NEWS ROUNDUP

Salmon, ranchers win in deal Zigzagging between jagged Wallowa Mountain peaks, the Lostine River beckons salmon with some of the finest habitat in Oregon. But in dry summers, ranch irrigators reduce miles of the river to a trickle. Threatened chinook that fight 600 miles from the ocean past eight hydropower dams in the Columbia and Snake rivers run into an impassable barrier just before reaching their near-pristine spawning grounds. This year -- despite another withering drought -- salmon found the going easier. More than 100 ranchers who rely on the river found a way to keep water gushing over its boulder-strewn course through the hottest, driest days of August and September. The return of spring chinook, from a low of 13 fish in 1999, shot past 800 this year -- the second highest total since the Nez Perce Tribe began a restoration effort in the 1990s. An agreement brokered by the nonprofit Oregon Water Trust and supported by dollars from the federal Bonneville Power Administration offered simple terms: payment of as much as $180,000 for leaving a crucial volume of water in the river. It left irrigators to decide how best to ration water. A neutral party, the Oregon Water Resources Department, kept track of stream flow.....
Sage advice: Let grouse and cattle live together Sage grouse feed in a meadow at dawn, unperturbed as three young wranglers saddle their mounts nearby and head through the sagebrush for the high country of central Nevada, where cattle graze in the Desatoya Range. For some, the notion that cattle and a bird that just escaped listing under the Endangered Species Act can share the same Western landscape and thrive is a contradiction. At Smith Creek Ranch, manager Duane Coombs wants to prove otherwise - and, in so doing, protect a livelihood....
Arguments still rage over mountain lions in Kansas It's been 101 years since the last documented wild mountain lion in western Kansas was shot, but their presence within the state has been debated ever since. While state biologists say there's still no solid evidence, the odds are swinging heavily in the other direction. Colorado's long-sustained population is flourishing. Within the last few years Nebraska, Missouri and Oklahoma have had several confirmations of the big cats, some of which were within a few miles of the Kansas border. Most wildlife professionals say a wild mountain lion could be documented in Kansas any day....
Editorial: Forest Service Sulk THE FOREST Service's decision to suspend more than 1,500 permits for activities in national forests -- including weddings, mushroom-picking and hunting expeditions for the disabled -- should lead to more questions about the real motives of the agency that allegedly protects the nation's forests. The extraordinarily petty decision appears to have been an overly literal response to a judicial decision in the summer, which found that the Forest Service had illegally rewritten its rules and dispensed with required public consultations before harvesting timber in Sequoia National Forest. The judge ordered the Forest Service to return to previous rules, which required public consultation for major forest activities, such as commercial timber sales, oil drilling or mining. Instead of abiding by the law, the Forest Service, whose lawyers say they were interpreting a judge's broad and vague orders, decided to create chaos and put everything up for public consultation and a 30-day comment period. Proof that this was a political ploy -- deliberately designed to wreak havoc and feed the opposition to public consultation -- lies in the fact that a pro-development group announced it would like to see a "full public discussion" of the harvesting of the Capitol Christmas tree and initiated procedures that would delay the tree's arrival in Washington. On Capitol Hill there has also been talk of overruling the judge legislatively, possibly through an upcoming appropriations bill....
Column: Preventing the next firestorm The best way to prevent the next firestorm is to deal with the cause, and that is fuel. Ask yourself, why did bark beetles and wildfires destroy much of the San Bernardino National Forest? Why are we spending so much money for fuel breaks, defensible space around homes, and clearing evacuation routes? The answer is that there are too many, crowded trees and too much old brush, and most of it is on national forest land. Until the Forest Service restores the national forests in Southern California and the Sierra Nevada to a more natural healthy condition, future insect infestations and firestorms are inevitable. The Forest Service is limited in its ability to act soon. They say they are leaving all the beetle-killed trees in the "general forest" as wildlife habitat, even though a few trees per acre would be sufficient. These dead trees will pile up as they fall and make the fire hazard more severe – and will certainly not provide the habitat if they burn up. The Forest Service says it wants to do more, but the money is gone. Their budget of $30 million for next year's thinning projects on the San Bernardino National Forest has been cut to $5 million to help pay for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. There are only two options: let forests grow thicker and burn, or thin the forests. Thinning the forest could be done cheaply, quickly, and with a double environmental benefit by utilizing the thinned trees for wood products and biomass fuel. Half of the environmental gain would be a restored, healthy forest. The other would be for building and fuel so we use less fossil fuels....
Editorial: An abuse of power There are reasons why the federal government has the power to ignore local zoning laws, and none of them has anything to do with skiing. Yet federal primacy over local land-use laws isn't being used to locate an unpopular but necessary radar installation, missile site or extraterrestrial receiving center at the eastern entrance to Park City. No, the Air Force wants to turn 27 acres in spare federal land on State Route 248 into a vacation resort, complete with 150-room hotel. It would be owned and operated by a private developer but give preferential deals to military personnel. It's land in a corridor that Park City has been trying to keep open as an attractive entrance to a city that lives by its natural appeal. The city went so far as to pay $875,000 for the old Imperial Hotel on Main Street, hoping to lure the Air Force into trading for that property as a retreat. But the Pentagon passed....
Tree-killing beetle termed unstoppable Researchers and the Canadian government say there's no way to stop the spread of an Asian beetle that kills ash trees, valued for their shade, wildlife food and wood for baseball bats and furniture. The emerald ash borer was found just three years ago in the Detroit area, but researchers suspect it arrived as much as a decade ago. The U.S. and Canadian governments are sticking with a strategy of cutting down swaths of trees to keep it from spreading, but in the past year agreement has grown that the approach will at best slow the insect. "The eradication efforts may not be eradication efforts. They may be slowing the spread," said Jennifer Koch, a U.S. Forest Service research biologist in Delaware. Others said that opinion emerged at a research meeting last month in Pittsburgh, although some still disagree. "It looks pretty dismal for our native ashes," if nothing is done, said Vic Mastro, director of the U.S. Agriculture Department's laboratory in charge of detecting and controlling foreign pests. But Mastro still holds out hope the spread can be stopped....
Tracking environmental threats A Reno scientist is helping develop a plan for a nationwide system that could track the spread of diseases such as bird flu or prevent the spread of non-native weeds such as the tall whitetop that is damaging Nevada's waterways and agricultural lands. Michael Auerbach of the Desert Research Institute is one of a team of scientists across the country working to establish the National Ecological Observatory Network, NEON. When operating, possibly in five years, Auerbach said it would monitor plant and animal life, and the environment in the United States the same way the National Weather Service now tracks meteorological changes, alerting residents to the spread of infectious diseases and invasive species of plants such as cheatgrass from France or animals that include the snakehead fish from China....
Old-growth protection backed on eve of BLM deadline The U.S. Bureau of Land Management could meet its timber quota in Western Oregon without logging old-growth forests key to protecting threatened and endangered species, according to a study released Wednesday by three conservation groups. The study, led by the World Wildlife Fund in Ashland, is meant to provide evidence supporting a revision of the BLM’s management plan that would protect old-growth forests from Salem to Oregon. Corvallis-based Conservation Biology Institute and Portland-based Oregon Natural Resources Council helped conduct the study. "This report documents the importance of BLM lands to Oregon’s natural heritage and shows the BLM can meet its volumes without logging old-growth forests," said author Dominick DellaSala, a forest ecologist with the World Wildlife Fund....
Local BLM office to add 23 positions The Bureau of Land Management’s Carlsbad Field Office is looking for a few good people — about 23 of them to be exact, said Tony Herrell, field office manager. A $12.3-billion energy bill passed by Congress in July and signed by President Bush in August opened the door to hire more staff, he said. “When the Congress passed the new energy bill, they wanted to decrease our processing times for applications to drill for oil and gas and inspections of oil and gas wells,” he said. “The money has been made available to us to start hiring natural resource specialists, some clerical positions, legal instruments examiners, geologists and hydrologists.” Herrell said that the hiring process for petroleum engineer technicians (oil and gas inspectors) has already started....
Encana offers money up front In an effort it says shows its commitment to wildlife habitat work, EnCana Oil and Gas Inc. agreed to transfer $1.1 million to the state for off-site mitigation around the Jonah Field.
The money will be transferred to the state's new Wildlife and Natural Resources Trust Account Board, which will hold the funds. It has not been transferred yet, as the state needs to work out an agreement with the Bureau of Land Management, which will likely oversee and administer off-site mitigation work. Robin Smith, a consultant for EnCana, said the company elected to transfer the money before any decision has been made regarding well development on the Jonah Field "as a part of its show of commitment to fund up to $28 million for off-site mitigation and monitoring" in connection with the Jonah drilling project. But there is a catch....
Six years after deal with church, bison still waiting to roam lands For many, a $13 million land deal represented the best hope for creating a safe haven for bison that stray from Yellowstone National Park each winter. The hope was to provide a place where bison could roam without being hazed, captured or slaughtered out of fear they might infect cattle with a disease called brucellosis. It would be a place where bison and cattle wouldn't even come into contact. But six years after the government paid $13 million to a religious sect, the Church Universal and Triumphant, for land and easements north of the park, bison have yet to set hoof there. And they won't any time soon, federal and church officials say, unless someone is willing to pay the church to stop grazing cattle on its ranch -- a cost that could run several million dollars more. The Interior Department sought to buy the grazing rights in 1999, seeing them as crucial to ensuring bison would have room to roam outside the park. But that effort was ditched when the appraisal -- nearly $2.8 million, on top of the $13 million -- was much more than government officials were willing to pay....
16 horses are found dead near Calhan The discovery Saturday of 16 more dead horses in eastern El Paso County has left ranchers worried and investigators puzzled over who or what is killing the animals. In all, 22 horses and one burro have died under mysterious circumstances in the past two weeks in the same area. There is still no explanation for the deaths of the seven animals found Oct. 11. “I’ve never, never seen an animal die like that,” said William DeWitt, the lifelong rancher who owned the horses found Saturday. “It certainly wasn’t natural.” DeWitt was speaking of a horse that looked as though it died before it hit the ground. It was on its stomach, legs bent, and nose in the dirt. The head was upright. “At first, I thought he was still alive,” DeWitt said. El Paso County Sheriff’s Deputy Andy Prehm said investigators found no signs of trauma and could not speculate what might have killed the horses, including some young ones....
Is this the end of horse slaughter? Not all horses spend their final days basking in the sun while strolling across lush green pastures. Each year thousands of horses in the United States are slaughtered and become food for people overseas or carnivores in zoos. Whether it's a practical, cruel or humane way to euthanize horses can be debated, but Congress is on the brink of killing horse slaughter in the United States. As early as next week, a committee of representatives and senators could agree on the agriculture appropriations bill, HR2744, which includes amendments that strip the United States Department of Agriculture of funding to inspect horse meat in the country's three horse slaughterhouses. The legislation is not an outright ban of horse slaughter, but slaughterhouses are concerned that it will lead to their demise. Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for two Texas companies that slaughter horses, Dallas Crown Inc., of Kaufman, and Beltex Corp., of Fort Worth, said if the amendments pass, horse slaughterhouses could be doomed....
On the Edge of Common Sense: It seems PETA makes the news again The animal rights group PETA has based its advertising on outrageous things. They attract the media attention posing as a news item, and thus spend very little on advertising. Past examples include comparing serial killer/cannibal Jeffery Dahmer to slaughtering pigs; equating butchering chickens to the Jewish holocaust, and parading nude at the zoo to protest zoos. Many of us have come to believe there is nothing too grotesque that PETA will do "to advance the cause." Thus when I read the headlines this summer proclaiming "PETA employees charged with animal cruelty," I assumed it was another ploy for attracting the gullible media....

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