NEWS ROUNDUP

Hungry geese a peck of trouble for Humboldt Bay ranchers Honk if you're glad the geese are gone. Humboldt Bay ranchers are overjoyed that hungry hordes of the messy fowl are finally on their way north to nest. Ravenous Aleutian cackling geese have been eating up their pasture. The Aleutian geese, once an endangered species, now number at least 60,000 and many like to feast on the sweet spring grasses of the Humboldt Bay bottomlands. They'll nest in the wind-chilled Aleutian Islands — then eventually head back to the land of the worried ranchers to fortify themselves again. A survey last month found 10,000 of the chubby birds grazing on a 1/8240-acre ranch near Arcata. The rancher, Peter Bussman, estimates he lost up to 60 percent of the grasses he needs to feed his livestock for the three to four months the birds were there. In some pastures the birds chomped 10-inch-high grasses down to a mere two inches — then tackled the tender new shoots. "Once they get short grass, they keep hitting it," Bussman said. An analysis of 5,000 acres of pasture land in the Mad River bottoms found the geese were responsible for up to $450,000 in lost grazing....
Mary Dann Found Dead on Ranch One of two Indian sisters who brought worldwide attention to the land rights of Shoshone Indians has been found dead on her Nevada ranch. Mary Dann and her sister Carrie battled the federal government for decades over grazing practices. They claim the tribe owns much of the land in Nevada and Utah because of the 1863 "Treaty of Ruby Valley". Congress authorized a buyout of Shoshone land rights, but the Dann sisters refused to accept it. On Friday night Carrie Dan found her older sister Mary under an overturned ATV. It's believed Mary died suddenly of natural causes and then rolled the ATV....
BLM says it has 'no legal recourse' to stop wild horse slaughter Animal activists criticized the Bureau of Land Management on Friday for allowing six previously protected wild horses to be slaughtered for meat, and said it proves federal safeguards repealed last year need to be reinstated. The BLM is investigating how the mustangs ended up at an Illinois slaughterhouse, but the government has "no legal recourse" to prevent such slaughters since a 34-year-old law was changed in December, agency spokeswoman Celia Boddington said. The BLM sold the six horses that had been rounded up in Wyoming to a private owner in Oklahoma earlier this month, the agency said. The sale was authorized under the change in law in December. The amendment by Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., directs the agency offer for sale any excess mustangs that are older than age 10 or were unsuccessfully offered to the public three times under a separate, long-running adoption program. "Although it was six wild horses whose blood was spilled, it could easily have been 60 or 200," said Trina Bellak, president of the American Horse Defense Fund....
Road war all too real for actor Rick Schroder has played a cowboy on television; now he’s a real rancher involved in a land squabble as old as the West. Schroder, owner of the Mesa Mood Ranch high on the Uncompahgre Plateau overlooking the Gunnison River and Grand Valley, was sued two years ago by a neighboring landowner who complained that Schroder and his manager were trespassing on a private road to reach parts of Mesa Mood Ranch. The original two-page lawsuit has since exploded into a three-volume set of legal wrangling involving the previous owners of the Schroder property and a federal agency. The owners of an adjoining ranch — Ronald E. Tipping, Rodney C. Power and William R. Patterson — filed suit against Schroder on Nov. 12, 2003, alleging Schroder was trespassing by using a road through their property, including cutting the lock of the gate at one point. Schroder said he was suspicious of the timing of the lawsuit, noting that it came soon after a decision by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to move ahead on a proposed land swap with him instead of with his neighbors....
Wheels vs. Wilderness In a time when the popularity of other forms of motorized recreation - such as boats and snowmobiles - has essentially fallen flat, registrations in Utah for ATVs, dirt bikes, specialty four-wheel drive vehicles and new generation "rock crawlers" have skyrocketed in the past seven years and are now pushing the 200,000 mark. The kicker? State officials and off-road organizations suspect that may represent just half of the total number of OHVs in the state. And that's a problem. The sheer number of OHVs now venturing out onto Utah's backroads and trails is taking an environmental toll around the state - the vast majority on federal land - and in many instances has overwhelmed the ability of the budget-challenged Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to regulate it....
Widows file suit over tankers Self-described "tanker widows" filed a lawsuit Friday in federal court that accuses the Forest Service and five other U.S. agencies of allowing a contractor to fly a faulty military-surplus firefighting plane that crashed and killed their loved ones, including a Southern California resident. Relatives of the most recent victims in a series of U.S. air tanker crashes - crashes that threaten to ground the remainder of the aging fleet essential to protecting arid Southern California - are among those expected to join in the lawsuit or file their own....
Tanker crash will likely ground fleet Officials conceded Friday the crash of another federal firefighting plane will likely leave the U.S. Forest Service without an air-tanker fleet to fight western wildfires, broadening calls to accept Russia's offer to lend unique jet super-tankers as replacements. Federal officials told the Oakland Tribune that if the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the Wednesday evening crash, finds it was due to a flaw common to all other P-3 Orions, the remaining six federally owned tankers would be grounded. California owns a fleet of
small, turboprop tankers that may be trimmed due to budget cuts. But the state's tankers can carry only 1,200 gallons to fight wildfires that ravage the state during the dry summer season. The P-3 was one of only seven Orions left that can carry about 3,000 gallons of fire retardant, out of a worn-out federal military-surplus fleet....
U.S. may get fire aid from Russia Some congressmen, governors and state government emergency officials are calling for the U.S. to accept Russia's offer to loan the biggest and only jet firefighting tankers in the world so they can prove themselves. Russia only now is unwrapping the last mysteries surrounding the Ilyushin-76 Waterbomber because it wants to — you guessed it — sell the planes to America. In photographs taken by NATO and others, it's a behemoth when you're standing close. It's as huge as a 747 U.S. commercial airliner or a U.S.military C-5 cargo plane with a belly meant to carry full-sized battle tanks. From far away, when dropping water on a fire, the Waterbomber looks merely big. It's so big, enthusiasts say, the 11,000-gallon torrent of water it drops is breathtaking, even from a distance. It covers an area the size of 21 football fields with one 10-second drop, said Tom Robinson of the Virginia Offices of Fire Programs and Emergency Services in Richmond, Va. "It puts a fireline down 300 feet wide and 3,900 feet long."....
States tell Congress to repeal federal recreation fee Rich Vaughn says paying the U.S. Forest Service a daily fee so he can take his boat onto the Salmon River in Idaho, where he used to play for free, hurts his sense of fairness more than it hurts his wallet. "It's public land that's held in trust for the American people, and to charge a fee to access that land is wrong," Vaughn said. The Montana and Colorado legislatures agree, and the Oregon Legislature may soon join them. Montana and Colorado recently passed resolutions demanding Congress repeal the fees required for recreational use of certain federal lands. Oregon legislators have been advancing a similar measure worded a bit more gently - Congress is "respectfully urged" to undo the fees - but have not cast a final vote....
Editorial: U.S. PILT cash holds local taxes down The Bush administration has proposed cutting payments to counties that serve tax-exempt federal lands. Congress should reject this false economy. It's an obscure acronym, but we are cheered to see that Colorado's congressional delegation is making a bipartisan effort to secure adequate funding for the embattled Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program. We wish them well, because PILT is one of those rare federal programs that actually holds down local taxes. It follows, therefore, that a 12 percent cut in the program proposed by the Bush administration would likewise translate into tax increases or reduced services for Colorado taxpayers....
Forest Service Plans Land Selloff Looking for a sweet home in Sweet Home? The Forest Service may have just the answer. Three houses in Sweet Home, a former logging town in Oregon's Willamette Valley, are for sale for $52,500, $69,000 and $78,000. The properties, built in the 1950s for workers in the Willamette National Forest, are no longer needed -- and frankly, the Forest Service could use the money. Squeezed by record deficits, the decline of the timber industry and the revenue that produced, as well as demands of the new "healthy forests" law, the agency is looking to close some recreation sites and sell offices and ranger stations that bustled during the logging heyday decades ago but now sit idle....
Oregon: Public may use banks of many rivers A sweeping state legal opinion released Thursday says the public has the right to fish and go ashore along any of Oregon's floatable rivers up to the high-water mark, no matter who owns the riverfront property. In many respects, the findings by Attorney General Hardy Myers treat the banks of rivers like the state's Pacific Ocean beaches, which are open to the public. The opinion — requested by the State Land Board — may negate the need for the politically charged, river-by-river process of determining whether the state owns river beds and banks. That's because most of those conflicts, which pit landowners versus river users, rise from disagreements over public access....
A Native American Medicine Man To his neighbors and coworkers in Carlin, Nevada he's John Pope, a veteran brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad. But his family, friends, and tribal brothers and sisters—as well as the hundreds of people who've witnessed demonstrations of his remarkable healing power—know him as Rolling Thunder, a native American Indian and heir to a traditional role among his people: that of intertribal medicine man. In the manner of most such healers, Rolling Thunder deals more in matters of the spirit than of the flesh and—although he doesn't "do anything for show"—evidences of his ability have been said to astound the most skeptical of observers....
Llamas on guard protecting growing numbers of grazing sheep Jackson the guard llama perked up his fuzzy white ears and let out a quiet, guttural whine. With strange dogs nearby, Jackson was on the lookout for any threat to the small flock of sheep inside his pen. "See how he is right now? He's guarding," said Stephanie Arceneaux, who owns Jackson and the sheep. "He's doing his job quite well." Arceneaux is one of a growing number of livestock owners using llamas as guards against dogs and coyotes. Arceneaux can hear coyotes howling every night around her four-acre property northwest of Redmond. But since she bought Jackson four years ago, she hasn't lost a single one of her prized Jacob sheep to predators. "If I did not have him I would have lost a lot of lambs," she said. "He's been perfect." Every year, hundreds of thousands of sheep are killed or injured by coyotes and dogs at an annual cost to farmers and ranchers of more than $16 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture....
Little rider leaves an impression at Mexican rodeo Edmund Rios is the biggest little charro of San Antonio. Even though he is only 8, Edmund is well on his way to mastering all the horseback maneuvers performed at a charreada, or Mexican rodeo. On Sunday, the San Antonio third-grader was among dozens of charros who exhibited their precision drill maneuvers to the generous applause of spectators at Fiesta's "A Day in Old Mexico and Mexican Charreada." Unlike at an American rodeo, a charro, which means loud or flashy, isn't tested on speed, but on his skill and style. Edmund was the youngest performing member of the Asociación de Charro de San Antonio, which is dedicated to preserving a revered Mexican tradition dating back to the 16th century, when the Spaniards taught Mexican ranchers the art of horsemanship....
On The Edge Of Common Sense: The best advice is sometimes unwelcome And I, too, have had unwanted observations come clear as years go by. I remember the first time I was on the "Ralph Emery Show" in Nashville. It was the result of some of my country music friends recommending me. I told a few poems and was a hit. After the show my friends took me out to dinner. I was on cloud nine. They could tell. "Is there anything else you'd like?" they asked, smiling. "Well," I said, "I'd like somebody famous to cut one of the songs I wrote." My friend exclaimed, "I don't believe it! Every poet I know thinks he's a songwriter! Every songwriter thinks he's a singer. Every singer thinks he's an actor, and every actor thinks he's a poet! Why can't you be satisfied with what yer good at?"....

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