NEWS ROUNDUP

Bison make a home where they roam On a mountain ridge at the north end of the Eagle Cap Wilderness, a herd of runaway bison spent part of last summer and this fall munching grass and startling visitors. Their presence underscored a continuing headache for private landowners and public land managers across Eastern Oregon: Bison increasingly are roaming where they don't belong. Bob Stangel, an Enterprise rancher who is president of the Northwest Bison Association, estimates that Oregon ranchers are raising about 2,000 bison. But no one knows how many have gotten loose or how many are running loose now...Column: Creating Healthy Forests Takes Comprehensive Approach America's forest ecosystems are being decimated at an alarming rate by large-scale catastrophic wildfire and massive outbreaks of disease, insect infestation and invasive species. Federal foresters estimate that an astounding 190 million acres of federal land are at risk to catastrophic wildfire. Of that, over 70 million acres are at extreme risk to catastrophic wildfire in the immediate future. Because of a decades-long build up of forest fuel, woody biomass and dense underbrush our forests are only a lightning strike or escaped camp fire away from exploding into a massive conflagration. In many areas, tree density has increased from 50 trees per acre to as many as 500 trees per acre, according to the Forest Service and fire ecologists. These unnaturally dense forests are a small spark away from a large-scale wildfire...Fighting fire with better hires The two words don't belong together: "firefighter arson." According to a government report titled "Firefighter Arson," firefighters around the country - the vast majority of whom are willing to die to protect the public - are being forced to confront the idea of ultimate betrayal. "The problem may be increasing, or maybe is just now capturing the attention of the media, but the number of cases that have recently come to light indicates the need for better screening and adequate arson-awareness training programs for firefighters," according to the report, released earlier this year by the Federal Emergency Management Agency...Environmentalists, landowners disagree on fire prevention strategy The October firestorm is fueling a fierce debate over whether decades of poor planning or a century of putting out fires is to blame for the destructive breadth of the Cedar and Paradise blazes. Landowners and local public officials say the disaster is the result of forests and brushland choked with overgrown vegetation. They say the way to prevent another disaster is to thin plants with ax and flame, and to emphasize constructing backcountry homes with fire-resistant materials. Environmentalists and "smart growth" advocates flatly disagree with the focus on clearing. They say the enormous loss of life and property painfully illustrated that urban sprawl puts people in harm's way and must be halted to prevent another disaster...Taxpayers group blasts county habitat plan A taxpayers advocacy group is blasting a county habitat plan in a letter received by Lake Elsinore residents in recent days, roiling the waters on an already contentious issue. The letter from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association urges residents to pressure City Council members to vote no on joining the county's proposal for a multimillion-dollar habitat-protection project. The proposal asks 14 cities in Western Riverside County to support the project, known as the Multiple Species Habitat Protection Plan... Column: Activists drop the carrot, use threat of litigation as a stick Their latest maneuver is an Oct. 30 motion filed with a federal judge in Portland, Ore. In it, environmentalists demand the entire Columbia and Snake river system, from the Pacific to Wyoming's Jackson Lake, be included in a revised biological opinion detailing what federal regulators must do for salmon and steelhead recovery. That means they want all the water in the Snake River Basin made available for saving wild fish runs. The motion asks U.S. District Judge James Redden to require the government to "employ a definition of the action area in its revised opinion that recognizes the full extent of the direct and indirect effects on the listed species of hydrosystem operations." That might be just so much legalese to most people. But to water users -- and that's all of us -- it doesn't get much scarier. It's a direct and imminent threat to our state sovereignty and the livelihoods and property rights of hundreds of thousands of individual Idahoans...State wants to use endangered fish to fight West Nile virus Arizona wants to use endangered fish in its fight against West Nile virus. State wildlife officials are finalizing an agreement to allow rare topminnow and pupfish to be used for mosquito control in ponds and wetlands. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must approve it and hopes to sign off this spring. The four species - the Gila topminnow, Yaqui topminnow, desert pupfish and Quitobaquito pupfish - have all been pushed toward extinction by habitat loss...139 cruise ships, whales to share Alaska waters The National Park Service has decided to maintain the status quo on how many cruise ships will be allowed to enter the whale-filled waters of Glacier Bay National Park. The decision means that 139 ships will be allowed into Glacier Bay during the summer season, officials said, or one or two ships a day from May to September...Not all fun and games Unruly off-roaders clashed with paintball gun-wielding Bureau of Land Management rangers Friday night, putting on a show for thousands of spectators near the sand drags area of the dunes. "What had happened ... people were starting to get unruly, throwing beer cans at the officers," said BLM spokesman Gary Taylor. To disperse the crowd gathered near the sand drags area off of Gecko Road, the rangers fired pellets filled with a chili powder-type substance from paintball guns...US trade deal talks near endgame (Australia) Australian and American negotiators begin the final round of talks for a free trade deal with several key sticking points set to dominate. There will also be debate over America's push for changes to quotas on local content in film, television and radio and on future media. But Australia will be pushing hard for its key demands in agriculture. Australia is looking for major improvements in access to America's dairy, beef and sugar markets, as well as in other farm commodities...The cowboy image embraced by U.S. presidents hasn't always been one of chivalrous bravado In point of fact, the term "cowboy" has had a rather up-and-down history. The term goes all the way back to the American Revolution when it was used to describe members of pro-British guerilla bands that operated between American and British lines near New York City. But that usage died out, so that hardly anybody remembers the word in that context. The word was resuscitated in Texas in the aftermath of the Mexican War (1846-1848), when it had quite unsavory meanings. Mainly it meant a ruffian or a bandit, somebody who lived on the open range, outside the law. The word began to acquire a host of meanings, though still largely negative, during the cattle drive era of the 1870s. Joseph McCoy, the entrepreneur responsible for building up Abilene, Kan., as a destination and shipping point for cattle trailed up from Texas, devoted several pages of his 1874 book, "Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest," to cowboys...Photos of life on the ranch help preserve a rugged culture that's fading into memory There's a lot of dirt, grit and sweat in Janell Kleberg's new photography book, "Waiting for Daylight." But that's only natural, since most of these pictures are of people and horses working outdoors for long hours, "before daylight to dark" - working cattle in dust, heat and rain. "It was," Kleberg says, "tough, dangerous and a great adventure." As intimated by the subtitle, "King Ranch: Images from the Past," Kleberg's lens looks back to a storied time now gone. That was before cattlemen kept their ranch's stock records on computer disk, before cowboys herded steers by helicopter...For generations of ranch workers, the land is their life "On my other side, my grandfather and my father came to the King Ranch in 1909 from Mexico," Rudolfo says. "My grandfather's name was Hipolito Silguero. My father was Emiterio Silguero. He was 9 years old at the time. He started working for the ranch when he was 10. He worked here until he was 73. Their graves are over on the Laureles division." Santa Gertrudis and Laureles are the northern divisions of the King Ranch, oldest and most famous of the great Texas cattle baronies. Silguero and all those ancestors and his descendants are Kinenos. King's men, King's people...Apaches pack premier of 'The Missing' Director Ron Howard's latest film,"The Missing," was screened in Alamogordo at the White Sands Mall with a "special Apache Premier" to a packed house of Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches Tuesday. Producer Daniel Ostroff, Jay Tavare, who plays Kayitah, an Apache medicine man and Tommy Lee Jones' sidekick, and Yolanda Nez, who played a captive girl in the film, were on hand for the screening...On The Edge Of Common Sense: Nothing's quite like the wild ride of a hurricane 'Thousands flee" I couldn't flee. I was trapped in a five star hotel in Richmond, Va, Sept. 16, with Hurricane Isabel bearing down on us like 200 elephants on the last peanut on earth...Rodeo defends its name to PETA An advisory board bucked in unison Wednesday at a proposal by an animal rights group to change the town's name to Unity to protest animal cruelty. The anticlimactic 8-0 vote by the Rodeo Municipal Advisory Council followed a monthlong outpouring of indignation and humor over the idea, advanced by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- while San Francisco hosted the Grand National Rodeo. On Oct. 20, Norfolk, Va.-based PETA faxed Contra Costa County Supervisor Gayle Uilkema a letter urging Rodeo to shed its name because "it conjures up visions of a violent 'sport.'"...No Bull: Canadian Animals Barred from Top Rodeo A U.S. ban on Canadian cattle, spurred by a lone case of mad cow disease, has had an unintended consequence -- bulls bred north of the border to toss cowboys around for eight seconds at a time have been shut out of rodeo's biggest event. The 10-day Wrangler National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas runs Dec. 5 to 14, with nearly $5 million in prize money up for grabs among the world's best professional cowboys, and up to 125 bulls are chosen for the gritty bull-riding event...