NEWS ROUNDUP

Scientists suggest relocating Africa's poster species to North American ranchland Lions stalking deer in the stubble of a Nebraska corn field. Elephants trumpeting across Colorado's high plains. Cheetah slouching through the West Texas scrub. Prominent ecologists are floating an audacious plan that sounds like a "Jumanji" sequel - transplant African wildlife to the Great Plains of North America. The scientists' plan appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. It echoes the controversial 1987 Buffalo Commons proposal by Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers University to cut down fences of abandoned farms and reconnect corridors for native prairie wildlife. The idea of "rewilding" the Great Plains grew from a retreat at Ladder Ranch near Truth or Consequences, N.M. The 155,550-acre property is owned by media mogul and conservationist Ted Turner. Ecologists at the ranch are planning to reintroduce the Bolson tortoise. These 100-pound burrowers were found across the Southwest, but now survive in a corner of northern Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert....
Lawsuit seeks to ban snowmobiles near caribou winter range Only a handful of endangered caribou remain in the remote Selkirk Mountains near the Canadian border, and a federal court lawsuit filed Wednesday seeks to ban snowmobiles from their winter range. The lawsuit filed here would limit snowmobile access on 450,000 acres of high-elevation forest in a sliver of Eastern Washington and northern Idaho near the snowmobiling hotspot of Priest Lake, Idaho. The lawsuit said only three mountain caribou were seen in the area this year, although about 30 live on the Canadian side of the border....
US Senators: Global Warming Obvious in Far North Fresh from visits to Canada's Yukon Territory and Alaska's northernmost city, four US senators said on Wednesday that signs of rising temperatures on Earth are obvious and they called on Congress to act. "If you can go to the Native people and listen to their stories and walk away with any doubt that something's going on, I just think you're not listening," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Hillary Clinton of New York told reporters in Anchorage that Inupiat Eskimo residents in Barrow, Alaska, have found their ancestral land and traditional lifestyle disrupted by disappearing sea ice, thawing permafrost, increased coastal erosion and changes to wildlife habitat. Heat-stimulated beetle infestation has also killed vast amounts of the spruce forest in the Yukon Territory, they said....
Park Service director still traveling The National Park Service is looking to hire a travel coordinator, 18 months after director Fran Mainella was reprimanded by Congress for traveling too much. The Park Service has posted a job opening for a "scheduling and advance coordinator" to "analyze key or critical issues confronting the director's scope of travel and mission needs." The employee must also prepare "detailed, minute-by-minute itineraries for the director's travel." The scheduling and advance coordinator will make between $52,468 and $68,209, according to the posting. Lawmakers who oversee the Park Service budget called Mainella to Capitol Hill in March 2004 after records showed she and other agency employees had spent $94 million on travel in the previous two years. In one case, an official took a $9,315 trip to Africa....
Creative way to develop Roan Plateau gas sought A proposal to allow natural-gas development on top of the Roan Plateau through blocks of 2,500-acre leases that would be designated as one large federal unit was hailed by area governments Tuesday. Colorado Department of Natural Resources Deputy Director Shane Henry said a “creative way” of developing the gas resource was sought. “We wanted something that would require operators to share facilities and roads to avoid duplication and mitigate the impacts,” he said. “That led us to the unitization concept.” Federal units are large blocks of land where a single company jointly develops the underground minerals. The idea was presented in Rifle at a meeting of cooperating agencies to the Bureau of Land Management’s resource management plan and environmental impact statement for the 73,602 acres of public lands between Rifle and Parachute....
Victims of Their Own Success Niemeyer gave the order to kill the Copper Basin pack on July 20, after nearly a year of trying to keep the wolves away from livestock with everything from radio-collar-activated noisemaking devices to rubber bullets. He and other FWS agents were also responsible for relocating hundreds of wolves away from livestock in the years following the 1995 reintroduction of 35 gray wolves to Idaho. But they don't relocate wolves anymore; Niemeyer says Idaho's wolves have multiplied so dramatically, there's nowhere left to release them where they won't face brutal competition from already established packs. The cruel irony in this situation, he says, is that "killing wolves demonstrates the success of wolf recovery." Just how successful are wolves in Idaho? Currently, according to the 2004 Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Report, put out by FWS, the original 35 have expanded to well over 400. The service's original goal of 30 breeding pairs throughout central Idaho, Northwestern Montana and Yellowstone National Park was met in 2002-today, 30 pairs reside in Idaho alone. And though FWS agents killed 30 wolves linked to depredation in 2004, and despite estimates of between 44 and 65 wolves killed illegally by private citizens, the state's population has grown by eight new packs since 2003. According to Suzanne Stone, the Rocky Mountain field representative and wolf specialist for the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, that success has produced a genetically strong, healthy wolf population-as well as some expansions into troublesome areas....
Newmont Mining Corporation Buys Historic Horseshoe Ranch Mason & Morse Ranch Company (http://www.ranchland.com), one of the nation's leading ranch real estate brokerages, announced today the sale of historic Horseshoe Ranch in central Nevada to the world's largest gold mining company, Denver-based Newmont Mining Corporation. Mason & Morse Ranch Company negotiated the sale of the nearly 60,000-acre ranch on behalf of Zeda Inc. and J.B.B. Inc., owners of the property since 1979. The purchase of Horseshoe Ranch will add to Newmont Corporation's portfolio of ranchland property which includes TS Ranch, a 450,000-acre cattle and alfalfa ranch, located in northern Nevada. Both properties are owned and managed by Elko Land and Livestock Company, a subsidiary of Newmont Mining
Corporation. Mason & Morse Ranch Company listed the ranch as a turnkey operation including equipment and cattle for $11 million....
Hundreds of cattle dead; anthrax leaves ranchers scrambling For three decades, Andrew Peterson has been a calming influence on farmers and ranchers, taking care of their sick animals. Lately, comforting words have not come easy to the longtime veterinarian. An outbreak of livestock anthrax has killed hundreds of cows in North Dakota and South Dakota, and put at least two ranches under quarantine in Texas. North Dakota officials call it the worst such outbreak in state history. Some farmers and ranchers wonder about their future. "A lot of them are just devastated," said Peterson, sitting in an examination room at the Enderlin Veterinary Clinic. "It's not just the financial losses, it's the mental anguish."....
Students trace history of Buffalo Soldiers in Guadalupe Mountains In June 1866, an act of Congress authorized the creation of six regiments of black soldiers _ two cavalry and four infantry. The two cavalries would later go down in history as the "Buffalo Soldiers." Now, 139 years later, a group of black and American Indian college and high school students dug in the dirt for hours under a hot sun in Guadalupe Mountains National Park to learn more about the Buffalo Soldiers and the Apache Indians. But the task was more than just digging to find evidence of the soldiers and their turbulent co-existence with the Apaches, who had a strong presence in the area during the 1800s....
Fiddle virtuoso Vassar Clements dies at 77 Vassar Clements, the "Hillbilly Jazz" stylist whose genre-bounding fiddle work marked him as one of Nashville's most accomplished, versatile and adventurous musicians, died at 7:20 yesterday morning at home in Goodlettsville. He was 77 and had been battling cancer. "He was one of the greatest, most creative fiddlers in country and bluegrass music history," said Mark O'Connor, a virtuoso fiddler who counted Mr. Clements among his musical heroes. Mr. Clements worked with music greats including Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Emmylou Harris, The Band, The Byrds, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, The Grateful Dead, Tom T. Hall, John Prine, Kris Kristofferson and Bonnie Raitt. He was appreciated not only for his expansive musicality but also for a personality that led Kristofferson to deem him, "The nicest person I ever met in the music business." Born in Kinard, Fla., and raised in Kissimmee, Fla., Mr. Clements had a professional career that began at age 14, when he became a member of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in 1949. From 1958 to 1961, he worked with bluegrass stars Jim & Jesse. Although Mr. Clements later became recognized for his remarkable improvisational and interpretive skills, his early work as a bluegrass fiddle player was quite influential....

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