Wildlife

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 […]

    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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Greg Hood is a researcher in western Washington who knows a few things about salmon habitat — a few surprising things. When Hood talks about preserving threatened populations, he doesn’t mention in-stream flows, fish ladders or water temperatures. Instead, he brings up a mostly-vanished ecosystem than once lined significant portions of the Puget Sound. It […]

For years, HCN contributor Tony Davis has been following — and writing about — the Southwest’s endangered jaguars. The rare cats are in danger of being wiped out in the U.S. by the border fence that isolates them from their Mexican counterparts (see our story Cat Fight on the Border). Recently, a huge male cat, […]

Encana has a bit of a reputation for looking out for wildlife. Though predictably, it’s an ambiguous  one. High Country News has covered the oil and gas company’s efforts to trade habitat restoration dollars for sweetheart lease deals, and its practice of padding drill sites to minimize vegetation impacts. Those moves may not add up […]

After years of legal deadlock over the federal government’s inadequate attempts to recover Columbia Basin salmon devastated by dams, the Obama administration appears to be steering a new course. Ken Olsen just wrote High Country News an extensive analysis of how this new political order — combined with the efforts of a diligent federal judge, […]