NEWS ROUNDUP

New bill gives major tax breaks for land conservation On Aug. 17, President George W. Bush signed into law H.R. 4, which expands federal tax incentives for conservation easement donors. The bill can be especially beneficial to farmers and ranchers as well as people owning historic properties. The expanded tax incentive raises the deduction a donor can take for donating a conservation easement from 30 percent of their adjusted gross income in any year to 50 percent of their income. The incentive allows qualifying farmers and ranchers to deduct up to 100 percent of their income and it increases the number of years to take deductions from the previous six years to 16 years. Local agricultural officials say local farmers could essentially pay no taxes on income by conserving large amounts of land. “For farmers and ranchers, this is huge,” said Sandra Reid of the Polk County Soil and Water District. “Farmers could zero their income for the next 15 years and be tax free.” Reid says her office and PAC will be glad to steer landowners wishing to participate in the right direction for the incentive. An example from http://conserveland.org says that under the previous rules, a landowner earning $50,000 a year who donated a $1 million conservation easement could take a $15,000 deduction for the year of the donation and for an additional five years, for a total deduction of $90,000. Under the new rules that landowner can deduct $25,000 for the year of the donation and then for an additional 15 years, for a total deduction of $400,000 for the same $1 million property. If the landowner qualifies as a farmer or rancher, they can zero out their taxes, and they could take a maximum of $800,000 in deductions for their million dollar gift. According to the website conserveland.org, the new law applies to all easements donated from Jan. 1, 2006 until Dec. 31, 2007....
Biologists monitor Oregon's sage grouse population for West Nile Wildlife officials have pinpointed the first known cases of West Nile Virus in Oregon's sage grouse, a population that has been under consideration for the threatened and endangered species list. The investigation began in early August, when a landowner near Burns Junction reported dead birds in a field, said Christian Hagen, sage grouse coordinator with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. U.S. Geological Survey biologists with the National Wildlife Health Center got to the property a few days later, and set up a systematic survey to look for dead birds, he said. They found three fresh carcasses that tested positive for the disease as well as more than 60 decomposed birds. When the virus infects birds it gets into their nervous system, said Colin Gillin, the state wildlife veterinarian with the department. The virus then causes encephalitis and meningitis, or inflammation of the nervous system and the brain, he said. Sage grouse seem to have a very high mortality rate when exposed to West Nile, with about 90 percent of infected birds dying from it and symptoms showing up within five to seven days, Gillin said....
Judge overturns pesticide-approval rule Ruling that the Bush administration "plainly violated" the Endangered Species Act, a federal judge Thursday overturned a regulation that streamlined approval of pesticides by eliminating reviews by wildlife officials responsible for protecting rare animals and plants. By throwing out the 2004 regulation, the judge restored previous standards, which had required the Environmental Protection Agency to consult with federal wildlife biologists before licensing pesticides for use. The ruling was a victory for a coalition of nine environmental groups that filed suit against the U.S. Interior Department two years ago. The new rule allowed the EPA to bypass the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Its aim was to shorten the years-long process of reviewing whether each pesticide poses a danger to any of the nation's more than 1,200 endangered species....
Kempthorne conducts listening session in Fairbanks The country's top land steward heard several dozen Fairbanks-area residents ask him to keep oil and gas development out of sensitive North Slope areas, including the Teshekpuk Lake region and the Arctic National Widlife Refuge. Monday's meeting, one of 24 "listening sessions" being held across the country, was hosted by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, and representatives from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Kempthorne said he would take the comments into account in developing federal management policies. "You're helping me," he told the crowd of about 100 people at the Carlson Center. More than three dozen people commented during the meeting on issues ranging from oil and gas development to federal funding for wildlife management....
Kempthorne seeks land legacy for Bush Drilling managers led Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on a tour of Wyoming's Anticline gas fields to show how they are reducing truck traffic and wildlife habitat destruction in one of the West's largest energy projects. Kempthorne's thoughts drifted back to his days as mayor of Boise where he dealt with traffic congestion and air quality issues. "I'm asking, 'What's our carrying capacity?'" he said. A day later, the landlord of 20 percent of the nation's land mass was walking through the steaming sulfurous cauldrons of Yellowstone National Park's famous geyser basins greeting tourists and talking to rangers about the challenges of preserving the nation's crown jewels. This week he'll be touring the oil fields of Alaska on behalf of his boss, President George Bush. Kempthorne has two years to establish Bush's conservation legacy, one that has drawn strong criticism from a wide range of conservation groups and sportsmen....
Report identifies 'missing linkages' in wildlife corridors A "missing linkages" report designed to ensure the continued existence of wildlife indigenous to the Santa Monica/Sierra Madre mountains has been released by the National Park Service, in conjunction with the nonprofit South Coast Wildlands organization, to approximately 90 civic agencies, jurisdictions and public action groups focused on open space and wildlife habitat conservation. The 213-page report, part of the South Coast Missing Linkages Project and titled "A Linkage Design for the Santa Monica-Sierra Madre Connection," is an informational rather than an action document and is advisory in nature, Parks Service officials said. It recommends methods and enhancements for maintaining critical corridors, the "linkages", that allow wildlife to move naturally between large habitat areas. The sector affecting Malibu specifically includes the Santa Monica Mountains, the Susana Hills, Simi Hills and north to the Los Padres National Forest. Some of the recommendations include not only keeping open and maintaining wildlife corridors for mammals in urbanized areas to allow for migration, but to remove nonnative vegetation and to restore riparian vegetation in certain creeks and watershed areas that would inhibit the recovery of Southern steelhead trout and other species. Removal of barriers such as Arizona crossings (low-water concrete crossings) and dams, including the Rindge Dam in Malibu, is discussed as well....
Washington state's glaciers are melting, and that has scientists concerned With more glaciers than any state in the Lower 48, Washington state has emerged as a bellwether for global warming. The signs are not encouraging. A national environmental group recently reported that North Cascades and Mount Rainier are among the dozen national parks most susceptible to climate change. At Mount Rainier, which has more glacial ice than the rest of the Cascades combined and is among the best studied sites in the nation, the area covered by glaciers shrank by more than a fifth from 1913 to 1994, and the volume of the glaciers by almost one-fourth, the National Park Service says. From 1912 to 2001, the Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier retreated nearly a mile....
Flying rafts out of control A new type of inflatable raft designed to soar into the air as it is towed behind a speeding motorboat has been pulled from the shelves of several local stores and could face a ban at Lake Mead. The National Park Service at Lake Powell already has outlawed the flying rafts after a string of accidents at the reservoir on the Utah-Arizona border. Since April, four people have been injured badly enough to be airlifted from Lake Powell. In one of the accidents, a 14-year-old girl from Houston was knocked unconscious when she tumbled into the water from 10 to 15 feet up. In another, a 29-year-old man from St. George, Utah, suffered a broken neck when he fell about 35 feet from a raft towed at 35 to 45 mph. The parks agency said the man was the third person in his party injured that day while riding the flying raft, but the other two did not require medical treatment....
Thieves and Vandals Put a National Gem at Risk Linda Farnsworth picked her way across a field of loose rocks, down a steep slope under the overhang of sandstone cliffs. The archeologist stopped at the remains of a low stone retaining wall and searched briefly until she found the series of backfilled holes — where looters had rooted around a remote kiva site for highly prized black and white Anasazi pots, tools and other prehistoric objects. There are no signs or trails that lead visitors here, to Woods Canyon Pueblo, a site containing the remnants of 50 stone kivas, 220 rooms and 16 towers. But isolation offered scant protection when thieves swept through it a few months ago, leaving behind crude excavations, discarded pot shards and their own trash — crumpled water bottles and wrappers from banana LifeSavers. Although Farnsworth and other officials of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the monument, suspect that the looters scored a valuable haul from the site, they can't back up their hunch. "I have no idea," said Farnsworth, the BLM's sole archeologist at Canyons of the Ancients, in Colorado's southwest corner. Farnsworth and other officials can't say what's missing because they know so little about what was there. Only about 18% of Canyons of the Ancients has been inventoried to assess historic, cultural or scientific values. That's more than the BLM knows about a great many of the places it administers. Less than 6% of the 262 million acres managed by the agency has been inventoried for cultural resources....
Bush calls for national parks makeover There's nothing like a big birthday bash on the horizon - even if it's a decade away - to make you want to look your best. So, President Bush on Friday directed the National Park Service on Friday to set "performance" goals for itself for the next 10 years. The idea is to have as many bragging rights as possible when the park service turns a century old in 2016. "As havens of enjoyment, recreation, learning and personal renewal, national parks must endure," said Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, while opening a new visitor education center Friday at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. To the Park Service, the presidential nudge is tantamount to President Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon. "This is for us what that was to NASA," Park Service spokesman David Barna said....
Severe Plains drought hurting land, lives, traditions With parts of South Dakota at its epicenter, a severe drought has slowly sizzled a large part of the northern Great Plains, forcing farmers and ranchers into conditions they say are comparable to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The drought has led to desperate, rarely used methods. Shrunken sunflower plants, normally valuable for seeds and oil, are being used as makeshift feed for livestock. Despite soaring fuel costs, some cattle owners are hauling herds hundreds of miles to healthier feedlots. And many ranchers are pouring water into "dug outs," natural watering holes for animals, because so many of them (up to 90 percent in South Dakota, by one estimate) have gone dry. South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds, who has requested that 51 of the state's 66 counties be designated a federal agricultural disaster area, recently sought unusual help from his constituents: He issued a proclamation declaring a week to pray for rain. "It's a grim situation," said Herman Schumacher, owner of a livestock market in Herreid, a small town near the North Dakota border, where 37,000 cattle were sold this summer, compared with 7,000 during the same three months last year....
US To Ask OIE For Official BSE Status The U.S. will make a massive submission in September to the World Organization for Animal Health, known commonly by the French acronym OIE, for its decision on the U.S. status for bovine spongiform encephalopathy risk, a government agricultural official said Monday. J.B. Penn, U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary for farm and foreign agriculture services, said the U.S. will not be asking for a specific status level, but rather making a presentation and allowing the OIE to decide for itself. "We are going to submit to the OIE a package of information that details our entire experience with this disease," Penn told Dow Jones Newswires. "We're going to let them determine our status and tell us," he said, but stressed that the submission will show that USDA's "conclusion is that this disease is very, very rare in our livestock herd." The U.S. began restricting what ranchers could feed their cattle in 1996 as means to prevent the spread of BSE even though the disease had not been found here....
Latest BSE Case in Canada Likely Came from Feed Supply An Alberta dairy cow that was diagnosed last month with bovine spongiform encephalopathy probably contracted the disease from contaminated feed, federal regulators say. Because the 50-month-old animal from an Edmonton-area farm was exposed to mad cow disease after a 1997 feed ban was imposed, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has launched an enforcement investigation. The CFIA report said two feed manufacturing facilities received prohibited material from the same rendering plant implicated in previous BSE investigations. The investigation is focusing on the activities of the feed mills, the report said. The CFIA tracked approximately 170 cows that originated at the same farm as the infected dairy cow. The trace-out investigation located 38 live animals on the farm and in other herds to which they had been sold. Most of these animals have been destroyed and their carcasses burned....
Russia says to hit imports of US meat if no WTO deal Russia threatened on Thursday to scrap preferences for U.S. poultry and red meat shipments if Washington failed to endorse Moscow's accession bid for the World Trade Organization within three months. "If talks (on Russia's WTO entry)...set for the end of October in Geneva fail, Russia will have to return to its original stance prior to agreements on (bilateral) meat trade that had been reached," Economy Minister German Gref said in a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab. Excerpts from Gref's letter, first made available by unnamed sources to the Kommersant business daily, were posted on the ministry's official website at www.economy.gov.ru. Last month U.S. and Russian officials failed to reach a trade deal in time for the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, where Russia had hoped to clinch a WTO accord with the United States after Moscow's 13-year-old bid for membership....
Richardson Reports Barbaro's Right Pastern Completely Fused Veterinarians at the University of Pennsylvania's George D. Widener Hospital changed the right hind leg cast of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro yesterday, Sunday, August 27. "The cast was changed because there was a small crack in it," said Dean W. Richardson, DVM, Dipl. ACVS, Chief of Surgery. "Based on new radiographs that were taken, the leg looked excellent under the cast. The pastern joint looks completely fused, and there is only a small area in the long pastern bone that has a little farther to go before we take him out of the cast completely." In addition, the radiographs showed that there were no signs of infection. The cast change took place under general anesthesia, and Barbaro had another successful pool recovery before returning to his stall. The colt's left hind foot has laminitis, but Barbaro seems comfortable with that foot as well. The bandage on the left hind foot continues to be changed daily. According to Richardson: "Barbaro is bright and happy this morning with an excellent appetite."....
End of the trail It drove James Earle Fraser crazy. But Gene Autry kept doing it. As the finish to his rodeo act, Autry and his horse, Champion, would strike a pose, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, as the cowboy crowed to the crowd that they were portraying Fraser's famous painting, "End of the Trail." You'd think Fraser might have loved the publicity. Guess again. "End of the Trail" wasn't a painting, it was a sculpture. Autry could never seem to get it right. Fraser could never understand why. James Earle Fraser (1876-1953) is not a name many Americans will recognize. Yet it was Fraser who created some of our most recognized art. The most recognized of the recognized? His "End of the Trail." If you've visited the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, you've no doubt seen it. A 25-foot rendition is on permanent display. But even if you haven't made the trek yet, you've probably seen a snapshot of the piece. Almost everybody has....
Cowboys blend bridles, Bibles Don't be hankerin' for yer buddy's stuff. Few theologians have ever reduced coveting to such simple terms, but the Texas Fellowship of Cowboy Churches has no problem translating elevated religious language into words any cowboy can understand. This simplicity is in part what drew a record crowd to George W. Truett Theological Seminary this weekend for a cowboy church conference sponsored by the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT). The weekend's events covered topics such as youth ranch rodeo, chuck wagon cooking and cowboy band worship. The concept of cowboy churches is an outreach of the BGCT and targets those "in a western culture who may not be comfortable in a regular church," said Pastor Greg Moore of Top Hand Cowboy Church in Crawford. While their theological beliefs are in line with the BGCT, their style of worship varies. Many cowboy churches meet in arenas or barns as opposed to traditional church buildings and have youth rodeos instead of retreats, Moore said....
It’s The Pitts: Grinders, DINKS & Rabbits Although they might show up at wine and car auctions, here are some folks you’ll NEVER meet on sale day at your local auction market during the slaughter cow run: A Grinder- It is the Grinder’s job at high-end auto auctions to get in the face of bidders and “grind” on them until they bid again. I feel for the safety of anyone who gets in the face of a cow buyer to point out the attributes of the canner cow he was trying to steal. Whereas the auctioneer is permitted to say a kind word about an old cow, anyone else who stops the sale and tries it is liable to get punched in the face. Insurance Salesman- A common sight at Thoroughbred sales, these folks wait in the wings to insure buyer’s purchases. I have yet to see an insurance salesman write a policy for a barren, toothless cow with an extremely short life expectancy. A Rabbit- At horse sales sometimes you’ll see a person bid repeatedly in a clandestine manner to force another bidder to pay a higher price. We call such people “rabbits.” Auction owners provide all the market support needed at a cow sale. Paddle Holders- Unlike antique sales, where neophytes often leave their bidding paddles in the air, grizzled cow buyers try to make it difficult for anyone to see them bidding. Unfortunately, this includes the auctioneer. Spouses- During charity auctions you might see a husband and wife argue about spending $5,000 for a Kobe Bryant basketball or a Barry Bonds baseball. I have yet to see a cow buyer bring his wife to a killer cow sale, let alone confer with her on whether to bid another tenth of a cent on an old piece of leather holding a cow together....