NEWS ROUNDUP

Reintroduced gray wolves fighting tooth and nail But despite the unsolved shootings, a management style officials admit is heavy-handed and the age-old contempt for wolves that persists among many residents here, the wolves are starting to come back. At least 50 wolves are now in the wild - halfway to the goal of getting 100 to roam the rugged Blue Range by 2008. Wolves are taking down full-grown elk and pumping out enough pups that releases of captive-bred animals have been scaled back....
Wolves and schoolkids, sharing the sagebrush It's 10 o'clock in the morning. Wolves have been sighted in the sagebrush next to Yellowstone Park School. The sagebrush is a playground for the school's kids. That's where their dynamic alliances are formed and re-formed. But not today. Until there is an all-clear for the wolves, the kids have been told to stay out. The sagebrush here reaches over my head. There isn't a kid in the school who comes close to my armpits. They disappear out in the sagebrush. So do the wolves. There could be an entire pack of wolves among the sage shrubs and you wouldn't see them....
Fences and Exceptions Make Good Neighbors in Montana Near population centers, sprawl is not only affecting wildlife habitat, but it is also drastically reducing opportunities to fish and hunt. In more remote areas, wealthy private buyers are gobbling up desirable ranches and farms; as a result, red "Posted" signs are popping up like wildflowers, barring access to rivers and game lands. Often, those signs are also symbolic markers of an underlying cultural clash. In some rural states, the attempt to preserve access for local hunters in the face of an influx of cash-rich out-of-state sportsmen has led to bitter confrontations and litigation. On the federal level, Congress is contemplating the Open Fields Incentives bill, officially named the Voluntary Public Access and Habitat Incentive Program of 2003. The bill, which has broad bipartisan support, would provide $50 million annually to farmers and ranchers who make their land available for access to the public. And states now routinely purchase conservation easements and "walk-in" rights that can protect lands from development and enable the public to use them in strictly defined ways....
Editorial: Unfair recreation fees now law Get ready to pay through the nose to use your national forests and other public lands. A last-minute plan to charge recreation fees on some federal lands for the next decade was tucked into the 3,000-page appropriations bill that passed Congress last Saturday. The proposal never received even one public hearing and was rammed into law by a congressman who has no public lands in his district. It was lawmaking at its worst....
Column: Environmentalists' lies hinder sensible resource use If you tell a lie often enough and loud enough and with enough conviction, does that make it the truth? The leadership of environmental groups who often take extreme, even radical positions (like the Sierra Club, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and Earth First!) regularly misinform the public about natural-resource issues. Their intent appears not to provide factual information so that reasonable people may become knowledgeable about controversial environmental policies but, rather, to deliberately mislead the public about private and commercial uses of natural resources on public land, so that their objective, namely elimination of such uses, will be supported and laws changed. And such propaganda is all too often effective....
Corps sandbar plan raises concerns Several agencies and groups are sounding alarms over a plan to create more Missouri River sandbar habitat for endangered bird species. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is seeking public comment on its intentions to create suitable nesting habitat for the endangered interior least tern and the threatened piping plover on emergent sandbars along a stretch of the river from Ponca, Neb., to Fort Peck, Mont. As part of the plan, the corps intends to increase sandbar acreage from 121/2 acres per mile to 50 acres per mile from Garrison Dam to Lake Oahe....
Group wants park officials to reduce roadkill The National Park Service needs to do more to protect wildlife from motorists, an advocacy group for public employees says. An average of 103 large mammals have been killed each year from 1989 to 2003 due to vehicle collisions in Yellowstone. A large mammal is defined as one that weighs more than 30 pounds, according to the Park Service. During that period, 566 elk, 456 mule deer and 192 bison died on park roads, according to Yellowstone officials....
Ownership Dispute Over Montana Riverbed For the Northern Cheyenne, it's about defending a special resource and the border of their reservation. For an energy development firm, it's about business. And for Montana's governor, it's about protecting the state's financial interests and assets, which she insists include the bed of the Tongue River. Ownership of the riverbed, along the eastern border of the tribal reservation in southeastern Montana, is at the heart of a legal dispute over leases the state sold to Fidelity Exploration & Production Co. for natural gas development. The big question: When the boundary of an Indian reservation is a river, who owns the riverbed?....
Scientists watch man-made flood of Grand Canyon More than 135 years after explorer John Wesley Powell first surveyed this ancient canyon, his writings seemed to echo last week as water roared down the Colorado River. "Floods ... have brought down great quantities of mud, making (the river) exceedingly turbid," Powell wrote on Aug. 16, 1869, as he navigated the canyon. For five days last week, dozens of scientists and federal resource managers saw a similar sight after they created an artificial flood by shooting water out of the Glen Canyon Dam: Waves of water, turned the color of mocha latte coffee by sediment, barreling downriver. Now they are analyzing whether the "flush" of sand, silt and clay from side canyons will help save the Grand Canyon's imperiled ecosystem and revitalize recreation....
Pest to attack pesky weed in Colorado River Federal and state naturalists and researchers hope a minute bug will perform like David against Goliath on a noxious weed potentially threatening western Arizona waterways. Actually, they'll settle for the pinhead-sized salvinia weevil being enough of a presence to simply help keep the rapidly growing giant salvinia weed in check along the Colorado River. "It can double its mass under ideal conditions every 2.2 days, meaning that it could grow to form a mat 38 square miles in size in three months," said John Caravetta, associate director of the Arizona Department of Agriculture....
Ranchers want to keep hot-iron brands if system changes Can a bar code - say XJZ3472 - replace a hot-iron brand? Rancher Len McIrvin has his doubts. Twice a year, McIrvin hauls 5,000 cattle between a patchwork of land that he leases and owns near the Canadian border and his winter grazing site in southeastern Washington state. Each animal wears the brand of his Diamond M Ranch - a diamond with legs to represent the M - on its right side. It is that brand that enables McIrvin to differentiate his cattle from every other rancher's in the open grazing land he occupies. And it is brands that must play a role in the federal government's efforts to establish a national system for identifying and tracking cattle, McIrvin said....
Ski racing meets rodeo in new sport of skijoring A horse thunders down the snow-packed main street, hooves spitting snow like sparks. His foam-flecked neck stretches low, Pony Express-style. The cowboy on his back, gripping the saddle horn, hollers, "Yah! Yah!" But this isn't just winter rodeo. There's a skier in tow. My breath catches as the skier shoots past me over a 6-foot jump. I could have touched him from where I stand on the sidewalk. The helmeted figure streaks down the 800-foot course, whipping through slalom gates and over jumps—bursting into the air through clouds of snow. Skijoring—as this is called—originated in Scandinavia, when reindeer towed travelers on skis. One modern variation has dogs pulling cross-country skiers, most often for recreation. But competitive equestrian skijoring is a riveting spectator sport. Ski racers are teamed with horses and riders on the day of the event, and race the clock through the course, one team at a time. Skiers have been clocked at up to 38 m.p.h. behind quarter horse and/or thoroughbred mounts—some with racetrack experience....
The West's best: Generation of ranchers harnessed a hard country While that portrait may have been partly true, the rest of the story about Texas ranch life is not as well-known. For Alf Means, the rest of the story is that he is having to sell his Y6 ranch, which has been in the Means family for more than 100 years. Record numbers of historic family ranches are being put on the market. They are casualties of a pernicious dry spell that dragged on through the 1990s, the roller-coaster economics of the cattle industry, inheritance taxes that make it hard to pass property on to heirs, and family disagreements in the third and fourth generations of children about who'll get what. Then, too, there is a shortage of experienced cowhands to work big spreads. And an influx of well-heeled city folk who want to buy wide-open spaces. Some want a recreational "getaway" with peace and quiet. Some are subdividing the land for resale as "ranchettes."....
QUANAH PARKER A MAN OF TWO WORLDS The wolfhounds followed the casket across the cold ground, two shaggy dogs trotting behind the wagon, but even after all the mourners had drifted away, one of the hounds would not leave. It lay atop the mounded earth, waiting for its master's call. The dog died there of grief in the winter of 1911, expecting Quanah Parker, the last Comanche chief, to return, says Leatrice Tahmahkera Cable, one of Quanah's great-granddaughters. Her father, who was 13 then, brought food to the animal every day, but it was no use....
At home on the range THERE is a kind of man in America who wouldn’t be caught dead in an SUV. This type of fellow does not care for tourists, takes his coffee black and wakes each morning in the dark without an alarm clock. He probably knows grain prices inside out, and believes cigarettes are for fools. He may have gone to Vietnam, he may not. Either way, he doesn’t moon too much at the surrounding mountains when he steps on to his porch in the morning frost. Independent, stubborn, and capable of outworking some of the horses he owns, he takes a certain pride in the Sisyphean nature of ranching in Wyoming, and no American writer knows him quite so well as Annie Proulx....
On The Edge of Common Sense: Lifestock, wildlife also victims of violent weather The brutality inflicted on Florida and the neighboring coasts by hurricanes Bonnie through Ivan is hard to analogize. It could be compared to the terrible blizzard and flood in the Dakotas in '97, or the prolonged mental anguish of a rancher trying to survive a years-long drought, or the suffering of an abused wife. A chronic desperation is created. How many times can you get knocked down and still get back up? The spirit gets battered....