NEWS ROUNDUP

Coyotes get a reprieve A humane program aimed at combating coyotes on West Marin rangeland has worked so well that lethal devices are unnecessary, officials said. Marin's novel "holistic" livestock protection program - the only one of its kind in the state and possibly the nation - doesn't involve trapping or killing predators, county agriculture officials said. Instead, a mix of guard dogs, guard llamas, electric fences, strobes, radio devices and sheep bells keep livestock losses under control. "We've struck a medium here with the non-lethal program," said longtime Tomales sheep rancher Bill Jensen. "It's a win-win deal for everybody." The $40,000-per-year Marin County Livestock Protection Program is up for a five-year renewal from the county starting in the 2006-07 budget, Marin Agricultural Commissioner Stacy Carlsen told county supervisors. Carlsen said the five-year effort has resulted in an average annual loss of 2.2 percent among the 6,700 sheep in the program, compared to a more than 5 percent average annual loss under a previous trapping arrangement....
Cattlemen turn up heat on wolf regs A home-grown protest over the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission’s wolf plan may be headed statewide as the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association steps up pressure. A decision on the amended plan is expected in December. At their annual meeting here Nov. 5, cattlemen voted for a policy that publicizes withdrawal of private ranchland from access by hunters, and ties the action to the pending wolf plan. As amended, the plan neither allows ranchers to shoot wolves harming livestock nor seeks compensation for predation damage. Both were elements of the original plan adopted early this year. Six Baker County ranches, in protest over commission adoption of the original plan, got local publicity by declaring their property closed to hunters. Mike Colton, one of the six ranch owners, was appointed to a special committee organizing the wider protest. “I think it is probably the only thing left that we can do without costing us a bundle of money,” said Sharon Beck of Cove, co-chairwoman of OCA’s Wolf Task Force. For more than three years the group has fought for ranchers’ rights to kill wandering wolves....
Groups establish bison preserve in rural Montana When conservationists Curt Freese and Sean Gerrity look out on the rolling prairies of north-central Montana, they see grasslands largely unchanged by time -- a haven for hundreds of birds and wildlife and the perfect place, they believe, for bison to roam again. "Our vision is not a small herd on a few acres, but to create that exciting, visual image that really gets people's hearts beating fast: 'Wow, look at those bison!"' said Freese, Northern Great Plains Program director for the World Wildlife Fund. That vision will begin to take shape in the next week: On Thursday, 16 buffalo will be released on a portion of the nearly 32,000 acres that have been purchased or leased as the start of the wildlife reserve the conservationists see as, one day, growing to possibly hundreds of thousands of acres on the High Plains....
Fighting over roads Boulder County, Colo., resident AJ Chamberlin thought she was protecting her rights when she blocked access to a dirt track that snakes across the middle of her 28-acre mountainside property. Instead, she started a battle over the old mining road. Neighbors fought back, arguing the track was a county road under an obscure 1866 law allowing local governments to claim rights of way across federal land. They said they had jogged, birded and motorbiked there years before the Chamberlins moved in and could document public use back to the turn of the 20th century. The dispute got nasty. Someone removed the post holding Chamberlin's gate and scrawled an expletive on her no trespassing sign. She barricaded the road with an old truck. Three years later, despite appeals for help to the courts and the county, the neighbors are still divided. And no one is completely sure who owns the road. "It was a peaceful place," said neighbor Walter Plywaski. "It isn't now." Chamberlin's experience now is being used by advocates for change as an example of the problems caused by the old mining law, known as Revised Statute 2477. Thousands of tracks and paths crisscross the West, but deciding what is a road has become a tricky proposition....
What to do with dead trees? On a common-sense level, it is obvious. When a forest burns, the trees are dead. So you cut them down, haul them to the sawmill, and plant new ones. Soon the blackened hillsides will be covered with healthy green trees. "Common sense says we need to restore habitats and watersheds for future generations," said Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resources Council, a timber industry group. "If we don't choose to harvest dead trees and restore ecosystems for future generations, we are going to be forced to cut live green trees, in many cases on foreign soils, to meet consumer demand." But many scientists say those dead trees, standing and falling to the ground over time, form the very foundation of a healthy and diverse forest that will seed itself with trees uniquely suited genetically to thrive on a specific site and support a rich diversity of fish and wildlife, even if a new forest is slow to regenerate....
Editorial: Agency should not give up renegade roads to OHV users We welcome a new Forest Service plan to keep off-road vehicles on designated trails. We are encouraged by the agency's statement that these vehicles pose one of the greatest threats to forest ecosystems and to the solitude that non-motorized recreationists prefer. But we are disappointed that the plan allows OHV riders to continue to use unauthorized trails that they created by plowing their way into formerly protected and often pristine public forests. Hundreds of miles of renegade roads and trails are gouged through forests each year, damaging meadows, streambeds and other sensitive areas. That is like reversing long-standing policy and allowing people to throw litter from their cars onto a highway, simply because they've been doing it for years....
Company hires extra firepower for mine proposal The Canadian company behind a project to create the nation's largest cobalt mine in the mountains of central Idaho has hired a mining lobbyist and a public relations firm to sway lawmakers, agencies and the public on its economic benefits. Vancouver, British Columbia-based Formation Capital Corp. has worked since 1993 on the project 21 miles east of Salmon. It hopes to mine cobalt worth $46 million annually, based on estimated production and today's prices. The metal is used in hybrid cars, fighter jets and gas turbines, among other things. The Gallatin Group, whose consultants include Cecil Andrus, a former Idaho governor and U.S. interior secretary, and Peter Skamser, a longtime Boise-based mining industry lobbyist, has been hired to help. Formation would extract 800 tons of rock daily from beneath public land, calling it an environmentally safe way to cut U.S. dependence on relatively unstable countries. America currently imports about 79 percent of its cobalt from restive regions, including Africa and Russia....
Editorial: Meandering roadless policy Operating under new federal guidelines, Colorado has crafted a productive way to help decide where or whether to allow roads in national forest roadless areas. We have high confidence in the state process, but it is layered by reviews in Washington that could end up overriding local recommendations. For 30 years, the U.S. Forest Service has struggled with the future of 58 million acres nationwide that haven't been officially designated as wilderness and yet haven't been carved up by roads. President Clinton tried to settle things by declaring that no more roads could be built in roadless areas, but a series of lawsuits left his rule in limbo. The Bush administration's response was to ask each state to make specific roadless recommendations - but even that drew fire....
Support Growing For Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act Says Oregon Congressman The Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and the Department of the Interior's Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget today testified in support of the bipartisan Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act's common sense approach to land management during a legislative hearing in the Resources Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health. Chief Dale Bosworth and Assistant Secretary Lynn Scarlett told Walden that their agencies support H.R. 4200, which would give federal land managers the ability to more quickly address recovery of national forestlands damaged by a catastrophic event - such as fire, ice storms, windstorms or hurricanes - if expedited action is necessary for the health and restoration of the forest. "We believe H.R. 4200 would provide some innovative authorities to improve the ability of the Secretary to promptly implement recovery treatments in response to catastrophic events affecting federal lands...The Department strongly supports the goals of the legislation and its intent to get recovery actions accomplished promptly while focusing on maintaining sound environmental decision-making and public involvement," Chief Bosworth told members of the Subcommittee....
Feds auction off parcels Roughly 72,000 acres of public land just leased for oil and gas development include thousands of acres that were once proposed as federal wilderness and home to rare plants. The Bureau of Land Management auction Thursday included 23,183 acres in the South Shale Ridge area near DeBeque, about 210 miles west of Denver and in one of the state's hot spots for natural gas drilling. In 1999, during the Clinton administration, the BLM said the area, with more than 40 miles of twisting arroyos and multicolored ridges, had wilderness characteristics, a step toward recommending that Congress declare it a federal wilderness area. BLM spokeswoman Theresa Sauer said Friday that a formal protest of leasing South Shale Ridge has been filed. The issue can ultimately be appealed to an Interior Department appeals board. No lease is issued until the matter is resolved....
Days after release, black-footed ferret dies José, a rare black-footed ferret bred at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and released into the wild in northwestern Colorado in late October, was killed by a coyote or badger three days after his release. He was 4 months old. José’s release was featured in a Gazette story about the species’ future on Oct. 30. Biologists tracked José and 10 other ferrets with radio collars the size of a wristwatch. For two days, signals showed the 2-pound endangered prairie hunter living in prairie dog dens in the Wolf Creek release area near Massadona. Then on the third day, radio signals led biologists to what was likely José’s last stand. “We found only his radio transmitter, and it was all chewed up,” said Brian Holmes, a Bureau of Land Management biologist who oversees the black-footed ferret reintroduction in Wolf Creek....
A Grizzly Mystery in Montana Who's killing the great bears of Montana? Twenty-one grizzlies have been illegally killed in northwestern Montana in the past two years. This is a record pace for poaching since the bears were listed 30 years ago as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, according to officials at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The rising death toll alarms federal law enforcement officials, as well as government biologists. The increase in grizzly killing is concentrated in a rapidly growing but culturally disjointed corner of the West. Affluent outsiders have overrun Flathead County in the past 15 years, fueling a population growth of 37 percent and creating a service-based economy that needs grizzlies as symbolic emblems of an ecologically friendly Western lifestyle. Some longtime residents, though, are seething over decades of decline in logging and mining. They see protection of the bears as part of a plan that is closing roads in federal forests and that is marginalizing their lives....
Florida home builders sue wildlife service Florida home builders sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service saying protections for some species listed as endangered by the federal government are adding to soaring home prices. Some species that no longer require protection linger on the endangered species list because the Fish and Wildlife Service fails to review their progress every five years, as mandated by the Endangered Species Act, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation. The California-based property rights group filed the lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Orlando on behalf of the Florida Home Builders Association. The lawsuit calls for federal reviews of 90 out of about 100 species listed in Florida as endangered or threatened, including the Eastern indigo snake, the Everglades snail kite and the wood stork....
Coalition files new petition for Mono Basin sage grouse A coalition of environmental groups has renewed efforts to impose federal protection for a small population of sage grouse found along the eastern Sierra in Nevada and California. The petition, prepared and submitted by the Stanford Law School Environmental Law Clinic for the groups, argues that Mono Basin sage grouse are "genetically distinct" from other sage grouse populations and in danger of extinction. Similar arguments were rejected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service two years ago when the federal agency said more study was needed to determine if the Mono Basin birds were unique and in peril. But the environmental groups involved in the latest petition say science has since proved otherwise....
Gas drillers use mats to protect plants A major Canadian energy company is taking extra steps to protect Wyoming's fragile landscape while drilling for the natural gas the lies beneath it. EnCana Corp. is about to start putting down wooden mats to keep its drilling operations from destroying vegetation. EnCana already uses wooden planks to keep its equipment from sinking into muskeg in its Canadian drilling operations. Now, for the first time in the arid West, the company will be using the wooden mats to try to save crucial wildlife habitat. A pilot project using the oak mats - which look like giant Lincoln Logs - is about to get underway in the Jonah gas field in western Wyoming. If successful, EnCana will consider using the mats in other oil and gas fields around the West. "What this is really about is reducing the size of our footprint on these fields," said Jeff Johnson, EnCana's team leader in the Jonah Field. "We're very hopeful that mat drilling is going to be one of the tools that will do that." The company plans to lay down about two to three acres of wooden mats for well pads and their connecting roadways in the 23,500-acre field sometime this month....
Conservationists petition for increased livestock grazing fee The federal government has been losing money for years on livestock grazing on public lands, and now six conservation groups, backed up by a new government study, say it's time to raise the fees. But raising monthly grazing fees to the $12.26 per animal unit mentioned in the Government Accountability Office report would end the cattle business in this area, said rancher Brent Money of Palmyra. "When all the costs are figured in, it costs us a lot more than the $1.79" charged for grazing federal lands, said Money, who is secretary for the 40-member Spanish Fork Grazing Co. LLC. The Center for Biological Diversity, representing five other environmental and conservation groups, has petitioned the secretaries of the interior and agriculture to change grazing fee regulations to reflect fair market value of government grass. The request comes after the release of a September report by the GAO that notes livestock grazing fees charged by federal agencies are woefully short of what it costs those agencies to manage their grazing programs. The federal government manages livestock grazing on 235 million acres of public lands, more than 98 percent of it managed by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. In 2004, federal agencies spent more than $144 million on grazing management, while they took in only about $21 million in grazing fees....
Westerners are changing the way they see animals, study shows More and more Westerners are seeing the fish, fowl and wild animals around them as something to cherish rather than something to eat. A Colorado State University study of values concerning wildlife in 19 western states indicates a major shift from traditional beliefs that "wildlife is mainly for human use" toward one in which animals should be protected as "part of our extended family." The 12,673 people who answered the poll shed light on why wildlife issues are so controversial and why wildlife agencies are struggling to accommodate so many different views....
Bush signs horse slaughter ban into law President Bush signed into law Thursday an agriculture spending bill that includes an eight-month ban on federal funding for U.S. meat inspectors to monitor horse slaughter. The measure essentially prohibits the killing of horses at the nation's three slaughterhouses, which export the meat to Europe and Asia. The issue has pitted animal protection advocates who are outraged over the fact that horses are slaughtered for food against cattle ranchers and other horse owners who wonder what to do with old and injured workhorses. The eight-month moratorium set to start in March was a compromise measure between friends and foes of horse slaughter. Possible loophole? But advocates on both sides of the issue are looking at a possible loophole in the law that could allow horse slaughterhouses to pay for their own meat inspection, enabling them to continue their operations....
Cowboy Church shucks pomp for boots, bales, guts of the gospel Taylor Diehl set her cowboy hat carefully aside and stepped, fully dressed, into the shining metal horse trough. The 8-year-old sat back, plugged her nose and took the plunge, staying under just long enough for the warm water to still - long enough to be reborn. In most other churches, the congregation would sit quietly, reverently, showing respect and reserved dignity as the rite of baptism was sanctified. But not here. Not in the house of the trough. Here the crowd hoots, hollers, stomps hard-heeled boots against a well-worn floor, whistles, claps and cuts loose with a roof-raising "yeeeehaaw" or two. "This is Cowboy Church," said Robyn Redpath. "It's what you might call a user-friendly church, for people who absolutely would not set foot in a traditional church building. It's church for the rest of us." Tonight, "the rest of us" consists mostly of ranchers and farmers, saddle makers and horse trainers. They've come straight in from deer hunting, still sporting bright orange. They wear Wranglers and flannel, NASCAR T-shirts, stiff-brimmed cowboy hats, grimy ball caps with bent bills....
Column: The last ranch There's really not much to say about the last cattle drive, except that it's over and it happened on what was one of Pitkin County's few remaining cattle outfits, just recently sold. Someone should have taken pictures to memorialize the final chapter, but such documentation would have kept us from spending the next 20 years wondering if maybe there'll be one more long drive on the ghost of the old Fender spread. No one buys property around here to ranch seriously, no matter what they may say. Like dead American Indians of old, swaying in trees, sold ranches lie quietly by while their spirits drift away, never to reappear. New owners become not ranchers, but instead large landowners, unspecified quantities, people to look out for because you can pretty well bet they'll screw up the view plane in one direction or another. Conservation easements are tools of and by landowners, so it's never clear if there is any real benefit to the public. If a conservation group gets involved, you can bet there's going to be some subdivision of land to try to foot the bill. And let's not forget, conservation easement is more correctly spelled "open space" rather than "ranch," a huge difference. Pitkin County officials say they want to preserve agriculture in the county, but they never seem to back up their tired rhetoric....
This cowboy's story deserves a place in history News flash for everyone now fascinated with the history of White Settlement: You overlooked one early settler. He saw the Alamo after the fall and Virginia after the Confederate surrender. Until his death at 111, he carried a dime given to him by Sam Houston. One more thing. He was a black American freed from slavery. Of all the stories that have turned up while White Settlement voters were reaffirming their city's name, the most interesting must be the tale of John Hickman, who loyally served a Confederate officer during the Civil War and came back to Texas to ride as a cowboy on the great cattle drives. Hickman retold his stories in 1930 as a special guest at the State Fair of Texas. He had lived in the then-rural White Settlement community since 1895....
For Jim Brooks, it's more than riding and roping Jim Brooks got introduced to the cowboy life with a face full of dirt. It was 1961 and Brooks had just arrived in South Dakota from his Pennsylvania home. His cousin, who was working on the Circle M Ranch, said he might be able to get Brooks a job. But it was a rodeo weekend when Brooks got there and before he knew it, he'd been talked into riding a bronco. "I'll never forget his name," says Brooks. "It was Scrap Iron." Brooks, 59, who now lives in Perris, had ridden plenty of horses. He even knew how to drive a team. But he'd never been on a bucking horse before. And it showed. "He just snapped me down on the ground," he says. "People laughed, of course, because they announced that I was from Pennsylvania. The announcer said, 'Welcome, Jimmy Brooks. Welcome to the West.' " The rude initiation failed to deter Brooks. He had decided at an early age that he was going to be a cowboy, and one hard, humbling ride wasn't going to shake his resolve....