NEWS ROUNDUP

Copter that crashed was shooting cows A helicopter that crashed on Wednesday in eastern Kane County, injuring the six people on board, was on a mission to exterminate feral cows on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Larry Crutchfield, a spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management, which administers the 1.9 million-acre monument, said Thursday that the French-built helicopter apparently crashed while trying to land on 50 Mile Mountain in a rugged and remote region of the park. Crutchfield said the BLM employees were shooting cattle in a herd of about 60 animals on a grazing allotment in the area. The feral cows were damaging rangeland, he said. The cows were deeded to the agency when their owner was unable to remove them from the land during a drought several years ago. The herd soon became feral. Crutchfield said it is damaging the range by grazing year-round. He said normally cattle are rotated on the allotments to avoid the stress to the landscape. Crutchfield said several attempts were made to remove the cows without shooting them. Those attempts included netting them from the air, tranquilizing them with darts and rounding them up. None of those measures worked because the animals - a hybrid between Brahma and longhorns - are too wild and aggressive....
Livestock deaths have experts at odds A two-year-old Black Angus bull. A full-grown cow. Ahtanum rancher Mark Herke could think of any number of predators that might have killed the 275-pound calf he'd found a couple of days earlier. But what, he wondered, could have killed animals as big as that bull? His only previous experience with cougars prior to these July 2005 incidents had been seeing one running through the field on the family's property, where generations of Herkes have lived since 1871. Herke was 8 years old at the time. So Herke had the animals X-rayed and autopsied and began researching cougar predatory behavior. And because of the wounds he found — the stripped muscles from the windpipe area, the deep fang puncture mark along the side of the neck, behind the jaw, the meat gone on one side of the face — he's adamant that the culprit was a cougar. Skip Caton, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife enforcement officer who responded to Herke's call, is just as convinced it wasn't....
Legal Wyo. wolf kills reach 37 Thirty-seven wolves were legally killed in Wyoming over the year that ended Sept. 30, nearly twice as many as the previous year. Thirteen wolves were killed in Park County. Most wolves killed in Park County were in the Meeteetse area, Craig Acres, district supervisor for the federal government’s Wildlife Services agency, told the Park County Predatory Animal Control Board on Monday. Meeteetse-area ranchers have a “chronic” problem with wolves, he said. “In the past two years, Park County went from one of the easiest counties to work to one of the most challenging, just because of wolves,” he said. Seven packs roam western Park County. Complaints about wolf depredation are also up, from seven in 1998 to 220 in the year that ended Sept. 30. Nearly 80 were verified cases of wolves killing livestock, according to Rod Krischke, state director of Wildlife Services....
Bison herd in the cross hairs at Yellowstone Today, bison are making a comeback. And in Yellowstone National Park, which boasts the largest free-roaming herd in North America, the population swelled this year to the park's biggest on record. Park officials estimate that more than 4,900 bison lived within park boundaries this year, an increase of more than 700 from 2004. But the bison may become the first casualty of their own success. In addition to other natural and human hazards, this year there is a hunt. The herd size is almost 2,000 more than a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report recommended that the park rangeland could support, and as winter sets in, many bison will stray outside the park's boundaries to escape deep snow to forage on public and private lands in Montana. That worries ranchers and livestock officials who are concerned that large numbers of bison will compete with domestic cattle for food....
Column: Wilderness Act Does Not Ban Mountain Biking More than a year ago an extensive analysis of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and subsequent Forest Service regulations concluded that Congress did not intend to ban mountain biking in designated Wilderness, but the report’s conclusion has apparently been lost in the wind. It has done nothing to change the current policy banning fat-tired bicycles; nor has it done anything to cool off the debate between hikers and mountain bikers. The treatise authored by Theodore J Stroll, a staff attorney at the Supreme Court of California, examines in the greatest detail every word in the Wilderness Act, congressional testimony on the Act, and a series of regulations written by the Forest Service, the federal agency charged with management and enforcement of the Act. At the end of the report, Stoll concludes: “The regulations appear to run counter to congressional intent.” In other words, Congress did not intend to ban mountain bikes from Wilderness trails. This report is not the ramblings of a hammerhead mountain biker feeling over-regulated. Instead, it’s professional, top-of-the-line legal research, which makes it sort of amazing it hasn’t gotten more traction in the debate between hikers and mountain bikers over Wilderness proposals....
The Grizzly Detective As nimbly as we can under 50-pound packs, we ease down a narrow trail toward a small creek, brushing away blueberry and mountain ash branches. I walk ahead of my two companions, listening, scenting the breeze, and studying the ground. And then, something in front of me stops me dead. I signal my friends Chuck Irestone and Larry Campbell to join me and point to a faint pattern of smooth imprints leading down the trail. My heart racing, I scan the woods and then cautiously follow the marks, stooping to examine a more distinct track. A tiny ridge separates the pad from four toe prints. The toe line is curved: the unmistakable track of a black bear. We breathe deeply, at once relieved and disappointed. We're looking for a grizzly bear. I've seen many hundreds of the humpbacked, silver-tipped animals in 35 years of studying them, and I never tire of the electric experience. But seeing one here in the Bitterroot, ground zero in the great modern-day grizzly debate, would be truly special. Finding a grizzly here would change everything about this landscape for years to come. Are they here or aren't they? That question has plagued people on both sides of the grizzly conservation wars for more than a decade. We know this much as we head into the mountains: Grizzlies were here, for thousands of years, in huge numbers....
BLM to speed wind-farm permit process The U.S. Bureau of Land Management will amend 52 land-use plans in nine western states, including eight in Utah, to streamline permits for developing wind energy, Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced Thursday. The agency has finished an overarching environmental study begun two years ago that shows wind farms on public lands could generate more than 3,200 megawatts of electricity, enough for nearly 1 million homes. The so-called Programmatic Environmental Impact Study of wind power on public lands will allow the BLM to issue wind energy permits in less than a year, instead of the two years the process has been taking. Specific sites will be evaluated further, but applicants won't have to replicate work already done for the environmental study....
Senate bill would create landowner incentives to preserve species Its introduction was a sign of growing interest in the Senate in tackling large-scale changes to the landmark 1973 law. While environmentalists credit the Endangered Species Act with saving species like the bald eagle, many farm and property rights groups contend its provisions get in the way of legitimate land uses and provoke lawsuits instead of helping plants and animals. The bill by Crapo and Lincoln includes a number of provisions designed to draw support from landowners, including the creation of committees they could sit on to help guide plans to help species. The bill also would set up "conservation banks" property owners could use to accumulate and trade credits for taking actions to help species, and would give property owners tax credits for actions to conserve or recover species....
Column: Bet on Las Vegas for Western solutions Solutions come slowly. One good one is the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998, the best arrangement any American community has ever secured to mitigate the impact of federal action. It auctioned Bureau of Management land rather than allowing its piecemeal disposal, and targeted the proceeds for regional projects. Now, there's money for capital improvements, conservation initiatives, development of parks, trails and natural areas in the county, and acquiring environmentally sensitive lands. Another is a 79-species habitat conservation plan for Clark County that compels developers to pay a $550 per-acre development fee to maintain habitat for endangered species such as the desert tortoise. This creative usage of the Endangered Species Act was born of necessity, but it has become a linchpin in the development of wilderness and recreational space in southern Nevada. It also creates a convergence between the environmental community and developers, and nowhere else in the country has such a consensus been forged. The world of water has changed and the Southern Nevada Water Authority should get much of the credit....
Park Service head won't drop mission Grappling with how much access Americans should get to 84 million acres of the nation's best scenery, National Park Service Director Fran Mainella draws flak from both sides in Congress as she finds herself in a fight to maintain her agency's main mission. "Success should not be determined exclusively by whether our resources look the way they did when the Pilgrims landed," said Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., who heads a House Resources parks subcommittee. "To allow public use and recreation means literally that parks cannot be preserved in a snapshot. ... For 40 years, the preservationists have really infiltrated the national park system." Mainella's bigger concern, though, is critics like Pearce, who questioned the purpose of the "nonimpairment standard" for managing parks. Mainella's deputy, Steve Martin, tried to assure him that the law works fine the way it is. But Mainella also sent Pearce a letter, telling him the law has "stood the test of time," protecting parks for generations....
Drafting the future of parks In 1916, Congress—recognizing the importance of preserving the country’s most unique and treasured natural lands—passed the National Park Service Organic Act. The act created the National Park Service and directed that the national parks be preserved “by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” For the better part of the past century, the National Park Service (NPS) has managed the parks and historic sites under its care with preservation of park resources as its primary guiding principal. Under current NPS management policy—adopted in 2001—conservation of park resources trumps recreational uses of the parks. But a new draft of NPS management policies crafted by officials within the U.S. Depart-ment of the Interior would, if adopted, diminish park protections and encourage commercial priorities in the nation’s parks....
New Human Footprint Map We humans use more than a third of Earth's land surface for agriculture. And as our population increases, that portion is growing. That's according to scientists from the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) in Madison, Wisconsin. They presented their findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Watch a video showing how crop lands have expanded from the year 1700 to 2000. The scale of agricultural activity makes it one of the central forces of global environmental change. Navin Ramankutty, a member of the SAGE team, says, "the real question is: how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?"....
Feds End Protection of Sonoma's Tiger Salamader The economic impact of protecting habitat for the endangered California tiger salamader in Sonoma County cannot be justified, federal wildlife managers said Wednesday. The decision is a reversal just since August, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed 74,223 acres as critical habitat for the yellow-and-black amphibian. Last month the service cut the proposed protected area to 21,298 acres. Now, the service says it will rely instead on a locally managed approach to protecting the Santa Rosa Plain population of the salamander. The service said it ultimately decided that 17,418 acres of the plain meet the criteria for critical habitat for the salamander, but that the most crucial area already is included in the Santa Rosa Plain Conservation Strategy completed last week by local agencies....
Scientists Sound Warning on Global Warming NASA has just announced that for the fourth year in a row, it has recorded the hottest annual global temperatures since reliable records started in the late 1800s. This year, 2005, tied for the hottest year ever with 1998 -- and 1998 was "an El Niño of the Century year -- and El Niños always make it hotter. If this had been an El Niño year, it would surely have been the hottest year of all," Dr. James Hansen, NASA earth sciences director, told ABC News. As is well-known by now, NASA reported at summer's end that, over the last 30 years, the Arctic's summer sea ice cover had melted back 30 percent. As a number of scientists have calculated, it could be completely gone long before the end of the century....
First shipment of U.S. beef reaches Japan The first shipment of U.S. beef in nearly two years arrived in Japan Friday after the easing of an import ban put in place amid concerns about mad cow disease, Japan's Health Ministry said. An agricultural organization said, meanwhile, that Japanese beef exports to the United States would also resume shortly. Japanese beef was banned four years ago over similar mad cow concerns. Japanese inspectors planned to check the shipment of about 4.6 tons of meat to see that it met government safety guidelines, quarantine official Yuji Kitayama said. They planned to confirm the age of the cows and ensure that the meat doesn't contain material from brains, spinal cords or other suspect parts. Friday's shipment to Japan was processed at Selma, Calif.-based Harris Ranch Beef Co. and imported by Marudai Food Co., which said it will not sell the meat to consumers but use it for internal testing. "We have not dealt with American beef in two years," company spokesman Tatsuo Sawai said. "We want to see what its taste is like, how tough it is, how tender. Our salesmen need to know this before they can start selling." Before the ban, Japan purchased more American beef than any other country in the world, buying $1.4 billion worth in 2003. Since then, Australia has surpassed the United States as the biggest beef exporter to Japan....