Wildlife

Some Native American cultures attribute divine power and magical stealth to the American jaguar — traits that could come in handy now that the endangered cat won’t be getting a federal recovery plan. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced in mid-January that creating a recovery plan for borderland jaguars would “not be sensible.” Under […]

Since February, some 1,400 wandering Yellowstone bison have been killed under a controversial plan meant to prevent brucellosis – a livestock disease that causes spontaneous abortions – from spreading to cattle near the park. Five agencies are charged with keeping the park’s bison population within park boundaries, but the animals keep migrating out, entering private […]

Updated April 3, 2008 This winter’s storms hit the Northwest hard. In December, Washington’s Olympic Peninsula was thrashed for two days by 90 mph winds and saturating rains. Rivers rose up to 14 feet, twisting bridges and sweeping away roads. The storm caused $5 million of road damage in Olympic National Forest alone. While maintenance […]

The bridge, now in the design phase, would be Colorado’s first, but construction depends on securing the $4 million-$8 million needed for the project. Photographs courtesy of Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, Digital Animation Services, Sloan Shoemaker

For nearly a century, the Department of Agriculture’s Sheep Experiment Station has grazed over 6,000 sheep on 100,000 acres of public land in Montana and Idaho west of Yellowstone National Park. Yet the research center has never formally assessed its ecological impact on this mountainous habitat for native wildlife species. This month, in response to […]

The mountain pine beetle is about the size of Lincoln’s head on a penny. In the last 10 years, it’s devastated 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine in Colorado, a half-million in the past year alone. The swaths of dead trees color the mountainsides a sickly orange-brown. Now, communities in the hardest-hit areas are scrambling […]

Over the past 5 years, one of the West’s emblematic birds, the greater sage grouse, has been batted like a shuttlecock between environmentalists and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At issue is whether the chicken-sized bird, once found in sagebrush plains from Canada to Arizona, should be listed as threatened or endangered. If the […]