NEWS ROUNDUP

Congressman eyes preserve logging probe An Oregon congressman called Monday for an investigation into how the Forest Service allowed 16 acres inside a rare tree reserve to be logged as part of a salvage harvest following a 2002 fire. The tree-cutting inside the 350-acre Babyfoot Lake Botanical Area in southwestern Oregon was discovered by environmentalists last month, after an approved timber sale was completed. The Forest Service has said employees of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest mismarked the area where the logging took place, although just who did it or how the mistake happened has not been determined. Normally trees are marked with stapled tags and paint to show the boundaries of timber sales and reserves within them. "Given the large size of the illegal harvest, ... I find it difficult to understand how this could have been a casual oversight," said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore....
Recovery plan completed for Pecos sunflower A final recovery plan for the native Pecos sunflower calls for identifying stands of the rare flower and conserving known habitat in the desert wetlands of New Mexico and West Texas. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife released the plan this week for the showy plant, which survives in less than two dozen known locations in the two states. The plan aims to protect and bolster the population so the plant can one day be removed from the Endangered Species List. The Pecos sunflower was added to the list in 1999. While the plant is similar to the common sunflower, it has a cluster of several smaller reddish flowers at the tip. It grows only in saturated soils such as desert wetlands and flowers from August to October....
POMBO BILL WOULD RIP THE HEART OUT OF THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Resources Chairman Richard Pombo, long a foe on the Endangered Species Act, introduced a bill today that would significantly weaken protections for our nation’s fish, plants, wildlife, and the places they call home. Mr. Pombo plans to hold a vote in Committee on Thursday, September 22nd and the legislation could be on the floor of the House as early as the week of September 26th. "Pombo's bill would reverse thirty years of progress," said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, "it would rip the heart out of America’s most important wildlife law." "This bill would put corporations, developers, and other powerful special interests in the position of deciding whether endangered species live or die," said Susan Holmes, senior legislative representative for Earthjustice. "The Endangered Species Act has saved hundreds of species from extinction, and this bill would unravel that safety net."....for more environmental perspective see Pombo Moving Legislation That Would Cripple Endangered Species Act
It's Wild vs. Domestic Sheep as Groups Lock Horns Over Grazing Area Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep are believed to have once numbered 1,000 or so, but after they dwindled to about 100 they were listed as a federally endangered species, in 1999. Mountain lions and diseases were the culprits, and in June when the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest reopened an area for domestic sheep grazing, the disease threat became a problem again. The forest had closed the area a year before to protect the bighorns from domestic sheep and their diseases. Tom Stephenson, a bighorn sheep biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, said trackers had documented bighorn rams' straying into the grazing area between Yosemite National Park and saline Mono Lake. "When they reopened it," Dr. Stephenson said of the grazing area, "we were definitely concerned." But when the California agency requested permission from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to kill any bighorns that wandered and mingled with domestic sheep as a preventive measure, environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity protested. They argued that killing bighorns was counterproductive and that the Forest Service should instead eliminate grazing in the vicinity of the wild sheep....
GAO calls for more federal involvement in wind farms A government report urged federal officials to take a more active role in weighing the impact of wind power farms on bird and bat deaths, saying local and state regulators sometimes lack the necessary expertise. Monday's report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, found that the federal government offers minimal oversight in approving wind power plants, leaving decision-making at the state and local level. As a result, the GAO found, "no one is considering the impacts of wind power on a regional or 'ecosystem' scale - a scale that often spans governmental jurisdictions."....
Flow Regime Deal Reached on American River After years of negotiations, Department of Interior officials on September 8 agreed to support a new flow regime for the lower American River developed by the Sacramento Valley Water Forum. The agreement between the Water Forum, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will raise minimum flows on the river for the benefit of salmon, steelhead and other fish. This is a huge victory for fishery conservation and environmental groups that have pressured the Bureau for decades to develop long-overdue temperature and flow standards on the popular urban river stretching from Nimbus Dam to Discovery Park. The Save the American River Association, California Sportfishing Projection Alliance, Friends of the River, United Anglers and Granite Bay Flycasters were among the key groups participating in the successful campaign to finally get the federal government adopt a new flow regime. "The adoption of these flow standards represents a significant milestone in restoring the American River," said Ron Stork, conservation director of Friends of the River. "We chose to kept our noses to the grindstone and kept talking with the Bureau of Reclamation even after internal deadlines requiring an agreement had already passed."....
Three Engangered California Condors Released At Pinnacles Three California condors were released into the wild Saturday in the latest step toward bringing back North America's largest bird from near-extinction. More than 300 people gathered around 10 a.m. to watch the endangered birds spread their wings over this isolated stretch of wilderness, about 100 miles southeast of San Francisco. The condors, raised in captivity, emerged from their pens and spent several minutes on the ground before flying off to join six other condors already living in the park from previous releases, officials said. Weighing up to 20 pounds with wingspans of up to 10 feet, condors once could be seen from Mexico to British Columbia. But habitat loss, hunting and lead poisoning threatened the species, which reached a low of 22 birds nationwide in the early 1980s. Federal biologists captured all remaining wild condors in 1987 and began breeding them in zoos....
Experts fear impact of African lizards on waterfowl But it was the creature she couldn't find that worried Willett and other officials and residents on this posh island retreat with a 6,400-acre national wildlife refuge. The Nile monitor lizard, a cunning carnivore of voracious appetite that has already put fear in the hearts of many in nearby Cape Coral, Fla., has made its way across San Carlos Bay to Sanibel, a 17-square-mile island on Florida's southwestern coast. "We have more than 1,300 waterfowl nests on some of our satellite island rookeries, and we already have reports of Nile monitor lizards on Pine Island and Sanibel," Willett said as she looked for signs of the invader last month. "If these big lizards establish a breeding population and discover the rookeries as a food source, the birds may abandon them." This is not a gecko-sized problem. And herons, terns and cormorants aren't the only species endangered. Nile monitor lizards are large, nonnative predators capable of wreaking havoc on indigenous wildlife - and people, too....
Girls and Boys Are Loaded For Bear Samantha, a freckle-faced, pony-tailed fourth-grader, was on a bear hunt. Not the pretend kind memorialized in picture books and summer-camp chants, but a real one for black bears that live in the woods of southwestern Vermont. She had won a "dream hunt" given away by a Vermont man whose goal is to get more children to hunt, and she had traveled about 200 miles from her home in Bellingham, Mass., and was missing three days of school to take him up on his offer. The dream hunt -- all expenses paid, including taxidermy -- was the brainchild of Kevin Hoyt, a 35-year-old hunting instructor who quit a job as a structural steel draftsman a few years ago and decided to dedicate himself to getting children across the country interested in hunting. This year, three pro-hunting groups -- the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance and the National Wild Turkey Federation -started Families Afield, a program to lobby states to lower the age at which children can hunt or to loosen the requirements for a child to accompany a parent on a hunt....
Colorado River states taking hands-off approach to extra water A wet winter has made a little more water available this year than last year to states that rely on the Colorado River, a Bureau of Reclamation official told water managers from seven states that draw from the river. But fears of drought have the three states that rely on Lake Mead agreeing not to touch the surplus this year, said Terrence Fulp, area manager for the bureau's lower Colorado River regional operations office in Boulder City, Nev. "The states are saying that at this time, they are not planning to take any additional water," Fulp said. "We don't know if the drought is over or not." Fulp made the comments after representatives of the seven states met Monday at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas....
An uncertain future for San Joaquin River It begins as fresh snowmelt, streaming from Mount Ritter's gray granite faces into Thousand Island Lake, a bouldered mirror. The clear blue water spills out through a narrow canyon, and the San Joaquin River is born. When conservationist and mountaineer John Muir first explored these upper reaches, the narrow gorge barely contained the power of the living river, which carried the continent's southernmost salmon run, sustained Indian tribes and set the rhythm of life in the valley below with floods and droughts. "Certainly this Joaquin Canyon is the most remarkable in many ways of all I have entered," Muir wrote in 1873. Today, maps still show the San Joaquin River meandering to the Pacific via San Francisco Bay - but it is not the river Muir marveled at....
For years, the Mexican state of Sinaloa and its capital Culiacan have been the administrative headquarters for many of the country's most fearsome drug cartels. But like most things in Mexico for which there is a demand farther north, the drug trade has migrated, too. It has come here, to the state of Sonora, and the teeming, dusty border cities like Nogales and Agua Prieta that fan out into the desert just across the fence from Arizona. "It's become a war zone," said Ruben Ruiz, whose family has been ranching in Sonora for generations. "This place is a manifestation of the social problems of both countries." With the unremitting poverty of Southern Mexico pushing from below and the insatiable American appetite for cheap labor, cheap goods and cheap drugs pulling from above, the population of Sonora's border cities has ballooned in the past 15 years, and crime rates have also soared....
It's All Trew: Cowboys: Stand-up comedians for the Lord Few occupations experience everyday hazards quite like that of the cowboy. There's something about being out in the boondocks tending livestock that draws trouble like a lightning rod draws strikes. Some adhere to a theory that God made cowboys and their cowboy way of life just so he could enjoy an occasional laugh himself. Old Tom was known for being tight with his money and started replacing rusted water tanks with huge, used equipment tires he bought at the Army Surplus Store. The top could be removed with a sharp knife, then scoot the remainder under the lead pipe of the windmill, spread black plastic sheeting in the bottom and bingo, he had a cheap, rustproof water tank for cattle. Tom discovered an added bonus of bumping the rubber tire with his pickup during cold weather, which broke up the ice inside, saving ax work on his part....

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