NEWS ROUNDUP
 
Bold bears break into homes In 11 years of installing garage doors, Flip Rys has never had to replace ones damaged by bears - until now.On Soda Ridge Road in Keystone, a woman had eaten salmon for dinner, double-wrapped what was left and placed it in her trash in the garage. A bear broke through a panel in the garage door to get to the fish.The second, which backed the woods at the top of Mesa Cortina, was where the bear just "went through the garage door," apparently on the hunt for bird food, Rys said.The third, Monday, was in Blue River, where a bear broke into a garage in which there was nothing to eat. The DOW has deemed that bear a "problem bear" and have set traps to catch and relocate it....
Calif. Fires May Foretell Fall Disaster  When they weren't racing to mountainsides and canyons to fight fast-moving, potentially deadly blazes this week, firefighters sometimes found themselves scratching their heads. They do not usually see such major blazes in Southern California before Aug. 1. Most happen in October the height of fire season when hot Santa Ana winds can push flames across huge areas. "A lot of us are looking at each other and saying, `Wait a minute, it's mid-July and this is happening,'" said Angeles National Forest spokesman Stanton Florea....
Bill would require Forest Service to replant after wildfires  Dissatisfied with the low level of reforestation in the area scorched by the 2002 Biscuit fire, Sen. Gordon Smith on Thursday introduced a bill to require the U.S. Forest Service to replant burned areas within five years. The bill would triple reforestation funding to $90 million from tariffs on lumber imports in an effort to overcome a backlog approaching 1 million acres, the Oregon Republican said in a statement from Washington....
Diverse Groups Vow Vigorous Opposition to Administration's National Forest Assault  Groups representing hunters and anglers and environmentalists formally announced plans to mount a unified effort opposing the Administration's changes to national forest policies announced last week. Leaders for these diverse groups vowed to draw a million public comments in opposition to the rollback, and groups around the country are holding a series of events in a number of states to urge citizens to write the US Forest Service. "The Bush Administration is out of touch with the vast majority of Americans who want our last pristine National Forests protected," said Robert Vandermark, co-director of Heritage Forests Campaign (HFC). "When their mailboxes are jammed with letters overwhelmingly opposing their special interest giveaway, we hope they will get the message."....
Officials say state will revise its prairie dog management plan  State officials are revamping South Dakota's prairie dog management plan and will ask the Legislature for more money to poison the animals in an effort to keep them from moving onto private land from nearby federal land. The decision comes after the U.S. Forest Service delayed control efforts on grasslands it oversees for at least another year, said John Cooper, secretary of the Game, Fish and Parks Department. State officials had hoped the Forest Service would start poisoning prairie dogs this summer. But Cooper said the federal agency has decided it wants to conduct an environmental impact statement before any poisoning or other controls could begin. The EIS could take up to a year or more....
Logging in limbo  The battle over logging in rural Rio Arriba County is heating up again.Three environmental groups are asking the regional forest supervisor to halt a proposed commercial-logging project in an area of the Carson National Forest that environmentalists and local residents have argued over during the last decade. Congress set aside the section of forest a half century ago with a mandate that forest products should help support beleaguered economies in that part of Northern New Mexico....
Feds exterminate Idaho's largest wolf pack  The largest wolf pack in Idaho has been exterminated by federal agents after killing more than 100 sheep in central Idaho. "Non-lethal methods were tried, but they didn't work and the wolves continued to kill sheep," said Carter Niemeyer, wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "We won't tolerate wolves that are confirmed to be chronically killing livestock." Niemeyer said the nine wolves in the Cook pack were killed earlier this week and members of two other packs roaming the McCall area could also be killed because they have been attacking livestock. No decision has been made on those packs yet, however....
Owls Face Spotted Future   Habitat loss may no longer be the primary threat to spotted owls' survival. "There is a new wrinkle in an old problem," Forsman said. That wrinkle is the invasion of the larger, more aggressive barred owl into spotted owl territory. "The barred owl either eats [spotted owls], kicks them out of their habitat, or mates with them—and sometimes the offspring are fertile," said Steven Courtney, vice president of the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute (SEI) in Portland, Oregon. These hybrids fall into a legal gray area because northern spotted owls are listed as threatened, while their California cousins are not—so they are not protected under the ESA....
Column: Give states a chance with sage grouse  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should give the states, including North Dakota, a chance to improve conditions for the sage grouse, rather than list the bird as endangered.The sage grouse, notable for the colorful dance of the male in the two-month breeding season, lives in 11 western states and Alberta province, in Canada. In North Dakota, it is found only in western Bowman and Slope counties, where it rubs up against oil and gas development.This spring, the Bureau of Land Management restricted energy activity on the land it controls there so breeding would not be disturbed. Sage grouse numbers were down 17 percent from 2003 (although up from eight years ago)....
Industry, greens share ideas  So Sharp joined up with the Upper Green River Valley Coalition to develop a "citizens' proposal" for energy development in the area. The goal, the group says, is not to stop drilling but work with industry to create sustainable practices that will protect wildlife, the environment and jobs in the years to come.The group publicly released its "Responsible Energy Development Proposal" last week, after delivering it to the Bureau of Land Management in April. The BLM will ultimately be in charge of how energy development will take place....
Wilderness falls on Ketchum’s doorstep  As a Central Idaho hunter and flyfisherman, Ernest Hemingway likely would have been proud to hear that a new wilderness area adjacent to Ketchum and Sun Valley might bear his name. In revising his wilderness proposal for the Boulder and White Cloud mountains, Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, has announced he hopes to designate an additional 40,000 acres of road-free country immediately northeast of Ketchum and Sun Valley as wilderness....
Nine Mile testing gets OK   Seismic testing on a plateau south of Nine Mile Canyon can continue, a district judge ruled Wednesday, even in two wilderness study areas. Plaintiffs, including Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Utah Rock Art Research Association, had argued that the cumulative effects of the testing and eventual drilling on the West Tavaputs Plateau had not been adequately analyzed and that the project could harm cultural artifacts, especially in side canyons and on the Nine Mile Canyon rim....
Lake Powell is at the heart of the battle over restoring natural flow  The scars chiseled by five years of drought on the Colorado River are impossible to ignore here in the shadow of Glen Canyon Dam, no matter how many boaters or fishermen continue to use the reservoir. To the West's water managers, they are battle scars, proof that the system works. Store water in amounts this vast and the 30 million people tethered to the river can survive the worst of dry spells. But to others, the reservoir and the dam are ugly symbols of a good idea taken too far. The lake's declining volume - it is at its lowest level since it was first filled in the early 1970s - has revived talk of draining it and decommissioning the dam. At the very least, some conservationists say the conditions here, nearly 700 miles from the river's pristine headwaters, are evidence that the West's growth has come at a destructive cost to its rivers and the environment....
Farmers fear dry future  Almost all of the water soaking into the ground here was diverted from the Colorado River, which gives up more than 600,000 acre-feet each year to Yuma fields. Without the river, nothing would grow. In an average year, Yuma gets maybe 3 inches; for 30 months, from mid-2000 to late-2002, no rain fell at all. In the same period, annual cash receipts from crops increased from $725 million to $1.2 billion, underscoring the Colorado's value to Yuma and Yuma's value to the region's economy. What some people outside Yuma have started to ask is whether drought makes the water of more value to the thirsty cities that are reshaping the West and escalating demands on the river. With so much water taken out of the Colorado along the final miles of its journey, it is here in the fields of Arizona and California where the river's future could take a new turn....
Drought diminishes river  Down the hill from the hayfields where Duane Scholl isn't growing hay and the pastures where he isn't grazing cattle, the Colorado River carves a narrow path, weakened by another poor snowmelt at its headwaters 40 miles upstream but still strong enough to dominate the landscape.  Five years into the worst drought to hit the Colorado River in 500 years, the picture appears bleakest at the headwaters, where the water is the most finite. This is where the West's 1,450-mile lifeline begins, in the Rocky Mountains northwest of Denver. This is also where a new front in the West's water wars is most likely to erupt....
States deal for water  On a spit of land about five miles upstream from Hoover Dam, less than an hour's drive from the frenetic Las Vegas Strip, crews are drilling an enormous tunnel below the surface of Lake Mead, dipping deeper into the region's drought-stricken water supply.The tunnel will lower by 50 feet the subterranean intake pipe that draws water from the lake for use by the cities and suburbs on the other side of the River Mountains. The official goal of the project is to improve water quality, which suffers as the lake's level falls. But sinking the tunnel farther also buys southern Nevada time if the drought persists, putting more distance between the intake and a reservoir surface that has dropped nearly 100 feet since 1998....
How Drought Just Might Bring Water to the Navajo  The Navajo struggle for water on these unforgiving lands long predates the drought that has settled over the West in the last five years. On a reservation nearly five times the size of Connecticut, more than a third of the residents have no running water for themselves, their gardens or their livestock. So they go to water stations like White Rock, 50 miles from the nearest real town, to shower, wash clothes or socialize, making the best of a situation that would make most Americans shudder with its matter-of-fact adversities. But in an odd and deeply paradoxical way, the drought itself - and the fundamental ways it is making many Westerners rethink the future - may finally bring running water to the Navajo. The tribal council could vote at any time on a settlement to end a 30-year legal standoff with New Mexico over how to divide the waters of the San Juan River, a major tributary of the Colorado River. Tribal leaders had contended that history and treaty entitled them to the entire flow of the river; the state said the tribe was overreaching....
Drought has some thinking litigation  Continuing drought and an unintentional overestimate of the Colorado River’s hydrology have created huge obstacles for the states that depend on the river, said Scott Balcomb, Colorado’s commissioner for the Upper Colorado River Commission. During a visit Wednesday to the quarterly meeting of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, Balcomb said the compact that governs the use of the river was created in a time of tremendous water surplus.  With the current drought and possibility for future drier years, there is an “opportunity for intense litigation regarding the compact,” Balcomb said. “I would hate to see Colorado put its water rights at that degree of risk.”....
Second CJD case from transfusion  The first strong evidence that the human form of BSE might strike a wider group of people than those affected so far was revealed yesterday as the Department of Health announced that the disease could have been spread for the second time through a blood transfusion. The deadly rogue form of the prion protein linked to the disease was found in the spleen of a patient who died from an unrelated cause but had received blood from a donor who later developed variant CJD. The genetic signature in this person was different from the one found in the 142 patients who have died from vCJD in Britain. The patient, who received blood in 1999, had displayed no symptoms of vCJD but it is unclear how advanced the infection was. The double dose of disturbing news coincided with tighter controls over blood donations, already limited after the first transfusion incident was reported in December....
Enzi: USDA mad cow policy hurting producers  The federal government's testing policy for mad cow disease is creating doubts among consumers and nervousness in cattle markets, Sen. Mike Enzi said.The Republican senator wrote a letter Wednesday to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman decrying the release of preliminary test results on cattle to determine if they have mad cow disease, scientifically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy....
Japan Says No Talk of Lifting U.S. Beef Ban This Year  Japan has not discussed lifting its ban on imports of U.S. beef this year, said Yoshiyuki Kamei, Japan's minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries.  Japan aims to reach an agreement with the U.S. on cattle testing when officials from both countries meet in August, and an accord on the standards may lead to a resumption of beef shipments, Kamei said. Japan in December banned U.S. beef imports, valued at more than $1 billion a year, after a case of mad cow was discovered in Washington state. Kamei also said additional talks should address the findings contained in a joint report on test standards, released earlier in Washington. The report was based upon two days of technical discussions in Tokyo this week....