NEWS ROUNDUP

Mystery beast ravages flocks of Mont. sheep Ranchers in eastern Montana have a wildlife whodunit on their hands. Livestock growers in Garfield, McCone and Dawson counties have lost about 100 sheep this year to a ravenous creature that dispatches their 170-pound animals with ease and ferocity. And that creature is? "A wolf," says rancher Mike McKeever, who found one of his pregnant ewes disemboweled last month. "A wolf or wolf hybrid," says Carolyn Sime, statewide wolf coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "A dog or a hybrid," says Suzanne Asha Stone, the Boise-based Northern Rockies representative for Defenders of Wildlife. A hybrid is a mixture of wolf and dog. The disagreement encompasses a century of passionate feelings about wolves in the West. The distinction is important: Defenders of Wildlife reimburses ranchers for proven kills of livestock by wolves. McKeever says he believes the Montana marauder is a wolf because it preys on adult sheep. Coyotes usually kill lambs, and only one or two at a time, he says....
Oh, Give Me a Home Where Prairie Dogs Roam -- in Boulder Many people in the West view prairie dogs as disease-carrying, pasture-damaging pests that they would be happy to see go the way of the bison. Yet Boulder County just built a half-mile barrier to keep the burrowing varmints from leaving. The chicken-wire fence blocks black-tailed prairie dogs from venturing into neighboring Broomfield County, where the 15-inch-long rodents face extermination as a health concern if they wander close to homes. Boulder County has bent over backward to make itself a prairie-dog haven. The animals have dug up everything from prime development parcels to Little League fields here, yet local politics and city ordinances make exterminating them next to impossible. Animal activists have picketed extermination sites, and Boulder herbal tea-maker Celestial Seasonings several years ago endured public scorn after it poisoned prairie dogs that dug up the grounds of its headquarters. The question of how to manage prairie dogs is a divisive one in the West and Great Plains. In the past decade, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has denied petitions by wildlife groups to put three species, including the black-tailed prairie dogs common in Boulder, on the threatened list. A fourth species, the Utah prairie dog, is currently listed as threatened, but it has so stymied development in fast-growing areas of Utah that state and federal regulators are considering allowing more construction on the critter's habitat as long as it is offset with preservation elsewhere. In South Dakota's 2004 Senate race between former Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Republican John Thune, who won the election, the candidates attempted to one-up each other in their disdain for prairie dogs, the bane of the state's ranchers....
CONTROLLING PRAIRIE DOGS Mary Kanode has spent almost all her 66 years on the family ranch northeast of here, a ranch that's been in the family since 1917. Prairie dogs were never a major problem -- until a couple of years ago. Kanode said she has been told repeatedly that the forest service wants to be a good neighbor, but she's having a difficult time buying into that -- for good reason. The forest service, in its proposal to manage prairie dogs on the grasslands, estimated that the population of the rodents is expanding in acreage by about 12 percent per year. Yet on Kanode's ranch, she has from zero population in 2004 to about 60 acres presently. Less than two years ago, she had 250 holes in the pasture across from the grasslands and presently she estimates she has more than 750 holes that are expanding almost daily. That's despite the fact that she's spent at least $2,000 and countless hours on her own to control the infestation, the forest service built three-quarters of a mile of fence intended to keep the animals on forest service land and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has helped with poisoning efforts. "I asked them (the forest service) to put the fence down in the ground at least 2 feet so the prairie dogs couldn't burrow under it, but Steve (Currey, grasslands district ranger) said they would need an archeological dig before they could do that. It's not stopping them from coming across onto my pasture," Kanode said....
Environmental activist challenges BLM's power Longtime environmental activist Andy Kerr says it's time to transfer U.S. Bureau of Land Management forestlands in Western Oregon over to the U.S. Forest Service. "I hope 10 years from now you'll find the BLM only in the history books," said Kerr, one of a dozen presenters at Saturday's "Beyond Big Timber" conference in Medford. "Our national forests are better managed than the BLM lands," he said. "Not as well as we would like but better than the BLM's. "The dark days we're in now have never been darker," he said later. "I miss James Watt." The session drew some 75 environmental activists from throughout the region to discuss the BLM's ongoing Western Oregon Plan Revisions. The agency manages about 2.6 million acres west of the Cascade Range....
Report: USFS at fault in burn A report blames the U.S. Forest Service for a prescribed burn that got out of control and destroyed four cabins and a camper last month near Lander. "The principal causal factors of the escape stemmed from an underestimation of the complexity of burning so close to private property and structures, and from a mistaken determination by the assigned fire personnel that, upon completion of firing operations, the burned area posed little or no remaining risk to adjacent private land and structures," said the report, released Friday. In addition, the report noted that the Forest Service failed to follow burn plans that required fire engines to be positioned near buildings while the burn was conducted and that required firefighters to closely monitor the outer edges of the fire to make sure it didn't go beyond its intended area....
The Checkerspot Mystery: An Ecological Whodunit For one week a year the vibrantly colored bay checkerspot butterfly is in its element on Coyote Ridge, flitting from one wildflower to the next in search of sustenance. The hillside used to be covered with these creatures -- which warm themselves in the sun, mate and deposit hundreds of eggs to launch the next generation before dying off. But on Coyote Ridge's northern edge, their numbers crashed in the early 1990s as Silicon Valley's high-tech boom spurred a wave of development. The species, with its brilliant orange-and-red-flecked wings, first crashed between Palo Alto and San Francisco in the 1980s, prompting federal officials to list it as threatened with extinction. Then in the early '90s its numbers dropped on the southern edge of San Jose, around the suburban subdivisions that abut Coyote Ridge. The cause was a mystery until conservation biologist Stuart Weiss figured out that the butterfly's woes stemmed from a combination of pollution from the freeway below and, surprisingly, a cutback in local cattle grazing. Over years of research, Weiss -- who has worked for utility and waste management companies as well as conservation groups and government agencies -- documented how the nitrogen oxide emissions from cars commuting to Silicon Valley enriched the nutrient-poor serpentine-rock soil that sustains the native grasslands on Coyote Ridge. This soil enrichment allowed invasive grasses -- which flourish in more nitrogen-rich soil -- to out-compete the native plants on which the checkerspot depends. When local ranchers stopped grazing their cows on one side of the ridge, it made things worse, because grazing helped keep invasive grasses in check. "The grazed side is great butterfly habitat, the ungrazed side is lousy," Weiss said. "You end grazing in the areas and it's bye-bye butterflies."...
HOUSE PASSES DOI, EPA BUDGETS The full House approved FY 2007 budgets for the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency last week. The budgets differ little from what the House appropriations committee passed earlier this month. Both budgets are larger than what President George W. Bush recommended in February, but are smaller than those approved for FY 2006. The House approved $9.65 billion for DOI, a $211 million decrease from last year, but a $40 million increase from the President’s request. The EPA is funded at $7.56 billion, a $55 million drop from last year. The funding level, however, is $254 million more than Bush requested. Both agencies’ budgets have declined over the past four years. In FY 2003, DOI was funded at $10.5 billion and the EPA was funded at $8.1 billion. Under the current bill, five programs would be cut: Stateside Land and Water Grants, the Forest Service economic action program, the Bureau of Land Management’s rural fire program and the Asia Pacific Partnership program....
Editorial: Saving Western Culture ALTHOUGH IT receives far less attention than the National Park Service or the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management -- the Interior Department's forgotten stepchild -- controls a huge chunk of the American West: 261 million acres of federal land in 11 states, or about as much land as the holdings of the other more famous agencies put together. Unlike the national parks or the national forests, the BLM's land is specifically designated as "multiple use." That means that it can be leased for grazing or mineral extraction, can be freely used for recreation, and is not fenced off from the locals, many of whom depend on it for their livelihoods. But this vast chunk of real estate is not only oil wells and pasture. It contains landscapes of intense beauty and cultural treasures as well: Native American archeological sites, cave and rock paintings, and historic trails. Although they have been there for centuries, the National Trust for Historic Preservation recently published a report pointing out that they are suddenly threatened. An exponential increase in the popularity of off-road vehicles, the recent expansion of exurbs and the administration's policy of rapid distribution of drilling licenses have led to an increase in destruction and vandalism. Among other things, the trust points out that only 6 percent of the BLM's land has even been surveyed for cultural and archeological resources. Obviously, it isn't possible to protect things that nobody knows exists....
Ex-Lobbyist Helps Companies Green Up David Ford was on his way to becoming a top timber industry lobbyist when he decided he'd had enough of the fighting that erupted in the 1990s over forests and the northern spotted owl. He now heads a nonprofit called metaFore, which evolved from promoting sales of wood products from forests certified as environmentally sustainable to helping Fortune 500 companies green up their paper supplies. "Some of my colleagues in the forest products associations said, `You've gone to the dark side, David,'" Ford said. "I learned that the conflict wasn't getting us where we wanted to be." Improving their public image and their bottom line, major corporations are moving from using less paper to demanding the paper they use comes from environmentally sustainable sources, and letting stockholders and customers know they are doing it....
Editorial: Salvaging Timber With fingers crossed that all goes as well as the optimists predict rather than as bad as the pessimists fear, we cheer last week's passage of the salvage logging bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver. Approval in the House of Representatives 243-182 sends the measure to the Senate, where prospects for the contentious measure are less certain. The politics and the science on this issue have been both intriguing and divisive, with shock waves felt in Baird's 3rd Congressional District, including Clark County, and on the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis. Baird, who split from most Democrats on the issue, and principal sponsor Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., promise the bill would speed up logging of salvageable timber after fires without doing significant long-term damage to the forest. That goal is a good one and the two lawmakers deserve praise for working across party lines to reach it....
Four indicted in 1998 arson case Four people were indicted late Thursday in connection with a series of fires set at the Vail ski area in 1998. The federal grand jury in Denver handed down indictments against Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 29; Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28; Josephine Sunshine Overaker, 31; and Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, 33. Gerlach and Meyerhoff are in federal custody in Oregon, where they face separate arson charges. Overaker and Rubin are fugitives. The indictments was revealed Friday by Bill Leone, the U.S. attorney for Colorado. The eight-count indictment alleges the four set fires that destroyed eight buildings at the ski area, including the Two Elk Lodge and two restaurants...
Archaeologists uncover lost era Archaeologists scouring the historic John Marsh House-Cowell Ranch site in Brentwood say there are American Indian artifacts and bones buried within the soil, some dating back as far as 9,000 years to the "Paleo-Indian" era. "What we've found out there is extremely rare," said archaeologist Miley Holman, who is working with Shea Homes to study land associated with a residential development project next to the Cowell Ranch state park site. The village, he said, covers both the Marsh-Cowell property and a Shea-backed project called Vineyards at Marsh Creek. Both projects are in the planning stages. "The top layers of this Native American Village yield materials dating from as recent as a few hundred years ago, to 7,000 to 9,000 years ago," Holman said. "We are systematically studying this area, and at the end of the day, we hope to learn more about the region." He said the discovered artifacts and bones will give more insight into a people called "Windmiller."....
100 Years in the Back Door, Out the Front THE Texas cotton lobbyist tried to reassure Congress that the tens of thousands of Mexicans who labored in the fields of the Southwest were not a threat to national security. There "never was a more docile animal in the world than the Mexican," he told the Senate committee. Then he offered a way around the political problem the congressmen faced in extending the program that had let the workers in. "If you gentlemen have any objections to admitting the Mexicans by law," he said, "take the river guard away and let us alone, and we will get them all right." They did — and that was in 1920. Almost a century later, the debate over illegal immigration from Mexico often makes it sound like a recent development that breaks with the tradition of legal passage to America. Quite the contrary, say immigration scholars like Aristide R. Zolberg, who relates the anecdote about the Texas cotton grower in his new book, "A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America." A pattern of deliberately leaving the country's "back door" open to Mexican workers, then moving to expel them and their families years later, has been a recurrent feature of immigration policy since the 1890's....
Ag commissioner: Colorado needs moisture now Warm weather and decreased snowpack in much of Colorado mirror conditions found in 2002's drought and could hurt farmers and ranchers across Colorado, state Agriculture Commissioner Don Ament said. Alfalfa farmers in southern Colorado's San Luis Valley stand to lose much of their alfalfa crop this year and wheat farmers on the Eastern Plains are worried their crop could dry up unless rain falls on their fields soon, he said. The Pueblo Chieftain reported Thursday that the San Luis Valley could lose $60 million because of the alfalfa losses. That includes the loss of this year's crop, damage to subsequent harvests and the drop in farmers' income, according to Merlin Dillon, a Colorado State University agronomist, who discussed the situation with the Alamosa County commissioners this week. North of Denver, 200 farmers stand to lose up to more than $3 million worth of crops after the state shut down their wells after officials realized that snow had melted faster than expected. They're asking three cities to share their water with them to save their onions, corns and sugar beets. In southeastern Colorado, at least one auction barn has been busier than normal this week as some ranchers start to sell calves because they fear there won't be enough grass to support all their cattle....
Impact of poor wheat crop felt across rural Oklahoma This spring, Oklahoma will see its worst wheat harvest in 50 years, experts predict, because of drought, wild fires, high winds, hailstorms, insects and frost damage. With the harvest under way in some parts of the state, about 68 million bushels are expected -- less than half the yearly average since 2001. With the price of wheat, at harvest, estimated at $4.75 a bushel, farmers could lose $125 million in income. The average price since 2001 is $3.20. But that's not the whole story. When farm dollars circulated in rural communities are counted, this year's short crop could bring a $314 million loss to the state, said Oklahoma State University economist Kim Anderson. That's based on research showing that every $1 in farm income produces $2.51 for Oklahoma's economy. Already, farm towns such as Kingfisher, Altus or Frederick are hurting. Some farmers aren't buying new tractors or equipment. Repair jobs are being put off. Grain elevator operators are laying off workers. Vacations are being canceled. Some producers might even lose their farms....
W. Kansas thirsts for rain "The farther west you go, the more severe the drought conditions get," Kansas State Climatologist Mary Knapp said. "It improves as you move east from the halfway point, where it's basically neutral except the extreme eastern part of Kansas, which is abnormally dry." The state's farmers and ranchers have taken the biggest direct hit from the lack of moisture, while small downtowns and medium-sized cities also face the aftereffects of meager harvests. Knapp said if past drought periods are any indication, these drier-than-normal conditions could persist another two to three years. Outlook for the summer rainfall, however, now shows equal chances of normal or dry conditions. But southwest Kansas has already suffered, seeing more wheat fields abandoned this year than it has for several years, researchers say. Spring freeze, drought and an attack by the wheat streak mosaic virus each are taking a toll....
USDA declares New Mexico a disaster area U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., says the U.S. Department of Agriculture has declared New Mexico a disaster area due to continuing drought and wind storms. The declaration means that New Mexico farmers and ranchers are now eligible to be considered for low-interest emergency loans from the USDA's Farm Service Agency. Producers have eight months from the date of the declaration to apply for emergency loans to help cover part of their actual losses, if all eligibility requirements are met. Bingaman asked USDA officials last month to approve Gov. Bill Richardson's request for a statewide drought disaster declaration....
Industry reacts to ‘damaging’ fast food film The US food industry has launched a campaign to counter the bad publicity it expects to receive from a new film linking fast food chains and the industries that support them to the nation’s health and social problems. The film, based on Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book Fast Food Nation and staring Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, is set to premiere today at the Cannes Film Festival in France. It is a fictional version of the book, which had examined the social changes resulting from the rising dominance of the fast food industry. The industry is accused of using political influence to increase profits at the expense of human health and the social conditions of its workers. But according to a goup of food industry associations, this is the latest move in a series of attacks by “critics of our food system” who are “promoting their agendas using information that is inaccurate, misleading and incomplete.” In retaliation, 18 industry organizations this month launched a website, called Best Food Nation, which claims to provide fact-based responses to the concerns raised. Members include the Food Products Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation, as well as a number of commodity trade associations....
1,000 turn out for sugar beet factory centennial t was a perfect day for a party, although a bit dry for the sugar beets, especially up the Clarks Fork valley. No matter. More than 1,000 people showed up to say "Happy 100 years" Friday as the Western Sugar Co-op refinery marked its centennial. At least 900 stayed for lunch. "This has been a helluva deal for the community," said rancher Bud Sherrodd of Pompeys Pillar. He has trucked beet pulp from the factory to his own cattle and those of his neighbors for more than a dozen years. He rents land to neighbors who raise beets. "People don't see the business it creates," Sherrodd said. "There are trucks in and out of here constantly." They haul beets to the factory, pulp to cattle and sugar to the rest of the country, he said. The sugar refinery on the south edge of Billings was built in 1906 and produced 161,000 hundred-pound bags of sugar during that first campaign. The just-completed 100th campaign produced 10 times that amount: 1.62 million hundredweights. The first crop of the second century is starting to grow....
Doyon couple raises, sells Norwegian horses DEVILS LAKE ­ The Tangle Tree Ranch, located east of Devils Lake at Doyon, is the home of the first Norwegian Dole horse in America, according to ranchers Marte Holen Stensli and Robert Nelson. The couple bill themselves as "The Dole Horse People." The first Dole Horse, named Vollaug Silver, came to the United States because of the marriage of Marte and Bob. The horse arrived in the fall of 2001. He was joined by three more Dole (pronounced Dolly) horses in April 2003. How the first horse got to the country is a story in itself. Vollaug Silver was flown from Gotenberg, Sweden, to New York where he spent three days in quarantine. Next, he was trailered to a Wisconsin equine clinic by a transport company where he was picked up by Marte for the rest of his trip to the ranch in North Dakota. On April 12, 2003, Silver was joined by three more Dole horses that were brought to the ranch from Norway. They had to stay at a Wisconsin equine center for a month in quarantine because they are breeding stock. The Dole horse, an all-around breed, is the largest of the four native Norwegian horses. It has been called the Gudbrandsdalis Horse and the East Country Horse denoting the area where the breed was developed. The Dole horse breed is an old one. In his writings from the 1530s, Archbishop Olaus Magnus mentioned the breed. As early as the 1850s, the breed type was established....
Mini Moos Desi the heifer lolled in the shade at Bob Potter's ranch, her belly swollen by a calf she was about to produce. She looked big, but big is a relative term on this spread, where Potter raises miniature Hereford cattle. The animals grow to no more than 900 pounds, about two-thirds the size of conventional cattle, he said. They are ideal for people with small ranches, such as his 10 acres on Fisher Road, he said. "They are the most efficient feed converters in the animal world," said Potter, who has 10 head and hopes for 20 to 25. Miniature cattle are the result of decades of breeding bulls and cows that were on the small side, leading to animals distinct from the large cattle that dominate today's beef industry. Some are as little as a third the size of regular livestock. Potter, one of only a few producers in California, shows his cattle throughout the West. He also sells them to other people who want to show them or have them slaughtered for home freezers....
'Doc' Holliday's legend impervious to dissection He's been called "Aristocracy's Outlaw" and the "good bad man of Tombstone." But who was John H. "Doc" Holliday, really? Was he simply an innocent dentist with a predilection for gambling who just kept stumbling into tight situations, or a cold-hearted, calculating killer? Even among those who knew him well, opinions differed. Wyatt Earp remembered him as a "mad, merry scamp with heart of gold and nerves of steel." Bat Masterson was less enamored, pegging him for a mean drunk with a little-man complex. He was, Masterson wrote, "hot headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarreling, and among men who did not fear him, he was very much disliked." Like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, Doc Holliday is one of those Western historical figures who has been so completely obscured by legend and mythmaking that getting at the man himself seems an impossible task. Gary L. Roberts, emeritus professor of history at Abraham Baldwin College, is well aware of the difficulties but makes a heroic attempt in "Doc Holliday: The Life and the Legend" (Wiley, $38.99). In 414 pages of text buttressed by almost 90 pages of notes, Roberts thoroughly excavates the record, examines the legend and speculates why the latter has proved so enduring....
A Rodeo Home Where Traffic Drones and Suburbs Expand All Day This is the territory of shadow-traffic updates, a landscape of commuters who often form a bumper-to-bumper ribbon of road rage into San Francisco along Interstate 580 during rush hour. But once a year in a canyon fleetingly visible from the freeway and the Bay Area Rapid Transit line, the Peet's-Coffee-and-pinot-noir culture of the Bay Area gives way to the Jack Daniel's salute, a bottle of whiskey hoisted high in the air to celebrate the cowboys at the annual Rowell Ranch Rodeo. It is rodeo season in California, when chili cook-offs and sweat, dust and manure connect suburbs like Hayward to a past that existed before weekend soccer games and the mall. It is a time of yes ma'ams and no ma'ams, a throwback to the days before tract development, when cowboys like Cecil Jones, now 88, drove rodeo stock through the Livermore Hills down the two-lane blacktop that is now I-580. "This was big-time cowboy country," said Mr. Jones, a saddle-bronc rider who managed the ranch for the rodeo's namesake, Harry Rowell, an English-born sailor turned slaughterhouse-and-stock entrepreneur who died in 1969. "Today, the newcomers don't know what-all." The rodeo — the culmination of a week that included a parade, a dinner dance, a barbeque, the chili cook-off at the nearby Castro Village Shopping Center and the crowning of Miss Rowell Ranch Rodeo Queen 2006 — is one of the country's oldest such competitions. It is one of 45 rodeos in California, which has the distinction of being the country's second-largest rodeo stronghold, surpassed only by Texas, which has 107, according to the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association....
PRCA hasn’t exactly committed to Springs When the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association decided Tuesday to stay put after saying it would leave Colorado Springs for New Mexico, the abrupt change in direction was reminiscent of a bull’s maneuvers to buck off its rider. “I can’t get inside their brains and know what happened,” said Jon Goldstein, a spokesman for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who announced in February the PRCA was accepting that state’s $17 million offer to relocate. “All I know is, it’s unfortunate the way things played out in the end.” And while the PRCA said it’s not moving to New Mexico, it gave no guarantees it wouldn’t listen to other offers — which wouldn’t surprise some rodeo backers. Rob Alexander, Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo Foundation chairman and part of a community task force formed to try and keep the PRCA, said efforts locally and by New Mexico to woo the organization amounted to an economic development tug of war. And once word gets out a business or organization is looking, other cities circle like sharks....
On the Edge of Common Sense: ANTIs love their trees, but hinder progress Gale Norton, once Colorado's attorney general, is resigning as the nation's interior secretary. "She has been an integral part of the most anti-environmental administration we've ever seen," one of the so-called 'environmental' groups is quoted as saying. What they didn't say is, "She's been an integral part of one of the most pro-energy, pro-forest restoration, pro-multiple use, pro-rural community, pro-common sense, balanced federal lands policies in twenty years." I prefer to call the environmental groups the ANTIs. It is as if they have not noticed America's addiction to skyrocketing energy prices, our increasing dependence on foreign oil, the horrendous forest fires consuming the west, the grinding erosion of rural communities, the elimination of ranchers, lumbermen, miners, and the enmity between themselves and the citizens who actually live in the land they are trying to protect. This is the same ANTI mind-set that prevented beefing up the levees around New Orleans years ago, that stopped development of nuclear power, that still condemns the use of pesticides, antibiotics and genetically modified foods....