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. […]
Wildlife
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 […]
Posted inArticles
Still wild
Not far from my house in the high desert of northern New Mexico is a large tract of land run by the Bureau of Land Management. Some years ago, two horses were dumped there and left to fend for themselves. Nobody looks after them, but they seem to do pretty well. They have the Galisteo […]
Posted inGoat
Airports killing wildlife to prevent accidents
Today reports from two far-flung airports illustrate the ongoing conflict between modern human culture and animals simply doing what they do. In New York City — five months after Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger safely landed a US Airways jet in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of geese — some 2,000 Canadian geese living around […]
Posted inGoat
Government hunters become poachers?
Among the subsidies we taxpayers provide for agriculture, especially stock-raising in the West, is an agency euphemistically called “Wildlife Services,” which sounds like an organization that provides salt licks or improves habitat or something along that line. But it’s the old Animal Damage Control agency under a new name. It has the same […]
Posted inGoat
A woolly problem
Domestic sheep and bighorn sheep don’t mix. Or at least they shouldn’t, say most biologists. The tame sheep tend to infect their wild cousins with fatal pneumonia. In Idaho’s Payette National Forest, the Forest Service has even banned grazing in areas where flocks might encounter bighorns (see our story Sheep v. Sheep). Recent developments have […]
Posted inGoat
Unprecedented poaching in California
According to officials at the California Department of Fish and Game, the illegal sale of wildlife and “wildlife parts” generates something like $100 million per year — and it’s going up, as hard economic times have forced the state to cut back on game wardens. Only 230 wardens regulate 159,000 square miles of land, including […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Voyage of the Dammed
Nature’s engineers — and environmental heroes — make a comeback
Posted inGoat
Salmon scuffle
If you’ve been following the comment stream on High Country News‘ recent two part series on salmon (“Columbia Basin (Political) Science,” by Steve Hawley, and “Salmon Salvation,” by Ken Olsen), then you know how fired up people can get about fish. That includes, of course, the authors of the articles and the primary agencies involved. […]