NEWS ROUNDUP

Wildlife officials kill 9 wolves in southwest Montana Federal wildlife managers killed nine wolves in just over a month for attacking or killing livestock in southwest Montana, including one that a state wolf official says was shot by mistake. A wolf advocate says she's concerned about the recent kills and believes the state should focus more efforts on trying to control wolves without killing them. But a cattle industry official said the effectiveness of nonlethal measures is debatable and notes the cost to ranchers. "How would you feel if every week I went up and took $500 to $600 from your billfold?" asked Steve Pilcher, executive vice president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association. The wolves were killed between Labor Day and the middle of October on the orders of state wildlife officials, who this year assumed primary control of wolf management in Montana from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Wolves were blamed for seriously injuring two dogs that were guarding sheep in the Gravelly Mountains and for killing several cattle in southwestern Montana. The wolves killed were members of the Freezeout pack and an apparently new group, west of Jackson, said Carolyn Sime, the state's wolf program coordinator. Sime said the response was aggressive but warranted....
Ranchers unite to save the land for cattle, wildlife, way of life he image of the lone rancher punching cows and cursing environmentalists has gone by the wayside — at least for the Malpai Borderlands Group. With Malpai, ranchers run a nonprofit cooperative dedicated to conserving rangeland and preserving a ranching way of life. They work with scientists, an assortment of government agencies and even environmental groups. They don’t see cattle in competition with wildlife. For Malpai members, improving the range for one works to the benefit of the other. The Malpai group could be just the tip of an expanding iceberg. Cooperative conservation has become something of a buzzword in recent years. The White House hosted a cooperative conservation conference in St. Louis in August 2004. More than 1,000 people attended. In a group like that, a lone rancher would be hard to find. Malpai area ranches cover 800,000 acres of rangeland stretching from the San Bernardino Valley in southeastern Arizona across the state line into New Mexico’s Peloncillo Mountains. To date, 13 ranchers have signed on with the group. Its formation dates back to the early 1990s. At the time, neighboring ranchers would gather at Warner and Wendy Glenn’s Malpai Ranch....
Buyers back out of deals to buy BLM horses The federal government is looking for homes for 427 wild horses after buyers pulled out of revised contracts imposing criminal penalties for selling animals to slaughter. Twenty individuals and two tribes canceled contracts after the Bureau of Land Management in April suspended its sale program amid reports of horse slaughter, according to interviews with BLM officials and records obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal through a Freedom of Information Act request. Some people completed paperwork, and some sent checks paying for their animals, but backed out before completing the purchases, BLM spokesman Tom Gorey said. The BLM declined to identify individuals who canceled contracts and those who bought about 1,500 wild horses as of Sept. 30, citing privacy rights afforded people who do business with the government. At least one Indian tribe, the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota, pulled out after receiving 277 of the 400 horses it requested, according to BLM records....
Report: Public lands grazing costs $123 million a year Federal agencies lose at least $123 million a year keeping public lands open to livestock grazing, according to a government report that environmentalists say bolsters their argument that grazing should be limited. "If we are going to allow grazing on our public lands, the very least we should be doing is we should be recovering the costs," said Greta Anderson, a Tucson, Ariz.-based botanist and range restoration campaign coordinator for the Center for Biological Diversity. But Jim Hughes, deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management -- which, with the Forest Service, manages 98 percent of grazing permits -- said the agency charges a fee set by law and is not advocating a change or an increase. Ranching on the millions of acres of public lands has been a mainstay of Western life for more than a century. Ranchers pay a fee to the government often based on the amount of grass and other vegetation their cattle will eat. The agencies spend the money managing permits and leases, building fences and developing water projects, among other activities. But the arrangement increasingly has caused friction as more demands are put on Western lands. Most livestock is raised on private land. Environmentalists and others question whether taxpayers should subsidize grazing on public lands. Ranchers who hold public lands grazing permits pay as little as $1.43 per animal unit month -- the amount of forage a cow and her calf can eat in a month. But the BLM and Forest Service would have had to charge $7.64 and $12.26 per unit respectively to cover their expenses, according to the GAO....That's right folks, let's raise the grazing fees and never even consider lowering the managemnt costs. Having been there, I can tell you the grazing program subsidizes other BLM programs, especially wildlife and archaeology....
Age-old land fight Two of the most lucrative and fastest-growing industries in northern Colorado — land development and oil and gas extraction — are butting heads as they fight for access to the same pieces of land. The three largest oil and gas extraction companies in Colorado are proposing a state rule change in oil production in Northern Colorado to accommodate more wells on existing sites, which would give them more access to untapped reserves. Lawyers representing major developers, however, are countering the proposal, calling for more limited access and less land displacement, and less cost to surface land owners....
FOB sues over exclusion from press conference Friends of the Bitterroot and three of it's members filed a lawsuit Monday against the Bitterroot National Forest and Supervisor Dave Bull, claiming the agency recently violated their civil rights. The suit is based on events surrounding a Forest Service press conference Sept. 22 to announce the final environmental impact statement for the Middle East Fork Fuels Reduction Project. Jim Miller, Larry Campbell and Stewart Brandborg, all members of the Friends of the Bitterroot, were kept from attending the press conference. The complaint outlines the circumstances before the conference, which was held at the Bitterroot National Forest supervisor's office in Hamilton. Campbell arrived first and told the receptionist at the front desk that he was there for the press conference. She waived him to the back room, but Forest Service public affairs officer Dixie Dies stopped him and told him that he wasn't invited and would not be able to attend. Brandborg and Miller were also prohibited from attending the press conference in similar fashion, according to the complaint....
White House proposes cutting $500 M firefighting fund Trying to make up for Katrina costs, the White House has proposed eliminating a $500 million reserve fund to fight fires in heavy wildfire years. Western-state Democrats criticized the plan Monday as shortsighted and risky. "This fund - developed on a bipartisan basis - ensured that fire fighting costs could be met," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., adding that the loss of funds might force officials to scale back fire prevention efforts as well. "If this fire season is worse than normal, the Forest Service will have to cancel other projects like the removal of dead and dying trees infested by bark beetles in order to pay for firefighting costs," she said. The proposal is part of a $2.3 billion package of cuts the administration proposed Friday that includes reductions to other programs championed by Democrats and environmentalists, among them a fund for water projects. The administration also would shift $17.1 billion from Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief accounts into such hurricane needs as rebuilding damaged highways, repairing levees and fixing government buildings....
Two lynx killed in one week Last Wednesday, a postal worker was collecting the usual batch of mail from a drop slot at the Silverton post office when he came across something unusual. There among the letters was a radio-telemetry collar - the same fitted on lynx recently reintroduced in Colorado. All released lynx wear these collars that transmit information about the cat's physical condition and whereabouts via satellite, and finding a collar without its cat wasn't a good sign. It belonged to a male lynx that had been released in southwest Colorado in 2004. Now, with clipped collar in hand, Colorado Division of Wildlife officials can only assume the lynx was killed illegally....
State presents rights-of-way maps to BLM The Utah Attorney General's Office has provided the Bureau of Land Management documentation it says proves that six roads the state has claimed under an agreement with the BLM are valid county rights of way. The state last week provided the agency copies of six general highway maps dating back to 1950, plus additional information about the roads in Beaver, Daggett, Millard and Iron counties in response to environmental critics who had challenged the claims because of what they said was skimpy documentation. "These maps, along with the strong evidence already provided, demonstrate that the state of Utah and the counties owned and controlled these rights of way for decades prior to 1976," Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said in a statement. Congress in 1976 repealed an old mining law that guaranteed rights of way across public lands, but grandfathered in roads that existed prior to that....
Coeur plans to buy BLM land, turn it into a landfill and rock quarry A vote in a U.S. congressional committee has brought an Idaho-based mining company closer to buying federal land in northern Nevada's Pershing County, where the company wants to turn one of its dwindling silver mines into a supplier of rock for roadbuilding - and a landfill. Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp. would pay about $3.5 million, or $500 an acre, for some 7,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management public land that's the site of Coeur's Rochester mine, according to legislation approved by the House Resources Committee. The legislation is part of a broader budget appropriations bill still pending in Congress. Nevada and Pershing County would get $600,000 from the sale, with the rest going to the U.S. Treasury. After yielding more than 100 million ounces of silver and one million ounces of gold over the last two decades, the Rochester operation is about played out, Coeur mining engineers said....
Park Service plans meet opposition U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas leads a hearing this morning in Washington, D.C., largely focused on controversial language and ideas from another Wyoming figure -- Paul Hoffman, an assistant Interior Department secretary and former director of the Cody Chamber of Commerce. Park Service draft 2006 management policies released last month have been roundly criticized by conservation groups. They say key language appears to be written by Hoffman to diminish park protection while boosting commercial interests in and around the parks. Thomas, R-Wyo., is chairman of the parks subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Our purpose for this hearing is to review the National Park Service’s proposed management policies including potential impact of the policies on park operations, park resources, interaction with gateway communities, solicitation and collection of donations, and revised manager hiring practices,” Thomas said in an opening statement released Monday by his office....
Wyoming Sheep Ranchers Try to Keep Sheepherders in Grass, Not Oil Fields The sheep industry has been a longstanding yarn in Wyoming’s economic fabric. In the late 1800s, the sheepwagon was invented in Rawlins as shelter for sheepherders tending immense flocks on Wyoming’s plains. (In Wyoming, they’re called sheepherders not shepherds.) Today, Wyoming is ranked second in the United States in wool production and is exceeded only by California and Texas in the country in sheep numbers — making sheepherders a valuable, but woefully undervalued, labor pool. But according to sad tales from sheep ranchers, it has become difficult to find and keep sheepherders. They are tempted to leave their posts in the grass fields for better paying jobs in the oil and gas fields. So the Wyoming Wool Growers Association has decided to create a baaa-tle (sorry) over sheepherders who abandon ship (or sheepwagons, as the case may be). If a proposal backed by the Wyoming Joint Agriculture, Public Lands and Water Resources Interim Committee passes next year’s legislative session, anyone who entices a sheepherder off the range with a better paying job will be committing a crime punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $20,000. If the Wyoming legislature approves the bill, fines will be imposed for knowingly and willfully aiding or abetting such hiring. The bill also boosts the penalty for sheepherders who abandon their flocks....
Hispanic farmers represent a growing sector of U.S. agriculture Hispanic-operated farms comprised more than 20.8 million acres of farmland throughout the United States in 2002, up 23.8 percent from 16.8 million acres five years earlier. Farmers of Hispanic origin are a significant and growing part of U.S. agriculture, according to data from the 2002 Census of Agriculture. The 2002 census revealed major increases not only in the number of U.S. farms operated by Hispanics, but in the value of the products produced on those farms, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). The number of farms with Hispanic principal operators grew 51.2 percent between 1997 and 2002, from 33,450 to 50,592. Of those farms, Hispanic women, the largest group of minority women principal operators, operated 10 percent....
Wis. to Require Livestock Registration Wisconsin becomes the first state in the nation Tuesday to require registration of all places where livestock are kept. Federal and state agriculture officials said the registration will help them respond more quickly to animal disease outbreaks. In fact, the livestock location system is the first of three steps planned in many states and nationwide, said Dore Mobley, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Inspection Service. The next will be to register all animals and the third is to track animals throughout their lives, she said. The Wisconsin Premises Registration Act requires all who board livestock to register their premises, regardless of the kind and size of the operation. Numerous animals are covered under the law including cattle, llamas, deer, horses, goats, pheasants, exotic birds, chickens, turkeys, geese, ostriches, sheep and swine. Wisconsin received a $2.75 million, three-year grant from the USDA to develop the system, which 35 other states are also moving toward adopting, said Leanne Ketterhagen, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Livestock Identification Consortium....
Snow polo rides to Rio Grande This year's World Snow Polo Championships will have to settle for Rio Grande Park after three years of competition at the higher-profile Wagner Park in downtown Aspen. Frustrated organizers of the event have been told polo is a no-go at Wagner - a decision of the Aspen Parks Department. Barry Stout, a New Castle rancher and the event's director, pleaded again during Wednesday's meeting of the city's Special Events Committee for permission to use Wagner for the December tournament. "Rio is what you're being offered," said Steve Slack, parks supervisor. For the past three years, players from around the country and abroad have played a round-robin tournament at Wagner Park. Spectators line the park to watch the unusual action for free. The polo tournament will be sanctioned this year for the first time by the U.S. Polo Association. It's the first snow polo event the organization has ever sanctioned, Stout said....
It's All Trew: Incubator a valuable antique in today's world An elderly reader recalls that as a little girl her job was to feed the poultry, then hide in the barn loft and peep through cracks to watch setting hens and turkey hens go to their hidden nests. The reason for this chore was outlying nests of eggs were subject to bad weather, predators and calamity, reducing the live hatch. If the nest could be found, mother and eggs could be placed under housing, hopefully increasing the live hatch and providing more prosperity for the farm. Artificially hatching eggs began in 1847 with the invention of a crude but practical incubator. In 1887, a much improved incubator became available with warnings the user must fully understand the essential conditions needed to successfully hatch eggs. Some early models often caught fire, but new safety features soon prevented that disaster. In 1896, W.P. Hall of New York invented and placed on the market a mammoth commercial incubator capable of hatching 5,700 eggs at one setting. This device gave birth to the huge commercial hatcheries of today. Millions of baby chicks from about 26 breeds plus other poultry and wild game bird chicks were as close as the nearest post office....

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