NEWS ROUNDUP

Lion seen just after pause in hunt Minutes after state game officials halted the hunt for mountain lions Thursday morning, a woman reported seeing a lion crossing Sabino Canyon Road. "The lion was moving from Sabino Canyon and going west into the residential area," said Tom Whetten, education and information program manager for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, adding that officials verified the report by finding lion tracks.... Forest fire erupts in ski areas near Big Bear A forest fire Thursday threatened a ski resort in the San Bernardino Mountains – a range scarred by devastating wildfires last fall. A blaze intentionally set by the U.S. Forest Service to destroy dry brush and dead trees got out of control and roared through 200 acres. The fire was 20 percent contained by Thursday evening, said Linda Davis of the San Bernardino County Fire Department. There were no injuries. A hut used by the Bear Mountain resort's ski patrol was destroyed.... Buffalo Kill To Control Disease Questioned For most Americans, buffaloes are icons of an era when much of America was wild and unspoiled. But to state and federal park officials around Yellowstone National Park, the bison also represent the threat of brucellosis, a disease that causes both buffaloes and cattle to spontaneously abort their young. In an effort to protect susceptible cows on ranches bordering the park, park rangers have been shooting a growing number of the buffaloes that each winter wander out of the park in search of food. So far this year, National Park Service and Montana Department of Livestock employees have shot 278 of the roughly 4,200 wild buffaloes that roam the park's confines. The program -- a boon to neighboring cattle owners and a bane to environmentalists -- has been in place for nearly a decade. But as the number of dead bison mount, criticism of the practice has grown.... Bush administration criticizes Tiffanys over opposition to mine in Cabinet Mountains Mark Rey, an undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture, said the letter signed by Tiffany's chief executive was filled with errors, though he declined to say what they were. "I'm guessing this ad in The Washington Post cost upwards of $50,000," said Rey, director of the administration's forest policy, in a telephone interview. "For $49,999.63 less, they could have sent us this letter and given their customers a discount on their products." Mining interests also criticized Tiffany, suggesting the company was responding to threats of boycotts of its jewelry from environmentalists opposed to the mine.... Forest Service turns down employee outsourcing appeal The Forest Service late Wednesday ruled against California mechanics appealing an agency decision to outsource fleet maintenance work. In the ruling, Forest Service officials said the mechanics should not have waited so long to challenge the accuracy of a statement describing work at stake in a competition for 60 full-time maintenance jobs.... Editorial: More logging at a snail's pace I t never made much sense for the U.S. Forest Service to spend tens of millions of dollars every year crawling around old-growth forests counting slugs and snails and searching for mushrooms and moss. The Northwest won't miss the "survey and manage" rule abandoned by the Bush administration in a settlement of a lawsuit filed by the timber industry. The rule was a shrewd poison pill inserted into the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994 that crippled the plan's promise of a small but stable level of logging on public forests. Survey and manage was a full-employment act for several thousand Forest Service contract workers, and a herd of environmental lawyers who repeatedly and successfully used the rule to block old-growth timber sales. In some years, federal agencies spent more than $100 million surveying more than 400 organisms thought to live only in Northwest old-growth forests.... Reviews mixed on smaller scale grizzly plan Critics of a plan to relocate grizzly bears in British Columbia are praising a new proposal to relocate the animals farther north, reducing the chances the bears will roam to Washington state. Environmentalists criticized the new proposal as hurting recovery chances for grizzly bears in the state. The British Columbia government may capture bears this fall from Wells Gray Provincial Park and hold them for a year before releasing them in fall 2005 in the Canadian portion of the North Cascades, said Matt Austin, large carnivore specialist for the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection. He said the bears may be released north of Highway 3, the main highway running across the southern part of the province. The highway is considered a possible barrier to grizzly migration.... BLM director: Avoid sage grouse listing Bureau of Land Management Director Kathleen Clarke stopped in Casper on Thursday during a tour of several Western states to garner support for efforts to prevent listing the greater sage grouse for protection under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reviewing a petition to list the greater sage grouse, and the agency is expected to make a decision early next week about whether or not the petition is warranted.... Wyo to appeal wolf FOIA denial Wyoming plans to appeal a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refusing the release of some documents considered in the federal agency's rejection of the state's proposed wolf management plan. Wyoming requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The state is preparing to sue the federal agency over the rejection. "What we wanted to know was -- from both the regional and national offices -- give us the comments, the research and documents generated in denying Wyoming's wolf plan," Mike O'Donnell, chief deputy attorney general, said Thursday.... Scientists criticize government over salmon rules Scientists appointed by the government to review salmon-recovery efforts are lashing out at federal court rulings that require both wild and hatchery-raised fish to be counted when determining whether a species is threatened. In an editorial being published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, the six scientists also criticized the National Marine Fisheries Service, saying the agency must do more to protect wild salmon.... Gold miners work to salvage salmon spawning area Gold miners were enlisted in an apparently successful effort to salvage a rare stretch of chum salmon spawning grounds along the Columbia River, officials say. Sand as deep as 18 inches covered about 20 percent of the spawning area at Woods Landing, between Vancouver and Portland, Ore. At the request of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, volunteer miners used lawn mower-sized dredges mounted on pontoons to suck up much of the sediment and pipe it out to the main channel of the river over the weekend of March 13-14.... 300 jam Denver meeting on wolves About 300 people crammed into a meeting room at a Denver hotel Thursday night, most eager to share their views on wolves and Colorado. The state Division of Wildlife held the meeting to encourage and collect nominations for a "working group" that will draft a wolf-management plan to be submitted to the division's director.... Park Service pledges cuts in travel costs Reacting to stern criticism in Congress, the National Park Service sought to dispel notions Thursday that its spending priorities were out of line and that it had muzzled employees who might want to speak out. "Who's minding the store here? Are you all sort of oblivious to what's going on?" Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., demanded of Park Service Director Fran Mainella. Mainella said she would immediately halt any more spending for foreign travel and cut 10 percent from domestic travel spending. She acknowledged that million-dollar projects were getting under way without her consent and said any costing more than $1 million would require approval from her or Interior Secretary Gale Norton.... Column: Yellowstone becomes prize in legal tug of war Compared to the flood of visitors that washes over Yellowstone National Park during the summer, the number of people making their way during winter into that fabled realm of geysers, hot springs, bison, elk, and wolves is but a trickle. Visitation between December and March is seldom more than 1,000 people a day, whereas in June, July, and August — when most of the park's 3 million annual visitors arrive — a crowd that size may be found at eruption time on the boardwalk around Old Faithful. Yet that relatively tiny number of winter visitors is at the heart of a very large legal, political, and philosophical dispute, one that in the past few weeks has taken a dizzying number of twists. The conflict is emblematic of an old paradox built into the national park system and reflects a deep and irreconcilable division in the way Americans perceive their native landscape.... Supreme Court considers right to sue government over land managementThe state all-terrain vehicle park is bordered on three sides by the wilderness study area, and conservationists say the Bureau of Land Management isn't doing enough to protect the fragile dunes and their ancient stands of ponderosa pine. The nation's highest court hears arguments Monday on whether citizen groups can sue the BLM to force it to better protect public lands awaiting a decision on wilderness designation. The clash of competing interests is most pronounced here, about 250 miles south of Salt Lake City, where the border defining Coral Pink's most delicate dunes from ATV traffic is little more than an imaginary line in the sand.... Wandering bighorns may be destroyed Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials have decided that up to seven bighorn sheep that wandered away from their new home in the Greenhorn Mountains last year may have to be destroyed. That decision has created controversy.... Interior official admits Animas-La Plata errors The Animas-La Plata Project saw a dramatic increase in costs because the Bureau of Reclamation completely failed to do its job, an Interior official told a congressional subcommittee Wed-nesday. Bennett W. Raley, assistant Interior secretary for Water and Science, told the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development that the long-in-the-works water project skyrocketed in costs last year because the bureau failed to take several factors into account.... House votes water rights fee repeal Colorado lawmakers are fast-tracking a bill not only to repeal the controversial water rights administration fee that the Legislature enacted last year but to refund the estimated $467,000 in fees that have been collected so far. House Bill 1402, which Joint Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Brad Young, R-Lamar, introduced a week ago, was the only bill the House considered during a brief floor session Wednesday, and it unanimously passed the House today.... California Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Require Testing All Cattle for Mad Cow California would become the only state in the nation that tests every head of cattle for mad cow disease under a bill offered Thursday by a pair of Democratic state senators. State Sen. Michael Machado, D-Linden, said Californians could have a certified-safe beef supply for just pennies a pound extra under a bill he has co-authored with Sen. Jackie Speier, D-San Diego....