic and ex-Marine from Windsor, Colo., didn’t need no stinkin’ experts; according to The Associated Press, he just picked up his […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
The meat of the matter
Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory FarmsNicolette Hahn Niman278 pages, hardcover: $23.99.HarperCollins, 2009. When lawyer Nicolette Hahn was first assigned to sue gigantic polluting hog farms, she didn’t care for the idea. It sounded like an “immersion in poop,” she writes in her first book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
Forager, feed thyself
Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century ForagerLangdon Cook224 pages, hardcover, $26.95.Skipstone Press, 2009. When Langdon Cook met his future wife, his lack of culinary prowess nearly chased her away. “Cooking meant heating up a box of mac ‘n’ cheese or opening a can of chili,” he confesses in the prologue to Fat […]
Posted inGoat
The latest buzz
It’s been more than two years since HCN reported on the West’s disappearing honeybees (see “Silence of the Bees”). Since then, parasitic mites and a mysterious syndrome called colony collapse disorder have killed off thousands more hives. Honeybees pollinate 80 percent of the fruits and vegetables we eat, and many wild species essential to ecosystems. […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
The Most Cooked-Up Catch
Saving fisheries — and taking the edge off the dangerous derby of the sea.
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
Conservation’s First Lady
“Fancy how I trembled.” That was activist Rosalie Edge’s tongue-in-cheek response to an incident in the 1930s, when an Audubon Society attorney accused her of being a “common scold.” A thorn in the conservation organization’s side for decades, Edge badgered board members and directors for bowing to sportsmen’s influence and ignoring dissenting voices. Although her […]
Posted inArticles
Interior Department tosses controversial logging plan
Bush-era plan favored timber industry, hurt wildlife
Posted inWotr
Birds can only fly so far
The sky is the color of a robin’s egg on the Barker Dam Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park, 215 miles southwest of Las Vegas. I’m hiking a section of trail that winds its way through an immense Joshua tree forest when an American kestrel wings over like a fighter plane, chasing a raven. […]
Posted inGoat
Condor quandary
A prominent group of biologists and scientists is strongly criticizing conservation plans for Tejon Ranch, a 270,000-acre property north of LA. The ranch is slated for 30,000 acres of housing, industrial and resort projects — which will sprawl across roughly 20,000 acres of critical habitat for the endangered California condor. Tejon’s developers have asked the […]
Posted inWotr
Wyoming continues its state of denial
Packs of hungry wolves are decimating Wyoming’s 35 herds of elk — right? Wrong. And yet that’s what some people continue to claim, even as studies repeatedly disprove the accusation. Nearly three decades of the data displayed in Wyoming’s annual reports show that elk numbers, elk harvests and hunter success rates have steadily increased in […]
Posted inWotr
Go beyond dams to save salmon
Amid the drumbeat of litigation that surrounds Columbia River salmon and the ever-present debate over dam-breaching, it’s easy to miss one remarkable achievement: We now have a salmon-protection strategy that most of the region agrees on. That has never happened before. Most of the affected Native American tribes support it. Three of the four Northwest […]
Posted inWotr
The salmon’s last best hope
If ever there were a news story that supported physicist Hugh Everett’s theory of parallel universes, surely the debacle over the looming extinction of Columbia and Snake river salmon is just that story. While Everett was a doctoral student at Princeton University, in 1957, he devised an elaborate mathematical proof for the premise that an […]
Posted inWotr
The battle against beetles
Four summers ago, I enlisted in the war against the pine bark beetle raging on Wyoming’s Togwotee Pass. I started to fight by inspecting every pine on the two-acre lot where my partner and I spend much of the summer. Sawdust at the base of one tall lodgepole indicated that the humpbacked killers had already […]
Posted inGoat
Kitten caboodle
After two kittenless years, Colorado’s Canada lynx are breeding successfully again. The Colorado Division of Wildlife, which has reintroduced 218 of the large-pawed cats to the state over the past decade, located 10 new lynx kittens during their annual spring survey this year. That total includes two dens of kittens whose parents are native to […]