For Immediate Release
April 7, 2006
Contact: Brian Kennedy (202) 226-9019
GAO Report Shows Agencies Fail to Plan Adequately for Species Recovery
Lack of planning has led to the ESA’s failure to recover species
WASHINGTON – Summarized as "recovery time and costs largely unknown,” a new U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released yesterday confirms that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is not working effectively and is in need of reform after more than three decades of implementation without improvements.
The report echoes the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s Not Performing assessment of the ESA.
Following a bipartisan request from several members of the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate, the GAO conducted a review of endangered species recovery plans to determine if they contained several key elements, including the amount of time and money it would take to recover species addressed in each plan. The GAO also reviewed the plans to see if they contained criteria which, when met, would indicate the species status had improved enough that the species no longer needed to be listed as endangered or threatened.
From a statistically significant sample of 107 recovery plans, the GAO found that only 34 plans included an estimated date by which the species would be recovered. GAO found that even fewer plans, 20, included an estimated cost for recovery. Worse yet, the GAO found that 102 of the 107 plans reviewed failed to address all of the factors that are considered when the agencies determine whether or not a species is endangered.”
"In more than three decades, the ESA has recovered less than one percent of the thirteen-hundred species on its list,” House Resources Committee Chairman Richard W. Pombo (R-Calif.) said. “And the prospects for improving this statistic under current law are just as low. GAO's results reveal one of the reasons for this – when you fail to plan appropriately, you plan to fail. This is precisely what has happened under the ESA, and it is tantamount to doing a jig-saw puzzle in the dark or trying to treat a patient without making a thorough diagnosis first.”
"If what GAO found was bad, what GAO missed was even worse," Pombo continued. “Although the GAO recommended the obvious - that actions be taken to address the failure of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to include this critical information in recovery plans - it did not analyze the few plans in its sample that did provide such critical information for their accuracy. My committee did, and they are not.”
To test accuracy (or lack thereof), the Oversight and Investigations staff of the Resources Committee reviewed those few plans that did have estimated costs and recovery projections and compared them with expenditure and recovery program reports the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is required to provide Congress.
Among the Committee's findings:
* The plan for the decurrent false aster, a plant, anticipated that the species could be recovered by 1997 for a budget of $58,000. Since the plan was written Federal and state agencies have spent more than $600,000 dollars on the species - more than 10 times the estimated cost in the plan. Well after the GAO study was initiated, the USFWS announced it will finally review the plant's status.
* 13 plans included estimated recovery dates that have already passed, but (with one exception) none of the species had been removed from the list or even reduced in status from endangered to threatened. The Maguire daisy was changed from endangered to the lesser threatened status after it was discovered to be more abundant. In some of these cases the expenditures on the species have been significantly below the plan's estimated cost but in others well over. As in the case of the decurrent false aster, the plan for the least tern anticipated recovery costs of $2,000,000 and that the bird could be delisted 2005. Federal and State agencies have spent over $23,000,000 million on the bird and in its most recent Congressional report the USFWS estimated that the species' status is "unknown" and that it has only achieved somewhere between 0 and 25 percent of its recovery objectives.
To view all Committee findings, click here.
The bipartisan Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act (TESRA), passed by the House this fall, includes several provisions that would remedy the shortcoming revealed by the GAO's analysis. One such provision establishes official Recovery Teams and requires recovery plans to be produced by a certain deadline, with specific criteria. Yet another strengthens the reporting requirements and public accessibility to the information about the endangered species program.
"Bringing the mechanics, incentives and scientific standards of the ESA into the 21st century will give it a chance to work effectively,” Pombo said. “If the U.S. Senate had any doubts about the need to do this, the GAO’s findings should clear them up. Accepting or defending the status-quo for this Act may be politically expedient for some and financially-beneficial to others, but it is unquestionably wrong for endangered species."
###
Friday, April 07, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Court upholds dismissal of charges against wolf biologist A federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of trespassing and littering charges against a federal wolf biologist and a private contractor who were found with tranquilized wolves on private property near Cody. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in a ruling released Thursday that the prosecution of Mike Jimenez, Wyoming's wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Wes Livingston, a private contractor from Cody, was more an "attempt to hinder a locally unpopular federal program," than a "bona fide effort to punish a violation of Wyoming trespass law." Rancher Randy Kruger pursued the charges after he found Jimenez and Livingston on his private land near Meeteetse Feb. 14, 2004. The men had four tranquilized wolves they were collaring because of depredation problems in the area. The incident raised speculation by some that they were trying to secretly transplant wolves into the area. The FWS said Jimenez and Livingston inadvertently wound up on the private land while working to place radio tracking collars on the wolves. FWS regional director Ralph Morganweck apologized for the incident....
Wyoming asks EPA to discard Montana rules Gov. Dave Freudenthal has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to reject Montana water quality rules that he says would severely limit natural gas production in Wyoming. However, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer said his state intends to stick by its rules and said he's not pleased Wyoming took the dispute to federal regulators. Freudenthal announced Wednesday that his letter to Stephen L. Johnson, EPA administrator in Washington, D.C., asks the agency to appoint a mediator to resolve the dispute between the states. He wants discussion about the Montana rules and recognition that they "have serious impacts in Wyoming." But Schweitzer maintains that Wyoming's booming coalbed methane development is already having serious impacts in Montana....
Wildlife Officers “Seize” Elk From Local Ranch Wildlife enforcement officers served a search warrant March 28 on Joey Perdue, owner of Beaverhorn Elk Ranch in the Bethel community. The search warrant, signed by Superior Court judge James Baker, allowed wildlife management officials to “seize” five elk, the last remnants of Perdue’s herd, after a citation accused her of failing to comply with state regulations. By “seize,” though, the warrant was really empowering officials to kill the elk and dispose of their carcasses in a pit at the Wilkes Wildlife Depot. Perdue says wildlife officials never told her the violations would end in the death of her elk, which included a 23-year-old bull and three pregnant cows. What’s worse, she said, is the animals, which officials say were killed as part of the state’s effort to keep a mysterious brain ailment known as Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) from infecting wild herds, were rendered inedible when two veterinarians tranquilized them before euthanizing them with a bolt gun shot to the brain. “This waste amounted to approximately 5,000 pounds of the most healthy meat in the world,” an infuriated Perdue wrote in a March 31 letter to the Democrat. Perdue had been involved in a running dispute with state Wildlife Management officials who say they’d been after the 71-year-old rancher since 2004 to bring her operation into compliance with state law....
Calaveras rancher jumps to support Endangered Species Act It took a frog to make Calaveras County rancher Danny Pearson hop on an airplane. Pearson runs cattle on his family's ranch near Burson, off a dirt road east of San Andreas. In his 42 years, he has never found occasion to fly. He's never registered with any political party, and he's certainly never lobbied Congress. Until now. This week, incited by his regard for the California red-legged frog and his concern over the future of the Endangered Species Act, Pearson has become the quintessential citizen lobbyist. He's learning legislative mechanics, navigating Capitol Hill and beginning to appreciate the art of the sound bite. "I've got to get the message out there," Pearson said Monday. "Not all ranchers can be bought." Pearson's is one sun-beaten face of the Endangered Species Act debate, which has stymied Congress for years. His opposite number, a man he has never met, is also a one-time rancher. As chairman of the House Resources Committee, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, is pushing a dramatic rewrite of the 33-year-old environmental law....
County says bill would hurt landowners Local opposition is gaining steam against a bill in the Colorado Senate that critics say would fail to protect the rights of surface landowners involved in disputes with gas drillers. The La Plata County commissioners wrote in a letter on Monday to the bill's Senate sponsor, Jim Isgar, D-Hesperus, that it was a "serious step backward" that "undermines local government authority in a wholly unacceptable way." Commissioners had earlier supported the bill, but they said it underwent "serious and deleterious changes." The bill requires gas companies to try to get a surface-use agreement with the landowner. However, if the landowner won't sign, the company could still drill by making an offer to reimburse the landowner and by posting a $15,000 bond with the state. Much of the current language was written by BP Amoco, the major driller in Southwest Colorado. The bill limits payment for damages to land that is disturbed by wells or pipelines, not the lost value of the entire parcel of land. The bill, HB 1185, passed by an overwhelming 60-3 vote in the House. It could receive a vote in the full Senate as early as today. Isgar has signed on as Senate sponsor. A Bayfield ranching family said Tuesday that the bill was a step backward and must be defeated. "This is just a bad bill," said Jim Fitzgerald, who owns 400 acres southeast of Bayfield. "It's unfair, and it takes rights away from landowners." Fitzgerald said he has one gas well on his land, two on adjacent land and "more coming," courtesy of BP Amoco. Gwen Lachelt, executive director of the Oil & Gas Accountability Project in Durango, said the bill was hijacked by the oil and gas industry....
Court asked to review mileage rules An environmental group on Thursday asked for a court review of tighter gas mileage rules for pickups and sport utility vehicles that many conservationists said do not go far enough in limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The federal government set the new standards last week in response to rising concern about the supply and cost of energy from abroad. The rules, covering 2008 through 2011, would save 10.7 billion gallons of fuel over the lifetime of the vehicles sold during that period, officials said. The Tucson, Ariz.-based Center for Biological Diversity filed a one-page petition Thursday asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the decision. Deborah Sivas, director of Stanford University's Environmental Law Clinic, which is representing the center, said the government did not adequately consider whether tighter standards would have been a greater boon for the environment. She also said the new rules would not adequately protect endangered species....
"Laurel and Hardy effect” spells good news for captive breeding Animals bred in captivity for reintroduction to the wild are able to retain their defences against predators for several generations, ecologists have found. According to new research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, tadpoles of the Mallorcan midwife toad (Alytes muletensis) retain their ability to change their body shape – a defence they have evolved in the face of predators – even after being bred in captivity for three to eight generations. The results have important implications for conserving endangered species through captive breeding programmes. Tadpoles of many amphibians have developed ways of defending themselves against predators. Mallorcan midwife toad tadpoles grow longer tails and shallower fins to help them escape from danger when predators are present. These defences have evolved in response to two predators that were introduced to Mallorca about 2,000 years ago: the viperine snake (Natrix maura) and the green frog (Rana perezi). The authors of the paper, Dr Richard Griffiths and colleagues from the University of Kent and the University of Sussex, have dubbed this change in shape the “Laurel and Hardy effect”. The researchers compared the responses of tadpoles in a predator-free, reintroduced population with those in the population from which their ancestors were collected several years earlier. When the tadpoles were exposed to chemical cues from predators, the researchers found that the reintroduced population retained their anti-predator responses, even though they had been bred in captivity for three to eight generations in the absence of predator selection pressures....
Lawsuit challenges use of hatchery fish in counts Conservation groups Thursday challenged a new government policy that includes hatchery fish in counts used to determine the status of dwindling salmon and steelhead runs. In a federal court lawsuit the plaintiffs also challenged the downlisting of upper Columbia steelhead -- from endangered to threatened -- that has resulted from that policy. "The purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to protect wildlife's ability to sustain itself in the wild. And that means the focus is on wild steelhead in rivers, not steelhead that are produced in hatcheries," said Patti Goldman of Earthjustice. Earthjustice filed the lawsuit on behalf of six plaintiff groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service and its regional director, Bob Lohn....
Conservation Celebrities Recognized as Disney Fund Reaches Milestone $10 Million Investment in Wildlife Five renowned conservation celebrities joined with Disney Thursday night to celebrate a $10 million milestone for the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund (DWCF) -- a program that has benefited nearly 500 wildlife projects around the world. Actor/comedian John Cleese; elephant expert Iain Douglas-Hamilton; primatologist Jane Goodall; actress Isabella Rossellini; and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai accepted awards of $100,000 each for their conservation causes in a ceremony at Disney's Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort. "These very special people, who have devoted their lives and lent their voices to conservation, are the key to engaging the public in caring for animals," said Jerry Montgomery, senior vice president of Walt Disney World Public Affairs. "The adventures and excitement at Disney's Animal Kingdom help us share conservation stories with our guests, and we are thrilled that many of them join our global conservation efforts through the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund. Together, we are making a difference for wildlife and wild places -- we are helping to create the next generation of Disney's conservation legacy." The conservation focus is a large part of the park's mission as a facility accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). Since 1998, the DWCF has been supported by donations from guests visiting Walt Disney World Resort and enhanced by company contributions. The $500,000 awarded at the celebration will be divided among several charitable organizations working in the U.S. and abroad....
Mountain lion bill introduced A bill making it a crime for a mountain lion to attack a human has been introduced into the state Legislature. Assembly Bill 2273, introduced by Assemblyman Bill Maze, R-Visalia, is intended to make victims of mountain lion attacks eligible for compensation for their injuries through the state crime victims' fund, according to Somke Mastrup, deputy director of the state Department of Fish and Game. For them to be eligible, they must be crime victims. Mastrup reported on a number of bills pending in Sacramento at Thursday's meeting of the state Department of Fish and Game in Monterey, legislation that the commission should keep an eye on, he said....
Wildfires Scorch 27,000 Acres in Texas The parched Texas Panhandle apparently survived another wildfire scare, but forecasters predicted dangerous conditions in other parts of the state Friday. Wildfires fueled by steady 40 mph winds scorched 27,000 acres Thursday and destroyed at least nine homes while forcing the evacuation of two small towns about 65 miles east of Amarillo. The roughly 600 residents of Lefors and Bowers City were allowed to return home in the evening and lighter winds helped firefighters contain most of the more than two dozen blazes, officials said. No injuries were reported....
Last frontier From 1987 to 2002, Colorado lost an average of 460 acres per day of agricultural land, according to a report released this week by Environment Colorado. The report, titled "Losing Ground: Colorado's Vanishing Agricultural Landscape," predicts 3.1 million more acres will be lost to development by 2022. "Colorado is losing the equivalent of five family farms every week," said Pam Kiely, the report's author. "Loss of farmlands impacts the environment, the economy and the very landscapes that define us as a state." The report, which is based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, predicts Moffat County will lose more than 100,000 acres of agricultural land to development by 2022. Struggling rural economies and increased development of large-lot residential property is largely to blame for the decline in agricultural lands, according to the report....
A little lambsie jivey: fraud at the stock show The two top winners of the National Western Stock Show's junior market lamb show and 16 other lambs were illegally injected with an unknown substance, stock show President Pat Grant said Wednesday. Grant said officials were alerted to the tampering Jan. 19, the night of the contest. The lambs were recovered at the packing plant, and the Denver district attorney was notified. The injections caused swelling and inflammation, which made the lambs appear more muscular, he said. None of the altered animals was consumed, he said. "It could be something criminal," said Lynn Kimbrough, of the Denver district attorney's office. "We're in the middle of the investigation."....
Court upholds dismissal of charges against wolf biologist A federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of trespassing and littering charges against a federal wolf biologist and a private contractor who were found with tranquilized wolves on private property near Cody. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in a ruling released Thursday that the prosecution of Mike Jimenez, Wyoming's wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Wes Livingston, a private contractor from Cody, was more an "attempt to hinder a locally unpopular federal program," than a "bona fide effort to punish a violation of Wyoming trespass law." Rancher Randy Kruger pursued the charges after he found Jimenez and Livingston on his private land near Meeteetse Feb. 14, 2004. The men had four tranquilized wolves they were collaring because of depredation problems in the area. The incident raised speculation by some that they were trying to secretly transplant wolves into the area. The FWS said Jimenez and Livingston inadvertently wound up on the private land while working to place radio tracking collars on the wolves. FWS regional director Ralph Morganweck apologized for the incident....
Wyoming asks EPA to discard Montana rules Gov. Dave Freudenthal has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to reject Montana water quality rules that he says would severely limit natural gas production in Wyoming. However, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer said his state intends to stick by its rules and said he's not pleased Wyoming took the dispute to federal regulators. Freudenthal announced Wednesday that his letter to Stephen L. Johnson, EPA administrator in Washington, D.C., asks the agency to appoint a mediator to resolve the dispute between the states. He wants discussion about the Montana rules and recognition that they "have serious impacts in Wyoming." But Schweitzer maintains that Wyoming's booming coalbed methane development is already having serious impacts in Montana....
Wildlife Officers “Seize” Elk From Local Ranch Wildlife enforcement officers served a search warrant March 28 on Joey Perdue, owner of Beaverhorn Elk Ranch in the Bethel community. The search warrant, signed by Superior Court judge James Baker, allowed wildlife management officials to “seize” five elk, the last remnants of Perdue’s herd, after a citation accused her of failing to comply with state regulations. By “seize,” though, the warrant was really empowering officials to kill the elk and dispose of their carcasses in a pit at the Wilkes Wildlife Depot. Perdue says wildlife officials never told her the violations would end in the death of her elk, which included a 23-year-old bull and three pregnant cows. What’s worse, she said, is the animals, which officials say were killed as part of the state’s effort to keep a mysterious brain ailment known as Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) from infecting wild herds, were rendered inedible when two veterinarians tranquilized them before euthanizing them with a bolt gun shot to the brain. “This waste amounted to approximately 5,000 pounds of the most healthy meat in the world,” an infuriated Perdue wrote in a March 31 letter to the Democrat. Perdue had been involved in a running dispute with state Wildlife Management officials who say they’d been after the 71-year-old rancher since 2004 to bring her operation into compliance with state law....
Calaveras rancher jumps to support Endangered Species Act It took a frog to make Calaveras County rancher Danny Pearson hop on an airplane. Pearson runs cattle on his family's ranch near Burson, off a dirt road east of San Andreas. In his 42 years, he has never found occasion to fly. He's never registered with any political party, and he's certainly never lobbied Congress. Until now. This week, incited by his regard for the California red-legged frog and his concern over the future of the Endangered Species Act, Pearson has become the quintessential citizen lobbyist. He's learning legislative mechanics, navigating Capitol Hill and beginning to appreciate the art of the sound bite. "I've got to get the message out there," Pearson said Monday. "Not all ranchers can be bought." Pearson's is one sun-beaten face of the Endangered Species Act debate, which has stymied Congress for years. His opposite number, a man he has never met, is also a one-time rancher. As chairman of the House Resources Committee, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, is pushing a dramatic rewrite of the 33-year-old environmental law....
County says bill would hurt landowners Local opposition is gaining steam against a bill in the Colorado Senate that critics say would fail to protect the rights of surface landowners involved in disputes with gas drillers. The La Plata County commissioners wrote in a letter on Monday to the bill's Senate sponsor, Jim Isgar, D-Hesperus, that it was a "serious step backward" that "undermines local government authority in a wholly unacceptable way." Commissioners had earlier supported the bill, but they said it underwent "serious and deleterious changes." The bill requires gas companies to try to get a surface-use agreement with the landowner. However, if the landowner won't sign, the company could still drill by making an offer to reimburse the landowner and by posting a $15,000 bond with the state. Much of the current language was written by BP Amoco, the major driller in Southwest Colorado. The bill limits payment for damages to land that is disturbed by wells or pipelines, not the lost value of the entire parcel of land. The bill, HB 1185, passed by an overwhelming 60-3 vote in the House. It could receive a vote in the full Senate as early as today. Isgar has signed on as Senate sponsor. A Bayfield ranching family said Tuesday that the bill was a step backward and must be defeated. "This is just a bad bill," said Jim Fitzgerald, who owns 400 acres southeast of Bayfield. "It's unfair, and it takes rights away from landowners." Fitzgerald said he has one gas well on his land, two on adjacent land and "more coming," courtesy of BP Amoco. Gwen Lachelt, executive director of the Oil & Gas Accountability Project in Durango, said the bill was hijacked by the oil and gas industry....
Court asked to review mileage rules An environmental group on Thursday asked for a court review of tighter gas mileage rules for pickups and sport utility vehicles that many conservationists said do not go far enough in limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The federal government set the new standards last week in response to rising concern about the supply and cost of energy from abroad. The rules, covering 2008 through 2011, would save 10.7 billion gallons of fuel over the lifetime of the vehicles sold during that period, officials said. The Tucson, Ariz.-based Center for Biological Diversity filed a one-page petition Thursday asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the decision. Deborah Sivas, director of Stanford University's Environmental Law Clinic, which is representing the center, said the government did not adequately consider whether tighter standards would have been a greater boon for the environment. She also said the new rules would not adequately protect endangered species....
"Laurel and Hardy effect” spells good news for captive breeding Animals bred in captivity for reintroduction to the wild are able to retain their defences against predators for several generations, ecologists have found. According to new research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, tadpoles of the Mallorcan midwife toad (Alytes muletensis) retain their ability to change their body shape – a defence they have evolved in the face of predators – even after being bred in captivity for three to eight generations. The results have important implications for conserving endangered species through captive breeding programmes. Tadpoles of many amphibians have developed ways of defending themselves against predators. Mallorcan midwife toad tadpoles grow longer tails and shallower fins to help them escape from danger when predators are present. These defences have evolved in response to two predators that were introduced to Mallorca about 2,000 years ago: the viperine snake (Natrix maura) and the green frog (Rana perezi). The authors of the paper, Dr Richard Griffiths and colleagues from the University of Kent and the University of Sussex, have dubbed this change in shape the “Laurel and Hardy effect”. The researchers compared the responses of tadpoles in a predator-free, reintroduced population with those in the population from which their ancestors were collected several years earlier. When the tadpoles were exposed to chemical cues from predators, the researchers found that the reintroduced population retained their anti-predator responses, even though they had been bred in captivity for three to eight generations in the absence of predator selection pressures....
Lawsuit challenges use of hatchery fish in counts Conservation groups Thursday challenged a new government policy that includes hatchery fish in counts used to determine the status of dwindling salmon and steelhead runs. In a federal court lawsuit the plaintiffs also challenged the downlisting of upper Columbia steelhead -- from endangered to threatened -- that has resulted from that policy. "The purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to protect wildlife's ability to sustain itself in the wild. And that means the focus is on wild steelhead in rivers, not steelhead that are produced in hatcheries," said Patti Goldman of Earthjustice. Earthjustice filed the lawsuit on behalf of six plaintiff groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service and its regional director, Bob Lohn....
Conservation Celebrities Recognized as Disney Fund Reaches Milestone $10 Million Investment in Wildlife Five renowned conservation celebrities joined with Disney Thursday night to celebrate a $10 million milestone for the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund (DWCF) -- a program that has benefited nearly 500 wildlife projects around the world. Actor/comedian John Cleese; elephant expert Iain Douglas-Hamilton; primatologist Jane Goodall; actress Isabella Rossellini; and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai accepted awards of $100,000 each for their conservation causes in a ceremony at Disney's Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort. "These very special people, who have devoted their lives and lent their voices to conservation, are the key to engaging the public in caring for animals," said Jerry Montgomery, senior vice president of Walt Disney World Public Affairs. "The adventures and excitement at Disney's Animal Kingdom help us share conservation stories with our guests, and we are thrilled that many of them join our global conservation efforts through the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund. Together, we are making a difference for wildlife and wild places -- we are helping to create the next generation of Disney's conservation legacy." The conservation focus is a large part of the park's mission as a facility accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). Since 1998, the DWCF has been supported by donations from guests visiting Walt Disney World Resort and enhanced by company contributions. The $500,000 awarded at the celebration will be divided among several charitable organizations working in the U.S. and abroad....
Mountain lion bill introduced A bill making it a crime for a mountain lion to attack a human has been introduced into the state Legislature. Assembly Bill 2273, introduced by Assemblyman Bill Maze, R-Visalia, is intended to make victims of mountain lion attacks eligible for compensation for their injuries through the state crime victims' fund, according to Somke Mastrup, deputy director of the state Department of Fish and Game. For them to be eligible, they must be crime victims. Mastrup reported on a number of bills pending in Sacramento at Thursday's meeting of the state Department of Fish and Game in Monterey, legislation that the commission should keep an eye on, he said....
Wildfires Scorch 27,000 Acres in Texas The parched Texas Panhandle apparently survived another wildfire scare, but forecasters predicted dangerous conditions in other parts of the state Friday. Wildfires fueled by steady 40 mph winds scorched 27,000 acres Thursday and destroyed at least nine homes while forcing the evacuation of two small towns about 65 miles east of Amarillo. The roughly 600 residents of Lefors and Bowers City were allowed to return home in the evening and lighter winds helped firefighters contain most of the more than two dozen blazes, officials said. No injuries were reported....
Last frontier From 1987 to 2002, Colorado lost an average of 460 acres per day of agricultural land, according to a report released this week by Environment Colorado. The report, titled "Losing Ground: Colorado's Vanishing Agricultural Landscape," predicts 3.1 million more acres will be lost to development by 2022. "Colorado is losing the equivalent of five family farms every week," said Pam Kiely, the report's author. "Loss of farmlands impacts the environment, the economy and the very landscapes that define us as a state." The report, which is based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, predicts Moffat County will lose more than 100,000 acres of agricultural land to development by 2022. Struggling rural economies and increased development of large-lot residential property is largely to blame for the decline in agricultural lands, according to the report....
A little lambsie jivey: fraud at the stock show The two top winners of the National Western Stock Show's junior market lamb show and 16 other lambs were illegally injected with an unknown substance, stock show President Pat Grant said Wednesday. Grant said officials were alerted to the tampering Jan. 19, the night of the contest. The lambs were recovered at the packing plant, and the Denver district attorney was notified. The injections caused swelling and inflammation, which made the lambs appear more muscular, he said. None of the altered animals was consumed, he said. "It could be something criminal," said Lynn Kimbrough, of the Denver district attorney's office. "We're in the middle of the investigation."....
NAIS
Transcript of Tele-News Conference with Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns And Dr. John Clifford, USDA's Chief Veterinarian Regarding the National Animal Identification System Washington, D.C. - April 6, 2006
MODERATOR: Good afternoon from Washington. I'm Larry Quinn speaking to you from the Broadcast Center at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Welcome to today's news conference with Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns to discuss the National Animal Identification System plan. With the Secretary today is Dr. John Clifford, USDA's chief veterinarian with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. During our question period if you'd like to ask a question, please press *1 on your telephone touchpad. Now it's my pleasure to introduce to you Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns. SEC. JOHANNS: Well, thank you very much. And good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining me today. We are going to do an update on the development of the National Animal Identification System. I am very pleased to make public today what we would refer to as our implementation plan and several other documents that will take us into the next phase of development. A National Animal ID system will dramatically improve our ability to respond to animal disease outbreaks. During the contagious disease outbreak, time is actually the enemy. The more time it takes to track an animal, the more animals are exposed, the more premises become involved, and the more money it costs to contain the disease. An animal ID system will help animal health officials identify the birthplace of a diseased animal and shorten the time required to trace the animal's history to identify other potentially exposed animals. A long-term goal is to be able to identify all animals and premises that have had direct contact with the disease of concern within 48 hours of discovery. As many are aware, this system will also help the U.S. livestock industry to remain competitive. Traceability is being used as a marketing tool by several countries. For example, Australia is aggressively marketing animal traceability to gain a competitive advantage over us. We know how important the export market is to livestock producers, and we want to retain our competitiveness in the international arena....
NAIS Implementation Plan
Integration Plan for Private and State Databases
Implementation of the Animal Identification Number (AIN)
USDA Outlines Plan, Benchmarks for National Animal ID Implementation
A new proposal from USDA outlines timelines and benchmarks for the establishment of the National Animal Identification System, along with a plan for the initial integration of private and state animal tracking databases with NAIS. Over the next two and a half years USDA wants 100% of premises registered and new animals identified and 60% of animals less than a year old to have complete movement data. The full plan, available at the NAIS Web site, gives an overview of what is currently in place and final components of the program expected to be operational in early 2007. By early 2007, USDA expects to have the technology in place, called the Animal Trace Processing System or commonly known as the metadata system, that will allow state and federal animal health officials to query the NAIS and private databases during a disease investigation. The animal tracking databases will record and store animal movement tracking information for livestock that state and federal animal health officials will query for animals of interest in a disease investigation. Currently only 235,000 premises are registered, or about 10% of the estimated national total. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns says some may question that the system isn't working with 90% not participating. However, he explains that 10% are on-board with what essentially was a "national animal ID thinking paper." The plan outlines the following benchmarks for progress:
* January 2007: 25% of premises registered
* January 2008: 70% of premises registered; 40% of animals identified
* January 2009: 100% of premises registered; 100% of "new" animals identified;60% of animal <1 year of age have complete movement data...
Animal ID System to Be in Place by 2009
Authorities trying to limit disease outbreaks will be able to trace livestock movements from birth to slaughter by 2009, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said Thursday. The goal is to pinpoint a single animal's movements among the nation's 9 billion cows, pigs and chickens within 48 hours after a disease is discovered. Many livestock producers have been wary of a tracking system, which the government promised to create after the nation's first case of mad cow disease two years ago in Washington state. The department has shifted gears on other parts of the animal identification system. Johanns said last May it would be government-run. Now, Johanns is letting industry groups create their own tracking systems, so long as state and federal authorities are able to tap into the systems when needed. The goal is for all ranches, feed lots, sale barns, packing plants and other facilities to be registered, and all recently born animals assigned numbers by 2009, said the department's chief veterinarian, John Clifford. Clifford said about 10 percent of the nation's 2 million premises have registered so far. Still in question is whether or when it will become mandatory for U.S. producers to register and report the movements of cattle, hogs and poultry. Johanns has said the system probably will have to be mandatory....
Animal ID System, Cattle Feed Rules Long Overdue, but Stalled by Industry Influence, Says CSPI
Despite the discovery of three cows infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, long overdue measures to ensure the safety of the food supply and to keep foreign markets open to American beef have been stalled, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). In a report coauthored with OMB Watch and Consumer Federation of America, CSPI says special-interest lobbying at federal agencies and at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) helped keep reforms, such as a nationwide animal identification system and a strong regulation governing cattle feed, from being finalized. The report identifies 10 closed-door meetings that staff at OMB, which is part of the Executive Office of the President, have held with the meat and feed industry, and points out that the senior levels of the Bush Administration’s Department of Agriculture are filled with former industry insiders. The groups are calling on Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns to jump start the stalled animal identification system and the Food and Drug Administration to finalize a rule preventing animal feed from being contaminated with mammalian blood, so-called “chicken litter,” and other animal-containing products that could pass on the prions that cause BSE. “We don’t need another mad cow to tell us how weak the United States’ cattle tracking system is,” said CSPI food safety director Caroline Smith DeWaal. “While Canada can quickly track all cattle that may have eaten infected feed, USDA has refused to mandate a similar system in the U.S.”....
Wyoming: Age and Source Verification Program Kicks Off
With markets for American beef proving restless in the Pacific Rim and around the world, the Wyoming Business Council is rolling out a voluntary program designed to help producers satisfy export requirements for Wyoming meat. John Henn of the Wyoming Business Council begins his Wyoming Verified Program for source and age verification of Wyoming livestock this month. As an approved partner in AgInfoLink's USDA PVP program, Henn will audit ranch records to verify age of animals and their place of birth. The program is in place due to restrictions placed on American beef after Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) was found in a Canadian animal on a Washington State ranch in 2003. Even though U.S. food safety measures ensure any material that could potentially carry the BSE agent does not enter the food chain, Japan closed its borders to American beef, depriving producers in the states a market that had brought $1.4 billion annually to the U.S. beef industry. The impact of this program will benefit the producer financially, Henn said. The loss of the Japan market meant a loss that equated to about $150 a head on the finished animal. "We hope we can get that back over a period of time when that market re-opens," Henn added. Animals that are source and age verified have been getting a premium from buyers and packers here at home. Since BSE has not been found in any animals under the age of 30 months, several countries around the world are not accepting beef unless its age is certified by a third party and proves to be less than 21 months of age for Japan and 30 months for other countries....
Transcript of Tele-News Conference with Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns And Dr. John Clifford, USDA's Chief Veterinarian Regarding the National Animal Identification System Washington, D.C. - April 6, 2006
MODERATOR: Good afternoon from Washington. I'm Larry Quinn speaking to you from the Broadcast Center at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Welcome to today's news conference with Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns to discuss the National Animal Identification System plan. With the Secretary today is Dr. John Clifford, USDA's chief veterinarian with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. During our question period if you'd like to ask a question, please press *1 on your telephone touchpad. Now it's my pleasure to introduce to you Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns. SEC. JOHANNS: Well, thank you very much. And good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining me today. We are going to do an update on the development of the National Animal Identification System. I am very pleased to make public today what we would refer to as our implementation plan and several other documents that will take us into the next phase of development. A National Animal ID system will dramatically improve our ability to respond to animal disease outbreaks. During the contagious disease outbreak, time is actually the enemy. The more time it takes to track an animal, the more animals are exposed, the more premises become involved, and the more money it costs to contain the disease. An animal ID system will help animal health officials identify the birthplace of a diseased animal and shorten the time required to trace the animal's history to identify other potentially exposed animals. A long-term goal is to be able to identify all animals and premises that have had direct contact with the disease of concern within 48 hours of discovery. As many are aware, this system will also help the U.S. livestock industry to remain competitive. Traceability is being used as a marketing tool by several countries. For example, Australia is aggressively marketing animal traceability to gain a competitive advantage over us. We know how important the export market is to livestock producers, and we want to retain our competitiveness in the international arena....
NAIS Implementation Plan
Integration Plan for Private and State Databases
Implementation of the Animal Identification Number (AIN)
USDA Outlines Plan, Benchmarks for National Animal ID Implementation
A new proposal from USDA outlines timelines and benchmarks for the establishment of the National Animal Identification System, along with a plan for the initial integration of private and state animal tracking databases with NAIS. Over the next two and a half years USDA wants 100% of premises registered and new animals identified and 60% of animals less than a year old to have complete movement data. The full plan, available at the NAIS Web site, gives an overview of what is currently in place and final components of the program expected to be operational in early 2007. By early 2007, USDA expects to have the technology in place, called the Animal Trace Processing System or commonly known as the metadata system, that will allow state and federal animal health officials to query the NAIS and private databases during a disease investigation. The animal tracking databases will record and store animal movement tracking information for livestock that state and federal animal health officials will query for animals of interest in a disease investigation. Currently only 235,000 premises are registered, or about 10% of the estimated national total. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns says some may question that the system isn't working with 90% not participating. However, he explains that 10% are on-board with what essentially was a "national animal ID thinking paper." The plan outlines the following benchmarks for progress:
* January 2007: 25% of premises registered
* January 2008: 70% of premises registered; 40% of animals identified
* January 2009: 100% of premises registered; 100% of "new" animals identified;60% of animal <1 year of age have complete movement data...
Animal ID System to Be in Place by 2009
Authorities trying to limit disease outbreaks will be able to trace livestock movements from birth to slaughter by 2009, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said Thursday. The goal is to pinpoint a single animal's movements among the nation's 9 billion cows, pigs and chickens within 48 hours after a disease is discovered. Many livestock producers have been wary of a tracking system, which the government promised to create after the nation's first case of mad cow disease two years ago in Washington state. The department has shifted gears on other parts of the animal identification system. Johanns said last May it would be government-run. Now, Johanns is letting industry groups create their own tracking systems, so long as state and federal authorities are able to tap into the systems when needed. The goal is for all ranches, feed lots, sale barns, packing plants and other facilities to be registered, and all recently born animals assigned numbers by 2009, said the department's chief veterinarian, John Clifford. Clifford said about 10 percent of the nation's 2 million premises have registered so far. Still in question is whether or when it will become mandatory for U.S. producers to register and report the movements of cattle, hogs and poultry. Johanns has said the system probably will have to be mandatory....
Animal ID System, Cattle Feed Rules Long Overdue, but Stalled by Industry Influence, Says CSPI
Despite the discovery of three cows infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, long overdue measures to ensure the safety of the food supply and to keep foreign markets open to American beef have been stalled, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). In a report coauthored with OMB Watch and Consumer Federation of America, CSPI says special-interest lobbying at federal agencies and at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) helped keep reforms, such as a nationwide animal identification system and a strong regulation governing cattle feed, from being finalized. The report identifies 10 closed-door meetings that staff at OMB, which is part of the Executive Office of the President, have held with the meat and feed industry, and points out that the senior levels of the Bush Administration’s Department of Agriculture are filled with former industry insiders. The groups are calling on Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns to jump start the stalled animal identification system and the Food and Drug Administration to finalize a rule preventing animal feed from being contaminated with mammalian blood, so-called “chicken litter,” and other animal-containing products that could pass on the prions that cause BSE. “We don’t need another mad cow to tell us how weak the United States’ cattle tracking system is,” said CSPI food safety director Caroline Smith DeWaal. “While Canada can quickly track all cattle that may have eaten infected feed, USDA has refused to mandate a similar system in the U.S.”....
Wyoming: Age and Source Verification Program Kicks Off
With markets for American beef proving restless in the Pacific Rim and around the world, the Wyoming Business Council is rolling out a voluntary program designed to help producers satisfy export requirements for Wyoming meat. John Henn of the Wyoming Business Council begins his Wyoming Verified Program for source and age verification of Wyoming livestock this month. As an approved partner in AgInfoLink's USDA PVP program, Henn will audit ranch records to verify age of animals and their place of birth. The program is in place due to restrictions placed on American beef after Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) was found in a Canadian animal on a Washington State ranch in 2003. Even though U.S. food safety measures ensure any material that could potentially carry the BSE agent does not enter the food chain, Japan closed its borders to American beef, depriving producers in the states a market that had brought $1.4 billion annually to the U.S. beef industry. The impact of this program will benefit the producer financially, Henn said. The loss of the Japan market meant a loss that equated to about $150 a head on the finished animal. "We hope we can get that back over a period of time when that market re-opens," Henn added. Animals that are source and age verified have been getting a premium from buyers and packers here at home. Since BSE has not been found in any animals under the age of 30 months, several countries around the world are not accepting beef unless its age is certified by a third party and proves to be less than 21 months of age for Japan and 30 months for other countries....
Thursday, April 06, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Drought affects grazing A lifelong Sacramento Mountains rancher has asked Otero County commissioners for help to keep cattle on federal grazing allotments within the county. "We need some help right now in the drought," said Jimmy Goss, of Weed. According to Goss, because of the lack of snow over the winter, elk never migrated to the lower elevations. Instead, he said, they ate the grass which ranchers expected to have this spring and summer for their cattle. "These elk, they stayed right there," Goss said. As a result, when the Lincoln National Forest begins monitoring grass availability, Goss said there will be nothing left for ranchers. Commission Chair Doug Moore said the first step is to schedule a meeting between the Otero County Grazing Advisory Board and the Lincoln. "Just give me a date and we'll try to get all the board members there, and the permittees (who graze on the federal lands)," grazing board chairman Bobby Jones said....
Sale of McCullough leases concerns environmentalists The sale Tuesday of oil and gas leases for six parcels on 50,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management property around the McCullough Peaks has left some local environmentalists and outdoor enthusiasts concerned about development in the area. The leased parcels include around 11,000 acres of land within the McCullough Peaks wild horse herd management area, said Andrew Tkach, a BLM spokesman in Worland. BLM officials say the leases include adequate restrictions to protect habitat and wildlife, but others contend that any development in the virtually untouched area is likely to spoil the scenic beauty that makes it a popular recreation spot. "It would be a shame to see all that land developed," said Sean Sheehan of Cody, a board member of the Wyoming Wilderness Association. "It's one of the most beautiful, wide-open spaces in the state."....
Killing wolves works -- briefly Killing wolves that attack cattle or sheep may take care of the immediate problem but doesn't stop conflicts later, according to a new University of Calgary study. Researchers looked at wolf attacks in Alberta and in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming for more than 15 years to determine the effectiveness of removing wolves that prey on livestock. Marco Musiani, the study's lead author and an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, said that once a "problem" wolf is killed, others simply to move in and take its place, Musiani said. "This study shows that wolves are being killed as a corrective, punitive measure -- not a preventative one," Musiani said in a statement. "People hope that killing individual wolves will rid the population of offenders, but this isn't happening." The study is published in the current issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin. Musiani is scheduled to discuss his findings today at the North American Wolf Conference at Chico Hot Springs, an annual gathering of scientists, policymakers and wolf enthusiasts....
Vistas plan hinges on reform of state land It has been four days since the Morrison Institute for Public Policy unveiled its novel proposal for developing Superstition Vistas, a 275-square-mile piece of raw desert on the fringes of the southeast Valley. It will be many months before the State Land Department, which owns the trust land in Pinal County, will know if it can implement any of the report's suggestions, which include building streets, highways and sewer systems before home construction begins and creating environmentally friendly communities. That is because the agency has little ability to weigh in on how state land is used or developed. Its sole mission is to sell the land to the highest bidder, in most cases regardless of whom that is or what that person plans to do with the land. But a reform measure that voters likely will consider in November would change that. It is one of two that is expected to be on the ballot....
Fishermen rally; salmon ruling due on Thursday The political heat rose a notch Tuesday, when hundreds of sport fishermen rallied at a federal fisheries management meeting to protest proposals to curtail or eliminate Chinook fishing along most of the Oregon and Northern California coasts. Members of the largest saltwater angling association in Northern California, the Coastside Fishing Club, carried picket signs and crowded into meeting rooms and hallways at the Doubletree Hotel as rain poured outside. Two police cars also patrolled the parking lot or were parked outside. Inside, the Pacific Fishery Management Council was making its first attempt of the week to design a season around an option that mandates no season at all. That option, a closure, was the preferred option of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency that must ultimately approve the council's decision.... Tribal Leader: Methane Wastewater Threatens the Cheyenne's Land Coal bed methane projects in southeast Montana and Wyoming are on are the verge of devastating the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, tribal leader Gail Small said in a lecture at the University of Montana, Tuesday. To prevent the loss of their homeland the Cheyenne need more allies in all Montana communities and more respect from regional government she said. "For a lot of these tribes I think were very close to losing what we can’t regain," Small said. The danger to Cheyenne reservation in the Tongue River Valley comes from the high-salinity wastewater that is pumped from methane wells at astounding rates and either dumped into rivers or held in ponds. The salt content of the water makes it useless for irrigation and destructive to soil. Small said the methane wells have also disrupted migrating elk herds and some tribal members believe the wastewater is killing beavers on the reservation. She said the majority of tribal members still rely on wild plants and game for subsistence and the wastewater is threatening their way of life. “You can just see the white alkali coming down the tributaries and the ponds they’re putting the water in aren’t even lined, the alkali goes straight into the ground,” Small said....
Conservation Report: The Killing Fields Alan Lackey has been an elk and mule deer guide in the high country of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains for over 21 years. When he is not pulling a pack string into the mountains, he’s a ranch manager in Roy, New Mexico. Before that, he owned the Chevrolet dealership in Raton, where he also served as the president of the Chamber of Commerce. By his own description, he is a deeply conservative person. Like huge numbers of sportsmen across the American West, however, Lackey is quick to tell you that there is nothing conservative about the pace or scale of energy development on public lands in the region. “This is a giveaway of public resources at the cost of every other value we hold,” he says. “Oil and gas production has been elevated to the primary use of our public lands, even when the local people say no to it. The whole plan is like burning down your house to stay warm for one night.” Lackey is referring to the potential energy development of the Valle Vidal (Spanish for “The Valley of Life”) in the Carson National Forest of northern New Mexico. It is a 100,000-acre expanse of wild country that starts with open grasslands at around 8,000 feet, runs to parklands threaded by snowmelt-fed trout streams and huge stands of aspens, and reaches into the high timber country and beyond to snowfields and high peaks. It is home—both winter range and calving ground—to New Mexico’s largest elk herd, said to be about 2,500 animals. The valley is targeted for as many as 500 coal-bed methane wells....
All Fired Up Over Water An aerial dogfight is shaping up over Southern California as rival millionaires duel to see who will be first to get his jumbo jet water tanker aloft to fight wildfires. One has his hopes pegged on a converted 747 cargo aircraft. The other is banking on a retrofitted DC-10 passenger plane. At stake are potentially lucrative government contracts to help fight brush and forest fires. The rush to get the planes in the air comes as authorities continue grounding the World War II propeller planes that for half a century have dropped water and retardant on burning hillsides and forests. So far, Sanford Burnstein of Tulsa, Okla., has a slim lead over Delford Smith of McMinnville, Ore. Burnstein, owner of charter aviation company Omni Air International, has sunk $15 million into converting a DC-10 into a tanker. Last week in Victorville, his plane received Federal Aviation Administration certification for water-dropping operations and is awaiting approval for firefighting use by the Interagency Airtanker Board, a federal group based in Boise, Idaho. But Smith is close on his tail. His company, Evergreen International Aviation, has yet to receive FAA approval for the Boeing 747 he has spent $40 million modifying. But he has strong government connections: Evergreen has been known as "the CIA airline" because of its work with the federal intelligence agency....
Senators criticize Forest Service budget as wildfire season nears Western senators on Wednesday took turns criticizing the Forest Service's plans for fighting wildfires, calling the budget a “shell game” and questioning whether the agency is prepared for what in some areas could be the worst fire season in years. Drought in the Southwest and bark beetle infestations in the Rocky Mountains have officials especially worried about this wildfire season. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson already has declared a state of emergency because of the fire threat. Rey defended his budget, saying the agency has increased funding for firefighting and has a reserve fund available for emergencies. But senators wanted to know whether the Forest Service is devoting enough of its budget to fire prevention, controlling bark beetles and training firefighters. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said New Mexico has more than 235,000 acres of fire-prevention projects “on the shelf,” waiting for the Forest Service to act. But in recent years, the agency has been able to finish just 83,000 acres per year in the state, leaving almost three years of projects waiting for money, support staff and equipment. Bingaman also criticized a plan to shift $500,000 for such projects in New Mexico and Arizona to southern California. Rey later agreed to rescind the plan, according to a statement from Bingaman's office....
Area closed while goats graze nuisance plants The U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are turning a thorny situation on the Sandy River Delta into a grocery for goats. A section of the delta, near the confluence of the Sandy and Columbia rivers, was closed this week to allow domestic goats to enjoy a buffet of blackberry bushes and other unwanted vegetation. The delta is a popular recreation spot at Exit 18 off Interstate 84, and activities will not be hampered seriously by this governmental gastronomical project. The closure for the next six to eight weeks will be on only 50 of the 1,400 acres of U.S. Forest Service land. Part of the area is wetlands, and closures are permanently posted on parts of those lowlands. Up to 600 goats, along with their herders and dogs, have begun their mission to remove Himalayan blackberries, a non-native, invasive species. The eaten area will be replanted with native vegetation....
BLM, Land Office sign access pact The state Land Office and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management agreed Wednesday on steps to provide access to 15,000 acres of public land around Cooke's Peak, north of Deming. The agreement, signed by Land commissioner Patrick Lyons and BLM District Manager Ed Roberson of Las Cruces, would allow the BLM a right-of-way easement for a road across state trust land to provide access to Cooke's Peak. A road into the area crosses private land, and the landowner put a gate across it in 1982, the Land Office said. Na'ama Tubman, a spokeswoman for the BLM in Las Cruces, said the BLM is looking at alternatives and will do environmental analyses before choosing one. The BLM wants to talk to the private landowner, but could possibly build a new road or reroute the current road, she said. There is no timetable for the decision or any road work, she said....
Maryland to Join Eastern States in Regulating Carbon Dioxide The Maryland General Assembly gave final approval Friday to the Maryland Heathy Air Act, which requires the state to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a group of eastern states committed to regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants. CO2 is the most prevalent greenhouse gas linked to global warming. After a two-year campaign led by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and a coalition of other environmental, faith, and health groups, the so-called "4-pollutant, or 4-P" bill passd by veto-proof majorities in both Maryland houses. Aides to Governor Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., a Republican, say the governor does not intend to veto the bill. "Maryland leaders took a historic step today in acknowledging the crisis of global warming and deciding to do something about it," said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. "While leaders in Washington say carbon reductions are impossible, the capital itself now borders a region stretching from Maryland to Maine where reductions are in fact happening."....
EPA joins beef producers in criticizing air study The Environmental Protection Agency has joined a beef producers' group in criticizing a 10-year study by California health officials that found more people died in the Coachella Valley on dusty days than clear ones. The federal government cited the research last year among evidence for possible new limits on dust, soot, and other pollution. But the EPA now proposes giving agriculture, mining, and natural sources of "coarse particulate pollution" an exemption from the rules. The National Cattleman's Beef Association took credit on its Web site for protecting farmers and ranchers from having to enact expensive dust controls, stating, "Thanks to NCBA efforts, EPA has agreed to exclude dust from agriculture sources." Environmentalists said the agency had been overly influenced by the beef producers. "There is the appearance the cattlemen got a special deal politically, and breathers can suffer as a result," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch....
Jump On the Buffalo Bandwagon But the interest in bison meat for human consumption has brought the animal back from numbers dwindling around 1,000 in the early 1900s to more than 300,000 on modern farms and ranches today. Indeed, this is not your great-great-great grandfather's buffalo. So why the sudden interest in the meat? It's actually not that sudden. Demand for high-end cuts of bison originally boomed in the '90s, which sent everyone scrambling to build herds and competing to buy animals, Dave Carter, Executive Director of the National Bison Association (NBA) said. But the consumers' appetite for the meat didn't last. After about a four-year slump, demand went up again in 2003, except this time people were interested in using the less expensive cuts for things like burgers and meatloaf, not just the high-end steaks. According to the NBA, bison meat has less fat than turkey, beef and chicken. It's loaded with Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), which studies say may actually help reduce body fat while preserving muscle tissue. The NBA also says that eating a 5 oz. serving of buffalo 4-5 times a week can help the health conscious reduce cholesterol levels....
U.S. ranchers' group loses bid to block border to Cdn cattle, beef An American ranchers' group has lost its bid for a permanent injunction to ban Canadian cattle and beef from coming into their country. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association said in a news release that U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull rejected the request by R-CALF in a court in Billings, Mont. The trade protectionist group wanted Cebull to scrap the U.S. Department of Agriculture rule that reopened the border to live cattle under 30 months old and boxed cuts of Canadian beef. The case had been pending before Cebull since last July. Cebull is the judge who issued a temporary injunction in March 2005 that delayed the reopening of the U.S. border to live cattle for four months over concerns there weren't enough safeguards to protect consumers from mad cow disease. The appeals court overturned Cebull's injunction last July and shortly after trade in live cattle resumed. Hugh Lynch-Staunton, president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, said it was good news for cattle producers....
Decision on animal ID system postponed The hotly debated issue of statewide mandatory premises registration, as part of a larger push for a National Animal Identification System, has been postponed for consideration by the Texas Animal Health Commission until winter or spring of 2007. However, commission spokeswoman Carla Everett said the commission will continue to offer education on the matter, including a forum at 7 p.m. today at the Brazoria County Fairgrounds, to further explain the proposed animal identification system. State health officials say the program is crucial for expediting the process of tracking the spread of livestock diseases, but some livestock owners argue the system violates their personal privacy and would be too costly. Commission Executive Director Dr. Bob Hillman said in a statement Tuesday that phase one of the identification system — the proposed premises registration regulations — have been placed on “hold.”....
Battle over gestation stalls heating up in Arizona Animal activists in Arizona have three more months to collect enough signatures to get the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Act on the ballot there this November. State and national producer groups are voicing their opposition to the Act, which would outlaw gestation stalls for pork and veal producers. According to the initiative and recall applications page on the Web site of Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer, the group Arizonans for Humane Farms applied for the ballot initiative on September 6, 2005. They are required to collect 122,612 signatures by July 6 for this fall's elections. Arizonans for Humane Farms is made up of the Arizona Humane Society, Animal Defense League of Arizona, the Humane Society of the United States, and Farm Sanctuary. The Act would require that "pigs during pregnancy and calves raised for veal must be given sufficient space to turn around, lie down, and fully extend their limbs when tethered, or confined in crates, cages, or other enclosures," There are exceptions, such as for veterinary purposes and during the pig's prebirthing period. It would allow six years to adopt "more humane practices," taking full effect in 2012, and would not require mandatory expenditure of state revenues. On the other side of the issue, the Campaign for Arizona Farmers and Ranchers -- a coalition of producer groups including the Arizona Cattlemen's Association, Arizona Farm Bureau Federation, United Dairymen of Arizona and Arizona Pork Council -- is opposing the initiative. This group represents more than 3,000 farm families....
Down and dirty They're the crew of the Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs," and they find out firsthand what it's like to have some of the grittiest careers in the nation. Next, they're coming to Craig. Makers of the show are making plans to document the castration process of local sheep ranchers Albert and Melody Villard this summer. "They're interested in having (host) Mike (Rowe) participate in part of the roundup operations as well as the branding and castrations," Melody Villard said. They plan for Rowe to assist with the usual spring lamb operations -- tail-docking, earmarking, branding and castrating. The Villards don't see their sheep operations as exceptionally dirty but admit it's different from what many Americans are used to....
Drought affects grazing A lifelong Sacramento Mountains rancher has asked Otero County commissioners for help to keep cattle on federal grazing allotments within the county. "We need some help right now in the drought," said Jimmy Goss, of Weed. According to Goss, because of the lack of snow over the winter, elk never migrated to the lower elevations. Instead, he said, they ate the grass which ranchers expected to have this spring and summer for their cattle. "These elk, they stayed right there," Goss said. As a result, when the Lincoln National Forest begins monitoring grass availability, Goss said there will be nothing left for ranchers. Commission Chair Doug Moore said the first step is to schedule a meeting between the Otero County Grazing Advisory Board and the Lincoln. "Just give me a date and we'll try to get all the board members there, and the permittees (who graze on the federal lands)," grazing board chairman Bobby Jones said....
Sale of McCullough leases concerns environmentalists The sale Tuesday of oil and gas leases for six parcels on 50,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management property around the McCullough Peaks has left some local environmentalists and outdoor enthusiasts concerned about development in the area. The leased parcels include around 11,000 acres of land within the McCullough Peaks wild horse herd management area, said Andrew Tkach, a BLM spokesman in Worland. BLM officials say the leases include adequate restrictions to protect habitat and wildlife, but others contend that any development in the virtually untouched area is likely to spoil the scenic beauty that makes it a popular recreation spot. "It would be a shame to see all that land developed," said Sean Sheehan of Cody, a board member of the Wyoming Wilderness Association. "It's one of the most beautiful, wide-open spaces in the state."....
Killing wolves works -- briefly Killing wolves that attack cattle or sheep may take care of the immediate problem but doesn't stop conflicts later, according to a new University of Calgary study. Researchers looked at wolf attacks in Alberta and in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming for more than 15 years to determine the effectiveness of removing wolves that prey on livestock. Marco Musiani, the study's lead author and an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, said that once a "problem" wolf is killed, others simply to move in and take its place, Musiani said. "This study shows that wolves are being killed as a corrective, punitive measure -- not a preventative one," Musiani said in a statement. "People hope that killing individual wolves will rid the population of offenders, but this isn't happening." The study is published in the current issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin. Musiani is scheduled to discuss his findings today at the North American Wolf Conference at Chico Hot Springs, an annual gathering of scientists, policymakers and wolf enthusiasts....
Vistas plan hinges on reform of state land It has been four days since the Morrison Institute for Public Policy unveiled its novel proposal for developing Superstition Vistas, a 275-square-mile piece of raw desert on the fringes of the southeast Valley. It will be many months before the State Land Department, which owns the trust land in Pinal County, will know if it can implement any of the report's suggestions, which include building streets, highways and sewer systems before home construction begins and creating environmentally friendly communities. That is because the agency has little ability to weigh in on how state land is used or developed. Its sole mission is to sell the land to the highest bidder, in most cases regardless of whom that is or what that person plans to do with the land. But a reform measure that voters likely will consider in November would change that. It is one of two that is expected to be on the ballot....
Fishermen rally; salmon ruling due on Thursday The political heat rose a notch Tuesday, when hundreds of sport fishermen rallied at a federal fisheries management meeting to protest proposals to curtail or eliminate Chinook fishing along most of the Oregon and Northern California coasts. Members of the largest saltwater angling association in Northern California, the Coastside Fishing Club, carried picket signs and crowded into meeting rooms and hallways at the Doubletree Hotel as rain poured outside. Two police cars also patrolled the parking lot or were parked outside. Inside, the Pacific Fishery Management Council was making its first attempt of the week to design a season around an option that mandates no season at all. That option, a closure, was the preferred option of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency that must ultimately approve the council's decision.... Tribal Leader: Methane Wastewater Threatens the Cheyenne's Land Coal bed methane projects in southeast Montana and Wyoming are on are the verge of devastating the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, tribal leader Gail Small said in a lecture at the University of Montana, Tuesday. To prevent the loss of their homeland the Cheyenne need more allies in all Montana communities and more respect from regional government she said. "For a lot of these tribes I think were very close to losing what we can’t regain," Small said. The danger to Cheyenne reservation in the Tongue River Valley comes from the high-salinity wastewater that is pumped from methane wells at astounding rates and either dumped into rivers or held in ponds. The salt content of the water makes it useless for irrigation and destructive to soil. Small said the methane wells have also disrupted migrating elk herds and some tribal members believe the wastewater is killing beavers on the reservation. She said the majority of tribal members still rely on wild plants and game for subsistence and the wastewater is threatening their way of life. “You can just see the white alkali coming down the tributaries and the ponds they’re putting the water in aren’t even lined, the alkali goes straight into the ground,” Small said....
Conservation Report: The Killing Fields Alan Lackey has been an elk and mule deer guide in the high country of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains for over 21 years. When he is not pulling a pack string into the mountains, he’s a ranch manager in Roy, New Mexico. Before that, he owned the Chevrolet dealership in Raton, where he also served as the president of the Chamber of Commerce. By his own description, he is a deeply conservative person. Like huge numbers of sportsmen across the American West, however, Lackey is quick to tell you that there is nothing conservative about the pace or scale of energy development on public lands in the region. “This is a giveaway of public resources at the cost of every other value we hold,” he says. “Oil and gas production has been elevated to the primary use of our public lands, even when the local people say no to it. The whole plan is like burning down your house to stay warm for one night.” Lackey is referring to the potential energy development of the Valle Vidal (Spanish for “The Valley of Life”) in the Carson National Forest of northern New Mexico. It is a 100,000-acre expanse of wild country that starts with open grasslands at around 8,000 feet, runs to parklands threaded by snowmelt-fed trout streams and huge stands of aspens, and reaches into the high timber country and beyond to snowfields and high peaks. It is home—both winter range and calving ground—to New Mexico’s largest elk herd, said to be about 2,500 animals. The valley is targeted for as many as 500 coal-bed methane wells....
All Fired Up Over Water An aerial dogfight is shaping up over Southern California as rival millionaires duel to see who will be first to get his jumbo jet water tanker aloft to fight wildfires. One has his hopes pegged on a converted 747 cargo aircraft. The other is banking on a retrofitted DC-10 passenger plane. At stake are potentially lucrative government contracts to help fight brush and forest fires. The rush to get the planes in the air comes as authorities continue grounding the World War II propeller planes that for half a century have dropped water and retardant on burning hillsides and forests. So far, Sanford Burnstein of Tulsa, Okla., has a slim lead over Delford Smith of McMinnville, Ore. Burnstein, owner of charter aviation company Omni Air International, has sunk $15 million into converting a DC-10 into a tanker. Last week in Victorville, his plane received Federal Aviation Administration certification for water-dropping operations and is awaiting approval for firefighting use by the Interagency Airtanker Board, a federal group based in Boise, Idaho. But Smith is close on his tail. His company, Evergreen International Aviation, has yet to receive FAA approval for the Boeing 747 he has spent $40 million modifying. But he has strong government connections: Evergreen has been known as "the CIA airline" because of its work with the federal intelligence agency....
Senators criticize Forest Service budget as wildfire season nears Western senators on Wednesday took turns criticizing the Forest Service's plans for fighting wildfires, calling the budget a “shell game” and questioning whether the agency is prepared for what in some areas could be the worst fire season in years. Drought in the Southwest and bark beetle infestations in the Rocky Mountains have officials especially worried about this wildfire season. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson already has declared a state of emergency because of the fire threat. Rey defended his budget, saying the agency has increased funding for firefighting and has a reserve fund available for emergencies. But senators wanted to know whether the Forest Service is devoting enough of its budget to fire prevention, controlling bark beetles and training firefighters. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said New Mexico has more than 235,000 acres of fire-prevention projects “on the shelf,” waiting for the Forest Service to act. But in recent years, the agency has been able to finish just 83,000 acres per year in the state, leaving almost three years of projects waiting for money, support staff and equipment. Bingaman also criticized a plan to shift $500,000 for such projects in New Mexico and Arizona to southern California. Rey later agreed to rescind the plan, according to a statement from Bingaman's office....
Area closed while goats graze nuisance plants The U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are turning a thorny situation on the Sandy River Delta into a grocery for goats. A section of the delta, near the confluence of the Sandy and Columbia rivers, was closed this week to allow domestic goats to enjoy a buffet of blackberry bushes and other unwanted vegetation. The delta is a popular recreation spot at Exit 18 off Interstate 84, and activities will not be hampered seriously by this governmental gastronomical project. The closure for the next six to eight weeks will be on only 50 of the 1,400 acres of U.S. Forest Service land. Part of the area is wetlands, and closures are permanently posted on parts of those lowlands. Up to 600 goats, along with their herders and dogs, have begun their mission to remove Himalayan blackberries, a non-native, invasive species. The eaten area will be replanted with native vegetation....
BLM, Land Office sign access pact The state Land Office and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management agreed Wednesday on steps to provide access to 15,000 acres of public land around Cooke's Peak, north of Deming. The agreement, signed by Land commissioner Patrick Lyons and BLM District Manager Ed Roberson of Las Cruces, would allow the BLM a right-of-way easement for a road across state trust land to provide access to Cooke's Peak. A road into the area crosses private land, and the landowner put a gate across it in 1982, the Land Office said. Na'ama Tubman, a spokeswoman for the BLM in Las Cruces, said the BLM is looking at alternatives and will do environmental analyses before choosing one. The BLM wants to talk to the private landowner, but could possibly build a new road or reroute the current road, she said. There is no timetable for the decision or any road work, she said....
Maryland to Join Eastern States in Regulating Carbon Dioxide The Maryland General Assembly gave final approval Friday to the Maryland Heathy Air Act, which requires the state to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a group of eastern states committed to regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants. CO2 is the most prevalent greenhouse gas linked to global warming. After a two-year campaign led by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and a coalition of other environmental, faith, and health groups, the so-called "4-pollutant, or 4-P" bill passd by veto-proof majorities in both Maryland houses. Aides to Governor Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., a Republican, say the governor does not intend to veto the bill. "Maryland leaders took a historic step today in acknowledging the crisis of global warming and deciding to do something about it," said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. "While leaders in Washington say carbon reductions are impossible, the capital itself now borders a region stretching from Maryland to Maine where reductions are in fact happening."....
EPA joins beef producers in criticizing air study The Environmental Protection Agency has joined a beef producers' group in criticizing a 10-year study by California health officials that found more people died in the Coachella Valley on dusty days than clear ones. The federal government cited the research last year among evidence for possible new limits on dust, soot, and other pollution. But the EPA now proposes giving agriculture, mining, and natural sources of "coarse particulate pollution" an exemption from the rules. The National Cattleman's Beef Association took credit on its Web site for protecting farmers and ranchers from having to enact expensive dust controls, stating, "Thanks to NCBA efforts, EPA has agreed to exclude dust from agriculture sources." Environmentalists said the agency had been overly influenced by the beef producers. "There is the appearance the cattlemen got a special deal politically, and breathers can suffer as a result," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch....
Jump On the Buffalo Bandwagon But the interest in bison meat for human consumption has brought the animal back from numbers dwindling around 1,000 in the early 1900s to more than 300,000 on modern farms and ranches today. Indeed, this is not your great-great-great grandfather's buffalo. So why the sudden interest in the meat? It's actually not that sudden. Demand for high-end cuts of bison originally boomed in the '90s, which sent everyone scrambling to build herds and competing to buy animals, Dave Carter, Executive Director of the National Bison Association (NBA) said. But the consumers' appetite for the meat didn't last. After about a four-year slump, demand went up again in 2003, except this time people were interested in using the less expensive cuts for things like burgers and meatloaf, not just the high-end steaks. According to the NBA, bison meat has less fat than turkey, beef and chicken. It's loaded with Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), which studies say may actually help reduce body fat while preserving muscle tissue. The NBA also says that eating a 5 oz. serving of buffalo 4-5 times a week can help the health conscious reduce cholesterol levels....
U.S. ranchers' group loses bid to block border to Cdn cattle, beef An American ranchers' group has lost its bid for a permanent injunction to ban Canadian cattle and beef from coming into their country. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association said in a news release that U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull rejected the request by R-CALF in a court in Billings, Mont. The trade protectionist group wanted Cebull to scrap the U.S. Department of Agriculture rule that reopened the border to live cattle under 30 months old and boxed cuts of Canadian beef. The case had been pending before Cebull since last July. Cebull is the judge who issued a temporary injunction in March 2005 that delayed the reopening of the U.S. border to live cattle for four months over concerns there weren't enough safeguards to protect consumers from mad cow disease. The appeals court overturned Cebull's injunction last July and shortly after trade in live cattle resumed. Hugh Lynch-Staunton, president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, said it was good news for cattle producers....
Decision on animal ID system postponed The hotly debated issue of statewide mandatory premises registration, as part of a larger push for a National Animal Identification System, has been postponed for consideration by the Texas Animal Health Commission until winter or spring of 2007. However, commission spokeswoman Carla Everett said the commission will continue to offer education on the matter, including a forum at 7 p.m. today at the Brazoria County Fairgrounds, to further explain the proposed animal identification system. State health officials say the program is crucial for expediting the process of tracking the spread of livestock diseases, but some livestock owners argue the system violates their personal privacy and would be too costly. Commission Executive Director Dr. Bob Hillman said in a statement Tuesday that phase one of the identification system — the proposed premises registration regulations — have been placed on “hold.”....
Battle over gestation stalls heating up in Arizona Animal activists in Arizona have three more months to collect enough signatures to get the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Act on the ballot there this November. State and national producer groups are voicing their opposition to the Act, which would outlaw gestation stalls for pork and veal producers. According to the initiative and recall applications page on the Web site of Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer, the group Arizonans for Humane Farms applied for the ballot initiative on September 6, 2005. They are required to collect 122,612 signatures by July 6 for this fall's elections. Arizonans for Humane Farms is made up of the Arizona Humane Society, Animal Defense League of Arizona, the Humane Society of the United States, and Farm Sanctuary. The Act would require that "pigs during pregnancy and calves raised for veal must be given sufficient space to turn around, lie down, and fully extend their limbs when tethered, or confined in crates, cages, or other enclosures," There are exceptions, such as for veterinary purposes and during the pig's prebirthing period. It would allow six years to adopt "more humane practices," taking full effect in 2012, and would not require mandatory expenditure of state revenues. On the other side of the issue, the Campaign for Arizona Farmers and Ranchers -- a coalition of producer groups including the Arizona Cattlemen's Association, Arizona Farm Bureau Federation, United Dairymen of Arizona and Arizona Pork Council -- is opposing the initiative. This group represents more than 3,000 farm families....
Down and dirty They're the crew of the Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs," and they find out firsthand what it's like to have some of the grittiest careers in the nation. Next, they're coming to Craig. Makers of the show are making plans to document the castration process of local sheep ranchers Albert and Melody Villard this summer. "They're interested in having (host) Mike (Rowe) participate in part of the roundup operations as well as the branding and castrations," Melody Villard said. They plan for Rowe to assist with the usual spring lamb operations -- tail-docking, earmarking, branding and castrating. The Villards don't see their sheep operations as exceptionally dirty but admit it's different from what many Americans are used to....
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Column: The mouse that roared Rob Roy Ramey's distinguished career at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science began its death spiral not long after he released research questioning whether a Front Range mouse is a unique subspecies and therefore worthy of federal protection. Coincidence? Ramey, the former chairman of the museum's zoology department, doesn't think so, and he has documents to back him up. Ramey's conclusions, first announced in December 2003 and refined until their publication last year in Animal Conservation, a journal of the Zoological Society of London, startled and upset many of those involved in endangered species protection and environmental activism. Among those most irate, evidently, was an official in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, whose complaints became so vocal by September 2004, according to Ramey, that museum executives met with him to smooth his feathers. But he remained unappeased - or so it seems based upon a letter the museum's chief curator and another top official sent to him on Oct. 26, 2004....
As the chinook go, so go the orcas The killer whales that chase salmon in this region's inland waters feed almost exclusively on chinook, to the extent that the orca population ebbs and flows right along with that of the West Coast's largest and longest-lived salmon, researchers said Tuesday. The whales settle for chum salmon for six to eight weeks in the fall, when most of the chinook are gone, John Ford of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans said at the 2006 Symposium on Southern Resident Killer Whales, a joint effort of his agency and the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. Between 1996 and 2001, Ford said, sharp drops in the region's chinook runs correlated with declines in the northern and southern resident orca populations, as the inland killer whales of Canada and the United States are called. Orca mortality was 300 percent higher than expected, Ford said, and difficult to link to other known stressors. "It was a bit of a surprise to us," he said....
U.S. to Auction Drilling Leases in Utah Bidding by oil-and-gas players could intensify at a government auction next month when drilling leases will be offered on 440,000 acres of public land in Utah. The auction set for May 16 will rank as the largest government lease sale ever in Utah. The stepped-up leasing reflects a soaring market demand for oil and gas, new technology that makes it easier to find and drill deeper for petroleum, and a rich oil find in central Utah that's driving speculative bidding. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance accused the Bush administration of rushing to open more public lands for drilling to buoy domestic energy supplies. The Utah Petroleum Association counters that drilling can be done in a responsible manner. The previous largest BLM auction in Utah was a quarterly lease sale in September 2004, when 357,000 acres were put out to bid....
Company proposes pipeline for liquids from natural gas A company is proposing a 750-mile pipeline that would carry liquid forms of natural gas - such as propane, butane and natural gasoline - from Wyoming to Kansas. The liquids are separated from gas produced in the Green River Basin. As gas production in the basin increases, pipeline companies worry that pipelines for liquids derived from natural gas may be reaching full capacity. The Williams Co. is seeking permission from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to build the Overland Pass Pipeline at a cost of $460 million to $500 million. "This is another project that supports the economic growth that's happening in Wyoming," Williams spokesman Kelly Swan said. The pipeline would begin at Williams' existing plant in Opal, cross southern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado, and end at a Williams processing plant and storage facilities at Conway, Kan., according to the company....
Coos County wants to buy back forest land — at Civil War prices Prompted by a retired forester, Coos County commissioners are trying to see whether they could buy 59,000 acres of federal forest at Civil War prices — $2.50 an acre. Their goal is to cut timber to replace the money the federal government has been giving to counties in the wake of cutbacks in logging on federal lands, aid that some people think could be in jeopardy. But a federal official says such a purchase would require an act of Congress and isn’t likely. Don Gurney of Myrtle Point says the federal government gave land grants to investors in the 1860s to build wagon roads in Oregon to move soldiers, mail and goods. The investors sold it to settlers at $2.50 an acre. One road was the Coos Bay Wagon road, 65 miles long. Completed in the early 1870s, it connected Roseburg and Coos Bay through some of the most rugged country in Southern Oregon. Complaints about the condition of the road and charges of crooked deals spurred lawsuits, and in 1918 Congress bought the land back....
Vandalism chips away pioneer heritage Vandals are burning down homestead cabins and destroying historic windmills in the sagebrush plains of northern Lake County. The federal government this month joined private livestock groups to offer up to $4,000 for information that could help an investigation into the crimes. Last year, vandals hit five historic sites, including a 100-year-old wooden windmill near Fort Rock that they pulled over with their truck, said Lynn Miracle, district ranger for the Lakeview district of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The Beeler Well and other damaged sites date to homestead days of the early 20th century, when dryland wheat farmers settled the Christmas Valley and Fort Rock regions. The well's windmill had a rare wooden flywheel and was one of the last standing in Central Oregon....
Environmental groups angry over possible use of roadless areas Several Colorado environmental groups are crying foul that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) could allow mineral development in roadless areas in the state's national forests before the Roadless Area Task Force makes a recommendation later this year about how those areas should be managed. The task force is holding meetings around the state to gather public opinion about roadless area management so the state can recommend to the USDA a management strategy for the state's unroaded wild areas on Forest Service land. The task force will meet in Glenwood Springs on June 21. Environmentalists are saying the Forest Service is acting against a statement USDA Undersecretary Mark Rey's wrote in a New York Times editorial last year saying that the USDA is "providing interim protection to roadless areas, pending the development of state-specific rules provided for in our 2005 rulemaking."....
Column: The new landgrab: A return to the king's domain The push to privatize the commons is as old as our Constitution. Commoners fleeing the King's Domain across the Atlantic rejoiced in a vast public domain here, where they could freely hunt and fish, while profiteers sought control of valuable assets. Laws gradually attempted a balance between commonwealth and commerce. Today, however, the scales tip toward privatization, as evidenced in President Bush's controversial 2007 budget proposal to fund the Secure Rural Schools Act (SRS) reauthorization by selling off the public domain. The Bush proposal offsets $800 million in lost timber sales, receipts that would flow to county coffers for schools and roads, by selling 304,000 national forest acres, 2,900 parcels within 31 states, and some half a million acres of unspecified public lands managed by the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM)....
Taking it to the people Executives of two natural gas producers and three natural gas consumers said March 28 that the American public needs to hear that the government’s policy of locking up access to natural gas resources is one of the reasons for high natural gas prices. Jim Hackett, Anadarko Petroleum’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, told a press briefing in Washington, D.C., that the group has been going to Congress and the administration with these issues for five years. “We’re now taking this to the American people,” he said. The United States has “vast untapped” natural gas resources, Hackett said, with estimates by government agencies putting the supply at 177 years of gas for home heating. But industry can’t get access to many areas because of government restrictions, he said....
Koch gift lifts Tallgrass preserve A $1 million donation from the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation will help secure future preservation of the National Tallgrass Prairie Preserve at Strong City and boost other projects, state and conservation officials said Tuesday. "This is a major step. We've reached $7 million in an $11 million campaign," said Kenneth Baum, chairman of the Kansas Prairie Legacy Campaign. "We're well on the road and this is, I think, the push that will make us get there," he said. Liz Koch, foundation president and wife of Koch Industries chief executive Charles Koch, was on hand to formally present the check at the Kansas State Historical Society Museum. Fred Koch founded the businesses that eventually became Koch Industries. The 11,000-acre tallgrass prairie preserve, on the site of the former Z Bar Ranch, is the only privately owned unit of the National Park Service. Two years ago, the nonprofit Kansas Park Trust was established to raise money to buy the preserve from the National Park Trust, which owned it for 10 years but faced financial difficulties....
Lost in American West? You may be billed for rescue Last October, avid mountaineer Tim Dopp and his teenage son set out for what they expected would be a day's climb of the highest peak in central Idaho's rugged Sawtooth Range. It was the beginning of a two-day ordeal in which the Boise man and his son would be stranded on a narrow ledge near the summit of the 10,751-foot (3,277-metre) peak wondering if they would survive sub-freezing temperatures. Summoned by a call from Dopp on his cell phone, five government agencies, 60 people and a high-altitude helicopter ended up being needed to lift the Dopps to safety. While Dopp expected to be haunted by his errors in judgment that imperiled his son's life, he was taken by surprise last month when Custer County Sheriff Tim Eikens, the official overseeing the operation, sent him a bill for nearly $15,000....
A Sound Resolution There are few places left in the world where you can pitch a tent under the stars and drift off to the haunting sound of howling wolves. It’s a healing, restorative experience to be so grounded in nature. But the scene changes dramatically when a car alarm goes off in the distance, or an airplane rumbles overhead. In that jarring moment, our connection to wilderness sputters and wanes, and we lose a little piece of the pristine experience. As the world grows noisier, park soundscapes become polluted, just as water becomes polluted with mercury, or air with carbon emissions. Several years ago, the Park Service recognized that natural sound was a resource in need of protection. So in 2001, the Natural Sounds Program was born. Its mission: to help parks protect soundscapes by monitoring sounds, both appropriate and intrusive—establishing ambient baselines, and assessing potential impacts. But a natural soundscape doesn’t necessarily mean complete silence all the time....
Wildlife officials investigate two eagle shootings The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is investigating the shooting deaths of two bald eagles in southwestern Dickey County in late March or early April. Agents were notified on Saturday by a landowner near Forbes that he had found a dead bald eagle in a harvested field near a county road. A second dead eagle was found about 200 yards away. The investigation revealed that both had been shot, probably within the past 10 days. A necropsy is being done on both eagles, said Ken Torkelson, a USFWS spokesman in Bismarck. "Hopefully it will tell us something more than we know now," he said. Bald eagles are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. The willful and blatant killing of any eagle is considered a violation of those acts, and the maximum penalty for killing an eagle is a $100,000 fine and one year in jail....
Idaho seeks authority to kill wolves Idaho wildlife officials on Tuesday formally asked the federal government for authority to kill most of the gray wolves in a pack roaming along the Montana border. Idaho believes the pack is decimating an elk herd. The state submitted a proposal to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that seeks permission to kill as many as 43 of the estimated 58 wolves in a pack roaming the Lolo Pass and Clearwater River Basin area of northcentral Idaho. After eliminating that many wolves in the first year of the plan, state game managers would continue to kill more wolves over the next four years to keep the Lolo pack no larger than 14 to 23 wolves. Jim Unsworth, the Idaho Fish and Game Department’s wildlife bureau chief, said killing the wolves is critical to rescuing the dwindling wild elk herd in the popular Lolo hunting zone. “The current predation rate on adult cow elk by wolves is not allowing the herd to bounce back to previous population levels,” he said. “We believe the habitat conditions would allow for higher elk populations if the wolf population was not at its current level.” Federal officials said they would immediately begin a scientific review of the state’s proposal to determine if the first lethal control of an animal classified under the Endangered Species Act was warranted....
Court rejects Wyo wolf appeal A federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of Wyoming's lawsuit against the federal government over how wolves should be managed in the state after their removal from Endangered Species Act protection. Wyoming filed suit after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected its plan for managing wolves in 2004. The agency is requiring Montana, Idaho and Wyoming to submit acceptable plans for managing the animals before it will remove them from the endangered species list. The Montana and Idaho plans were accepted. Wyoming's was rejected in part because it would classify wolves as a potential nuisance that could be shot on sight outside the Yellowstone area....
Scientists dig out a beaky dino in S. Utah Talk about a big, bad bird. It stood 7 feet high and weighed 100 pounds with a toothless beak, powerful arms and menacing claws. It roamed what is now southern Utah about 75 million years ago, devouring plants and munching meat. Today, the feathered raptor is known as Hagryphus giganteus - or "giant four-footed, birdlike god of the Western desert" - and marks the latest dinosaur discovery from the fossil-rich Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Scientists from the University of Utah and the Utah Museum of Natural History unveiled the new dinosaur species Monday at the Bureau of Land Management's visitor center in Escalante....
Plan to kill deer protested Nibbling placidly at the edge of a verdant meadow, the dappled brown and ghostly white deer with outsized, moose-like antlers are so popular they rival the spectacular bluffs and coastal valleys as a tourist draw. But the National Park Service says the estimated 1,100 fallow deer, native to the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and their exotic brethren the spotted axis deer, originally from India and Sri Lanka, are unwelcome pests that must be eradicated to protect Point Reyes' herd of native blacktail deer and tule elk. The voracious deer are consuming so much forage, officials say, that they threaten eventually to starve the native animals. A park service draft plan calls for hiring sharpshooters to kill male and female deer and using an experimental contraceptive drug on some females. Officials say they expect to eliminate all the fallow and axis deer by 2020....
Devastated, right down to the barbed wire Politicians may talk about mending fences after disasters, but on a recent day when 40-mph wind gusts scooped up fire-loosened soil and spit it into swirling brownouts, Burl Scroggs was the man in the middle of the grunt work. "I've never seen this many fences needing to be built in all my years in the business," he said watching one of his crews plunge posthole diggers into scorched earth a few miles south of Dumas. Blackened fence posts stretched into the distance, tilting out of the ground like rotten teeth. The fires that ripped across the Texas Panhandle last month devoured nearly a million acres of grassland and several hundred structures. Eleven people died, and uncountable lesser tragedies still require immediate attention. That includes the loss of literally thousands of miles of barbed-wire fence. "You can get on a hill and look all the way to Oklahoma, 40 miles away, and there isn't a fence standing," says Delbert Trew, who owns a 5,000-acre ranch west of McLean . "It's the saddest thing you ever saw."....
Column: The mouse that roared Rob Roy Ramey's distinguished career at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science began its death spiral not long after he released research questioning whether a Front Range mouse is a unique subspecies and therefore worthy of federal protection. Coincidence? Ramey, the former chairman of the museum's zoology department, doesn't think so, and he has documents to back him up. Ramey's conclusions, first announced in December 2003 and refined until their publication last year in Animal Conservation, a journal of the Zoological Society of London, startled and upset many of those involved in endangered species protection and environmental activism. Among those most irate, evidently, was an official in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, whose complaints became so vocal by September 2004, according to Ramey, that museum executives met with him to smooth his feathers. But he remained unappeased - or so it seems based upon a letter the museum's chief curator and another top official sent to him on Oct. 26, 2004....
As the chinook go, so go the orcas The killer whales that chase salmon in this region's inland waters feed almost exclusively on chinook, to the extent that the orca population ebbs and flows right along with that of the West Coast's largest and longest-lived salmon, researchers said Tuesday. The whales settle for chum salmon for six to eight weeks in the fall, when most of the chinook are gone, John Ford of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans said at the 2006 Symposium on Southern Resident Killer Whales, a joint effort of his agency and the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. Between 1996 and 2001, Ford said, sharp drops in the region's chinook runs correlated with declines in the northern and southern resident orca populations, as the inland killer whales of Canada and the United States are called. Orca mortality was 300 percent higher than expected, Ford said, and difficult to link to other known stressors. "It was a bit of a surprise to us," he said....
U.S. to Auction Drilling Leases in Utah Bidding by oil-and-gas players could intensify at a government auction next month when drilling leases will be offered on 440,000 acres of public land in Utah. The auction set for May 16 will rank as the largest government lease sale ever in Utah. The stepped-up leasing reflects a soaring market demand for oil and gas, new technology that makes it easier to find and drill deeper for petroleum, and a rich oil find in central Utah that's driving speculative bidding. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance accused the Bush administration of rushing to open more public lands for drilling to buoy domestic energy supplies. The Utah Petroleum Association counters that drilling can be done in a responsible manner. The previous largest BLM auction in Utah was a quarterly lease sale in September 2004, when 357,000 acres were put out to bid....
Company proposes pipeline for liquids from natural gas A company is proposing a 750-mile pipeline that would carry liquid forms of natural gas - such as propane, butane and natural gasoline - from Wyoming to Kansas. The liquids are separated from gas produced in the Green River Basin. As gas production in the basin increases, pipeline companies worry that pipelines for liquids derived from natural gas may be reaching full capacity. The Williams Co. is seeking permission from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to build the Overland Pass Pipeline at a cost of $460 million to $500 million. "This is another project that supports the economic growth that's happening in Wyoming," Williams spokesman Kelly Swan said. The pipeline would begin at Williams' existing plant in Opal, cross southern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado, and end at a Williams processing plant and storage facilities at Conway, Kan., according to the company....
Coos County wants to buy back forest land — at Civil War prices Prompted by a retired forester, Coos County commissioners are trying to see whether they could buy 59,000 acres of federal forest at Civil War prices — $2.50 an acre. Their goal is to cut timber to replace the money the federal government has been giving to counties in the wake of cutbacks in logging on federal lands, aid that some people think could be in jeopardy. But a federal official says such a purchase would require an act of Congress and isn’t likely. Don Gurney of Myrtle Point says the federal government gave land grants to investors in the 1860s to build wagon roads in Oregon to move soldiers, mail and goods. The investors sold it to settlers at $2.50 an acre. One road was the Coos Bay Wagon road, 65 miles long. Completed in the early 1870s, it connected Roseburg and Coos Bay through some of the most rugged country in Southern Oregon. Complaints about the condition of the road and charges of crooked deals spurred lawsuits, and in 1918 Congress bought the land back....
Vandalism chips away pioneer heritage Vandals are burning down homestead cabins and destroying historic windmills in the sagebrush plains of northern Lake County. The federal government this month joined private livestock groups to offer up to $4,000 for information that could help an investigation into the crimes. Last year, vandals hit five historic sites, including a 100-year-old wooden windmill near Fort Rock that they pulled over with their truck, said Lynn Miracle, district ranger for the Lakeview district of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The Beeler Well and other damaged sites date to homestead days of the early 20th century, when dryland wheat farmers settled the Christmas Valley and Fort Rock regions. The well's windmill had a rare wooden flywheel and was one of the last standing in Central Oregon....
Environmental groups angry over possible use of roadless areas Several Colorado environmental groups are crying foul that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) could allow mineral development in roadless areas in the state's national forests before the Roadless Area Task Force makes a recommendation later this year about how those areas should be managed. The task force is holding meetings around the state to gather public opinion about roadless area management so the state can recommend to the USDA a management strategy for the state's unroaded wild areas on Forest Service land. The task force will meet in Glenwood Springs on June 21. Environmentalists are saying the Forest Service is acting against a statement USDA Undersecretary Mark Rey's wrote in a New York Times editorial last year saying that the USDA is "providing interim protection to roadless areas, pending the development of state-specific rules provided for in our 2005 rulemaking."....
Column: The new landgrab: A return to the king's domain The push to privatize the commons is as old as our Constitution. Commoners fleeing the King's Domain across the Atlantic rejoiced in a vast public domain here, where they could freely hunt and fish, while profiteers sought control of valuable assets. Laws gradually attempted a balance between commonwealth and commerce. Today, however, the scales tip toward privatization, as evidenced in President Bush's controversial 2007 budget proposal to fund the Secure Rural Schools Act (SRS) reauthorization by selling off the public domain. The Bush proposal offsets $800 million in lost timber sales, receipts that would flow to county coffers for schools and roads, by selling 304,000 national forest acres, 2,900 parcels within 31 states, and some half a million acres of unspecified public lands managed by the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM)....
Taking it to the people Executives of two natural gas producers and three natural gas consumers said March 28 that the American public needs to hear that the government’s policy of locking up access to natural gas resources is one of the reasons for high natural gas prices. Jim Hackett, Anadarko Petroleum’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, told a press briefing in Washington, D.C., that the group has been going to Congress and the administration with these issues for five years. “We’re now taking this to the American people,” he said. The United States has “vast untapped” natural gas resources, Hackett said, with estimates by government agencies putting the supply at 177 years of gas for home heating. But industry can’t get access to many areas because of government restrictions, he said....
Koch gift lifts Tallgrass preserve A $1 million donation from the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation will help secure future preservation of the National Tallgrass Prairie Preserve at Strong City and boost other projects, state and conservation officials said Tuesday. "This is a major step. We've reached $7 million in an $11 million campaign," said Kenneth Baum, chairman of the Kansas Prairie Legacy Campaign. "We're well on the road and this is, I think, the push that will make us get there," he said. Liz Koch, foundation president and wife of Koch Industries chief executive Charles Koch, was on hand to formally present the check at the Kansas State Historical Society Museum. Fred Koch founded the businesses that eventually became Koch Industries. The 11,000-acre tallgrass prairie preserve, on the site of the former Z Bar Ranch, is the only privately owned unit of the National Park Service. Two years ago, the nonprofit Kansas Park Trust was established to raise money to buy the preserve from the National Park Trust, which owned it for 10 years but faced financial difficulties....
Lost in American West? You may be billed for rescue Last October, avid mountaineer Tim Dopp and his teenage son set out for what they expected would be a day's climb of the highest peak in central Idaho's rugged Sawtooth Range. It was the beginning of a two-day ordeal in which the Boise man and his son would be stranded on a narrow ledge near the summit of the 10,751-foot (3,277-metre) peak wondering if they would survive sub-freezing temperatures. Summoned by a call from Dopp on his cell phone, five government agencies, 60 people and a high-altitude helicopter ended up being needed to lift the Dopps to safety. While Dopp expected to be haunted by his errors in judgment that imperiled his son's life, he was taken by surprise last month when Custer County Sheriff Tim Eikens, the official overseeing the operation, sent him a bill for nearly $15,000....
A Sound Resolution There are few places left in the world where you can pitch a tent under the stars and drift off to the haunting sound of howling wolves. It’s a healing, restorative experience to be so grounded in nature. But the scene changes dramatically when a car alarm goes off in the distance, or an airplane rumbles overhead. In that jarring moment, our connection to wilderness sputters and wanes, and we lose a little piece of the pristine experience. As the world grows noisier, park soundscapes become polluted, just as water becomes polluted with mercury, or air with carbon emissions. Several years ago, the Park Service recognized that natural sound was a resource in need of protection. So in 2001, the Natural Sounds Program was born. Its mission: to help parks protect soundscapes by monitoring sounds, both appropriate and intrusive—establishing ambient baselines, and assessing potential impacts. But a natural soundscape doesn’t necessarily mean complete silence all the time....
Wildlife officials investigate two eagle shootings The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is investigating the shooting deaths of two bald eagles in southwestern Dickey County in late March or early April. Agents were notified on Saturday by a landowner near Forbes that he had found a dead bald eagle in a harvested field near a county road. A second dead eagle was found about 200 yards away. The investigation revealed that both had been shot, probably within the past 10 days. A necropsy is being done on both eagles, said Ken Torkelson, a USFWS spokesman in Bismarck. "Hopefully it will tell us something more than we know now," he said. Bald eagles are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. The willful and blatant killing of any eagle is considered a violation of those acts, and the maximum penalty for killing an eagle is a $100,000 fine and one year in jail....
Idaho seeks authority to kill wolves Idaho wildlife officials on Tuesday formally asked the federal government for authority to kill most of the gray wolves in a pack roaming along the Montana border. Idaho believes the pack is decimating an elk herd. The state submitted a proposal to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that seeks permission to kill as many as 43 of the estimated 58 wolves in a pack roaming the Lolo Pass and Clearwater River Basin area of northcentral Idaho. After eliminating that many wolves in the first year of the plan, state game managers would continue to kill more wolves over the next four years to keep the Lolo pack no larger than 14 to 23 wolves. Jim Unsworth, the Idaho Fish and Game Department’s wildlife bureau chief, said killing the wolves is critical to rescuing the dwindling wild elk herd in the popular Lolo hunting zone. “The current predation rate on adult cow elk by wolves is not allowing the herd to bounce back to previous population levels,” he said. “We believe the habitat conditions would allow for higher elk populations if the wolf population was not at its current level.” Federal officials said they would immediately begin a scientific review of the state’s proposal to determine if the first lethal control of an animal classified under the Endangered Species Act was warranted....
Court rejects Wyo wolf appeal A federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of Wyoming's lawsuit against the federal government over how wolves should be managed in the state after their removal from Endangered Species Act protection. Wyoming filed suit after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected its plan for managing wolves in 2004. The agency is requiring Montana, Idaho and Wyoming to submit acceptable plans for managing the animals before it will remove them from the endangered species list. The Montana and Idaho plans were accepted. Wyoming's was rejected in part because it would classify wolves as a potential nuisance that could be shot on sight outside the Yellowstone area....
Scientists dig out a beaky dino in S. Utah Talk about a big, bad bird. It stood 7 feet high and weighed 100 pounds with a toothless beak, powerful arms and menacing claws. It roamed what is now southern Utah about 75 million years ago, devouring plants and munching meat. Today, the feathered raptor is known as Hagryphus giganteus - or "giant four-footed, birdlike god of the Western desert" - and marks the latest dinosaur discovery from the fossil-rich Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Scientists from the University of Utah and the Utah Museum of Natural History unveiled the new dinosaur species Monday at the Bureau of Land Management's visitor center in Escalante....
Plan to kill deer protested Nibbling placidly at the edge of a verdant meadow, the dappled brown and ghostly white deer with outsized, moose-like antlers are so popular they rival the spectacular bluffs and coastal valleys as a tourist draw. But the National Park Service says the estimated 1,100 fallow deer, native to the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and their exotic brethren the spotted axis deer, originally from India and Sri Lanka, are unwelcome pests that must be eradicated to protect Point Reyes' herd of native blacktail deer and tule elk. The voracious deer are consuming so much forage, officials say, that they threaten eventually to starve the native animals. A park service draft plan calls for hiring sharpshooters to kill male and female deer and using an experimental contraceptive drug on some females. Officials say they expect to eliminate all the fallow and axis deer by 2020....
Devastated, right down to the barbed wire Politicians may talk about mending fences after disasters, but on a recent day when 40-mph wind gusts scooped up fire-loosened soil and spit it into swirling brownouts, Burl Scroggs was the man in the middle of the grunt work. "I've never seen this many fences needing to be built in all my years in the business," he said watching one of his crews plunge posthole diggers into scorched earth a few miles south of Dumas. Blackened fence posts stretched into the distance, tilting out of the ground like rotten teeth. The fires that ripped across the Texas Panhandle last month devoured nearly a million acres of grassland and several hundred structures. Eleven people died, and uncountable lesser tragedies still require immediate attention. That includes the loss of literally thousands of miles of barbed-wire fence. "You can get on a hill and look all the way to Oklahoma, 40 miles away, and there isn't a fence standing," says Delbert Trew, who owns a 5,000-acre ranch west of McLean . "It's the saddest thing you ever saw."....
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Column: Preparing for Nature's Attack Environmentalists and their opponents have spent far too much time debating whether global warming is caused by humans, and whether the transition to cleaner energy sources will be good or bad for the economy. Whatever the causes, warming is a genuine risk. If the earth's temperatures continue to rise, we can expect to face melting glaciers and rising sea levels, warmer ocean temperatures and more intense hurricanes, more frequent droughts and other extreme weather. Is the government ready? No. Which is why we need a Global Warming Preparedness Act. Those of us who live in California have long prepared ourselves for "the big one." Many of us buy earthquake insurance, bolt our houses to their foundations and set aside emergency food and water. Local governments create evacuation plans with first responders and make sure emergency generators are in place. Schools have created plans to house families whose homes are damaged. But nothing like this exists nationally. Under a preparedness act, it would. The law would give the Federal Emergency Management Agency the task of coordinating a national global warming preparedness plan with other government agencies....
Ranchers encouraged by grazing regs New grazing regulations could improve grazing management and help sustain ranching on public lands, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the Public Lands Council (PLC). The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) published the final regulations in today’s Federal Register. While still reviewing the details of these regulations, rancher groups agree the BLM has taken a positive step toward balancing land management concerns with sustainable resource development. The final regulations take effect 60 days following publication. “We have worked for years to communicate to the Administration about the challenges our ranchers face,” says Jeff Eisenberg, director of federal lands for NCBA and executive director of PLC. “The regulations issued today are proof positive that the BLM is listening to these concerns and wants a regulatory system that works, but also helps enhance the business climate for our nation’s ranchers.”....
Water supply is on the rocks, and that's OK The snow that covers Oregon's highest mountains is only the most visible part of the storage system that supplies water to streams and rivers flowing from the Cascades. The very rock that makes up the peaks soaks up rain and melting snow into an underground basin the size of Great Salt Lake. The water from deep under the ground surfaces through springs five, 10, sometimes even 50 years later. Each basin in Oregon depends on these water supplies to different degrees. About 28 percent of the North Santiam River system comes from this High Cascade region. By comparison, 6 percent of the South Santiam River system is classified as High Cascades, according to research by scientists at the Pacific Northwest Research Station, a part of the U.S. Forest Service. "The number is significant because our work has demonstrated how the presence of these young volcanic rocks has a lot to do with where the rain goes when it falls and where the snow goes when it melts and the timing on which it re-emerges," said Gordon Grant, a research hydrologist. "And ultimately, it says something about the availability of water late into the summer."....
Lease sale proceeds Despite Gov. Dave Freudenthal's call for a halt to the process, the U.S. Forest Service is proceeding to offer nearly 20,000 acres on the Bridger-Teton National Forest for lease for oil and gas development at auction today. In a letter last week to federal land managers, Freudenthal said it would make sense to resolve pending protests of an energy lease sale last December of land within the Bridger-Teton before offering more of the forest lands for lease. Conservation groups, as well as outfitters and guides, protested December's lease sale, saying drilling on the Forest Service lands threatened to harm trout streams and other wildlife habitat in the Wyoming Range. Those appeals are still pending with the BLM, which handles energy leasing on both its own and Forest Service lands. Freudenthal last week wrote to Jack Troyer, regional forester with the U.S. Forest Service in Ogden, Utah, and Bob Bennett, Wyoming state director of the BLM. "All told, 44,000 acres have been slated for oil and gas leasing in the Bridger-Teton," Freudenthal wrote. "Such leasing has raised the ire of a varied range of groups and constituencies."....
Column: Troubled National Forest waters Our national forests. The very places we can always count on to have healthy stream flows. Right? Not necessarily. Protection of streams, wetlands and groundwater on national forests will be profoundly affected by quiet negotiations occurring today between the U.S. Forest Service and an under-the-radar state authority called the Montana Reserved Water Rights Compact Commission. So far the seemingly sensible concept of leaving water in stream for fish, recreation and public health — and to provide continuous flows for accommodating existing water-right holders downstream on private land — isn’t winning the day. The negotiations are arcane and mind-numbing, but the result could be far-reaching. It will ultimately settle whether the Forest Service has a legal right — and if so, how meaningful it will be — to protect streams from future development under Montana’s “first in time, first in right” water use law. A Forest Service and commission accord could settle for perpetuity who has priority say in the future of all water on national forests in Montana — including in developed and undeveloped tracts, designated wilderness, and wild and scenic rivers. At stake is the protection of water for countless lakes, waterfalls, wetlands, critical fisheries and spectacular vistas. Curiously, the state’s negotiators on the commission appear reluctant to recognize any legal ability in the Forest Service to protect these public resources beyond a few paltry tools granted by (and revocable by) Congress. And they’re playing hardball, forcing the Forest Service to navigate technical and legal knotholes in order to justify the seemingly common sense conclusion that to be healthy the public’s streams, fisheries and natural areas need water....
Colorado ski development clears hurdle A hotly contested proposal for a major development near one of Colorado's most rustic ski areas cleared a key hurdle Monday when federal officials approved construction of two short roads across national forest to reach the site. The Village at Wolf Creek, proposed by Texas billionaire Billy Joe ''Red'' McCombs, could eventually include 222,100 square feet of commercial space and enough housing for up to 10,500 people. The surrounding Mineral County in the San Juan Mountains about 170 miles southwest of Denver has fewer than 1,000 full-time residents. ''We are relieved this process has come to this point,'' developer Bob Honts said. ''We thank the U.S. Forest Service for the opportunity to build the village with reasonable access.''....
Once foes, forest service and Nevada county back road deal After years of battling over a remote Nevada road and its effect on a threatened fish, the Forest Service and Elko County tried to persuade a federal judge Monday to ignore environmentalists' objections and ratify a settlement that grants the county a right of way to the route. U.S. District Judge David Hagen ruled in June 2003 that the compromise agreement was illegal because it violated several environmental laws. Hagen, who has since retired, stayed the deal pending an appeal by the county. On Monday, the county's lawyers began presenting evidence in a scheduled five-day hearing to try to have the agreement reinstated. Among other things, they argue the South Canyon Road near the Idaho border was built before the Humboldt National Forest was established in 1909 and should never have been considered a national forest road....
Regulators calculate higher bond for Troy Mine Regulators say the bond for eventual reclamation of a copper and silver mine in northwestern Montana is too small for the job, and should increase by about $2.5 million. The Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Forest Service want a bond of nearly $13 million for the Troy Mine, 15 miles from Troy. Inflation and fuel costs were among the considerations in calculating the new amount as part of a routine review conducted at five-year intervals, Warren McCullough of DEQ's Environmental Management Bureau said Monday. ''There were some areas that we did not agree with, but we are moving forward to increase the bond nonetheless,'' said Carson Rife, vice president at Revett Minerals Inc. in Spokane, Wash. The company's subsidiary, Genesis Inc., operates the Troy Mine on private and Forest Service land. In a March 22 letter to DEQ, Genesis disputed both the size of the increase and the process used to calculate it. McCullough and John McKay of the Kootenai National Forest staff said a response to the company is pending. The bond is a safety net for financing reclamation if Genesis were to stop mining, the required environmental work did not occur and government agencies stepped in. Operation of the mine is projected to span at least the next five years, mine manager Doug Miller said....
Feds to Do Own Spotted Owl Recovery Plan Citing federal budget cuts, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided it can't afford to pay an outside contractor to develop the long-overdue recovery plan for the northern spotted owl, so it will develop the blueprint for saving the threatened species from extinction on its own. "We had hoped to get a special funding allocation to handle a contractor who could help us with what will be a very labor intensive recovery planning process," said Fish and Wildlife spokesman David Patte. "It just didn't come to bear." The owl's dependence on old growth forests forced a dramatic cutback in logging on national forests in Washington, Oregon and Northern California in the 1990s. However, owl numbers continue to fall as the species confronts new threats with no clear way to stop any of them _ disease, wildfire and the barred owl, a cousin from eastern Canada that is pushing spotted owls from the best habitat. The decision to pursue a recovery plan, shelved before it was finished in 1992, is part of the settlement of a timber industry lawsuit demanding a new look at the federal lands set aside from logging as critical habitat for the bird....
A Weed, a Fly, a Mouse and a Chain of Unintended Consequences First came the knapweed. Then came the gall fly. And now the mice population is exploding — the mice that carry hantavirus. In a classic case of unintended ecological consequences, an attempt to control an unwanted plant has exacerbated a human health problem. Spotted knapweed, a European plant, is a tough, spindly scourge that has spread across hills and mountainsides across the West. In Montana alone, one of the worst-hit states, it covers more than four million acres. In the 1970's, biologists imported a native enemy of knapweed, the gall fly. The insect lays eggs inside the seed head, and the plant then forms a gall, or tumor, around the eggs. When the larva hatches, it eats the seeds. Dean Pearson, who works at the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the United States Forest Service, said the fly had not halted the spread of knapweed. In a report in Ecology Letters, however, Dr. Pearson reports that the introduced fly has changed the ecosystem's dynamics. The fly larvae provide an abundant food source for deer mice in the winter, above the snow. Instead of dying out, as is often the case in cold and snowy weather, the deer mice climb the stalk of the plant above the snow to the seed head. They can eat as many as 1,200 larvae a night, at a time when there is normally no other food. Mice numbers have tripled because of this food supply, said Dr. Pearson, and with them hantavirus, a viral infection is spread by urine and droppings. It is rare, but can cause a pneumonialike disease that can be fatal to humans....
Outdoor Industry Leaders Lobby for Roadless Land Nearly 50 companies specializing in outdoor recreation sent letters to the U.S. Forest Service on Friday requesting that roadless wildlands in America's national forests be protected from logging and other development. The companies, among them such industry leaders as Patagonia and The North Face, argued in the joint letter that their businesses depend on customer participation in a wide variety of outdoor activities and that any losses to America's roadless areas would "constrain our customers' activities and diminish our business opportunities." The outdoor recreation industry currently brings in $33 billion each year. "America's pristine roadless forests are public assets that provide our customers with incredible recreational opportunities," Patagonia's CEO Casey Sheahan said in a statement. "Without these wild backcountry lands, our business opportunities would be significantly restricted."....
Out of Bounds In the 100 years since concerted restoration efforts returned healthy numbers of bison to the plains of Wyoming, the animal has become as much a part of Yellowstone’s landscape as the geysers and sulfur springs that dot the terrain. But in recent decades, bison have been treated less like wild animals and more like livestock. By 1902, the number of bison in the Greater Yellowstone had dropped below 30, a far cry from the days when more than 30 million bison grazed on western lands. That year, Yellowstone officials brought back a few dozen members of the original herd that had been shipped out of the state years earlier. In the hundred years since, bison numbers have increased dramatically: Last summer, nearly 5,000 buffalo roamed throughout the park. But today that tally is now closer to 4,000. This winter the Park Service sent more than 900 bison to slaughter, ostensibly because of the risks the animals pose to cattle grazing on adjacent lands....
Sempra drops plans for Idaho coal-fired plant Sempra Energy said on Wednesday it was dropping plans to build a coal-fired power plant in Idaho in the face of strong opposition to the proposed $1 billion project. In a letter sent on Wednesday to Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and leaders of the state legislature, Michael Niggli, president of Sempra Generation, said the company would sell the development rights to the project. The plant would have been the first coal-fired generating station in the state. Idaho now gets most of its electricity from hydropower. A few hours after the letter was received, the Idaho Senate passed by a 30-to-5 vote and sent to the governor a bill calling for a two-year moratorium on coal-fired power plants. The Idaho House overwhelmingly passed the measure last week. The moratorium bill says "coal-fired power plants may have a significant negative impact upon the health, safety and welfare" of people, financial security of agricultural business, and the protection of natural resources....
Future of mountain cabins could be at risk Family traditions, rich in history, are celebrated every summer in the cabin villages on Mount Graham - but the future existence of the cabins is at risk. “We are doing an environmental study of the impact the cabins are having on issues such as the endangered red squirrel and with sacred, mountain grounds of the Apache Indians,” Recreation and Special Uses Program Manager Bill Lewis said. The Safford Ranger District of the Forest Service hosted an open house at the Arizona Room of the Manor House on Tuesday for cabin owners of Mount Graham to ask questions about the renewal process for permits. Summer homeowners spoke directly to several Forest Service officials at four separate stations. Many questions and concerns were expressed by families that have owned a cabin since as early as 1920....
Forest Service buys Blackfoot acreage The U.S. Forest Service has acquired nearly 11,300 acres bordering national forestlands in the Blackfoot watershed. The agency bought the land -- six separate parcels in Powell and Lewis and Clark counties -- from the Nature Conservancy last week using $10 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The conservancy acquired the property in 2004 from the Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Co. as part of the 88,000-acre Blackfoot Community Project. "This is great news for the Blackfoot because it puts in public ownership lands that local residents wanted to see continued public access on," said Hank Goetz, lands director for the Blackfoot Challenge, the landowner group leading the conservation effort....
Authorities want say in forest buy Lawrence County officials want to have input before the U.S. Forest Service buys more land in the county for the Wayne National Forest. The forest service has $800,000 that it wants to use to buy property in Washington Township that currently belongs to The Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy has bought some 3,600 acres of property in the county for $2.8 million in the past few years. The proposed purchase would cover only about 1,000 acres or so, said Gloria Chrismer, Ironton district ranger at the Wayne. "I'm surprised by (the opposition)," Chrismer said last week. "I'm disappointed. We've been talking about this for several years." County Commissioner Jason Stephens said the federal government already owns more than 25 percent of the land in Lawrence County. Future purchases takes the land off tax rolls and decreases tax revenues to local schools and pulls the land off any list for possible development. "Local people should have some say" in future land purchases, Stephens said. The Lawrence County Board of Commissioners will be asking local legislators and Gov. Bob Taft about changing the law to give counties input on future land sales, he said....
Sedona jeep tours bring money and concerns They roar through the ravines and mesas of some of Arizona's most beautiful country, hundreds of tour jeeps carrying nearly 350,000 tourists annually. But the tours are becoming so popular that they are not only threatening the solitude of the high country but also the environment. "It's hard to believe that this area has been used for spiritual renewal, given all the din now," said Dianne Leibensperge, who lives in the upscale Broken Arrow neighborhood of Sedona, on the main thoroughfare to the vistas. She said the neighborhood has a carnival atmosphere and the jeeps have put hip-deep ruts in nearby roads. As the state's estimated $15 million-a-year jeep-tour industry pits residents against operators, Forest Service planners are caught in the middle, trying to balance environmental concerns with the rights of businesses in Sedona and beyond....
Forestry official: Make some noise Montana's wood products industry is nearing the tipping point - and could end up following in the footsteps of Southwestern states where lumber mills have virtually disappeared - if the logjam on public lands doesn't change. That message Friday from keynote speaker Jim Petersen started a two-day Montana Society of American Foresters conference titled “The Law and Forestry” at the Holiday Inn Parkside in Missoula. Petersen, of Bigfork, is director of the Evergreen Foundation, a nonprofit forestry research and educational organization. Between 1989 and 2004, 414 wood products plants closed in five Western states, he said. In Montana alone, 27 mills have shut their doors since 1989. Petersen said 48,501 forest industry jobs in the West were lost because of those closures. Many of the shutdowns were the result of a dwindling log supply from federal lands due to appeals and litigation....
Eye in the sky: Red-tailed Hawk favorite of falconers From heights where the large birds are barely distinguishable by the human eye, the red-tailed hawk, with eyesight eight times greater than a human's, can spot potential prey the size of a small mouse. Their fantastic hunting capabilities and ability to hover on warm air thermals makes birds of prey awe-inspiring to people. The Red-tailed Hawk, the most widespread of the Buteo family and a favorite of falconers, resides in the Southwest year-round, enjoying the mild winters and an abundance of prey. Armed with strong grasping feet and sharp talons ideal for perching and clutching, the hawk, as well as most raptors, capitalizes on various hunting techniques. Whether soaring or perched it is safe to say the powerful eyes of the hawk are constantly scanning the ground, Klinger said....
Wild About Wild Flowers John Thomas stands in a field at Wildseed Farms near Fredericksburg, Texas (pop. 8,911), and surveys the surrounding canvas of mixed wildflowers—black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers, white daisies, red and orange California poppies, yellow coreopsis and pink buttercups. He knows that next spring the seeds from his farm will blanket the edges of highways across America. Today, Wildseed Farms is one of the most successful wildflower production farms in the nation, with 65 employees that include horticulturists and botanists. Eighty-eight varieties of seeds are collected on 200 scattered acres in the Texas Hill Country near Fredericksburg, and on another 1,000 acres in Eagle Lake, Texas (pop. 3,664), along the Gulf Coast. Last year, the farms harvested 50,000 pounds of bluebonnet seeds—70 percent of the world’s supply....
Conservation Planning Pilot Project Results Announced In California, as many as 140 customers signed up for conservation planning assistance during the recent Natural Resources Conservation Service's (NRCS) Conservation Planning Pilot Project, according to initial project results announced today by State Conservationist Lincoln E. Burton. California was one of nine states participating in the conservation planning sign-up, a pilot initiative that emphasized the importance of conservation planning to help farmers and ranchers be better prepared to apply for conservation programs and to comply with federal, state, tribal and local environmental regulations. Nine California field offices participated in the pilot project. Using a landowner self-assessment process, individuals who wanted technical assistance to develop a conservation plan applied at their local NRCS office during the specified sign-up periods that ranged from October 31 to December 30. All agricultural land was eligible for conservation planning technical assistance, including cropland, orchards, vineyards, pasture and range, woodland and farmsteads....
Strange love on the ranch Love comes in many types. Tough love, puppy love, love at first sight, love 'em and leave 'em, first crushes, infatuation. And, of course, the obsessive kind which can lead to restraining orders. It is the latter that has struck a midvalley couple. But no one is calling for a judge to intervene. In fact, said rancher Rory Cerise, most people who stop by think the peculiar relationship of Petunia and Chicken is cute. Chicken is actually an African flightless goose who, about six years ago, took a shining to Petunia, a retired saddle mare, on the Cerises' ranch near Emma. Chicken's name comes from his demeanor, Cerise said. But his cowardice might have saved his neck, which he sticks completely vertical as he bellows and hisses to protect his betrothed. Chicken, his brother and two ducks were orphaned one January morning at the foot of the ranch's driveway, Cerise said. Raccoons, and then dogs, got the ducks; Chicken's brother met his end March 12 under the heavy hooves of the ranch's cows. Now there's just Chicken. But he has also known the pain love can bring. Petunia has stepped on his webbed feet, broke his toes and made him lame, Cerise said. "She doesn't even know he's there," he said, which may be the worst misery of all. Chicken's love is undying, but it's costing him calories....
It's All Trew: A criminal or a saint? You never know On at 9 a.m. Feb. 4, 1931, two men entered the First State Bank of Alanreed, and demanded money, according to Fort Worth newspaper articles sent to me by T. Lindsay Baker. E. B. Hedrick, bank cashier, was forced at gunpoint to open the vault where the cash was taken. He was then ordered to lie on the bank floor until the thieves departed. Just as the robbers were leaving the bank, local blacksmith Jim Bryant entered for his daily free cup of coffee provided by the bank. The robbers ordered Jim to lie down on the floor. Jim was hard of hearing and didn't understand the order. When he didn't obey, one of the robbers shot him in the stomach. The robbers then left in one car, switched to another car and fled the scene....
Column: Preparing for Nature's Attack Environmentalists and their opponents have spent far too much time debating whether global warming is caused by humans, and whether the transition to cleaner energy sources will be good or bad for the economy. Whatever the causes, warming is a genuine risk. If the earth's temperatures continue to rise, we can expect to face melting glaciers and rising sea levels, warmer ocean temperatures and more intense hurricanes, more frequent droughts and other extreme weather. Is the government ready? No. Which is why we need a Global Warming Preparedness Act. Those of us who live in California have long prepared ourselves for "the big one." Many of us buy earthquake insurance, bolt our houses to their foundations and set aside emergency food and water. Local governments create evacuation plans with first responders and make sure emergency generators are in place. Schools have created plans to house families whose homes are damaged. But nothing like this exists nationally. Under a preparedness act, it would. The law would give the Federal Emergency Management Agency the task of coordinating a national global warming preparedness plan with other government agencies....
Ranchers encouraged by grazing regs New grazing regulations could improve grazing management and help sustain ranching on public lands, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the Public Lands Council (PLC). The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) published the final regulations in today’s Federal Register. While still reviewing the details of these regulations, rancher groups agree the BLM has taken a positive step toward balancing land management concerns with sustainable resource development. The final regulations take effect 60 days following publication. “We have worked for years to communicate to the Administration about the challenges our ranchers face,” says Jeff Eisenberg, director of federal lands for NCBA and executive director of PLC. “The regulations issued today are proof positive that the BLM is listening to these concerns and wants a regulatory system that works, but also helps enhance the business climate for our nation’s ranchers.”....
Water supply is on the rocks, and that's OK The snow that covers Oregon's highest mountains is only the most visible part of the storage system that supplies water to streams and rivers flowing from the Cascades. The very rock that makes up the peaks soaks up rain and melting snow into an underground basin the size of Great Salt Lake. The water from deep under the ground surfaces through springs five, 10, sometimes even 50 years later. Each basin in Oregon depends on these water supplies to different degrees. About 28 percent of the North Santiam River system comes from this High Cascade region. By comparison, 6 percent of the South Santiam River system is classified as High Cascades, according to research by scientists at the Pacific Northwest Research Station, a part of the U.S. Forest Service. "The number is significant because our work has demonstrated how the presence of these young volcanic rocks has a lot to do with where the rain goes when it falls and where the snow goes when it melts and the timing on which it re-emerges," said Gordon Grant, a research hydrologist. "And ultimately, it says something about the availability of water late into the summer."....
Lease sale proceeds Despite Gov. Dave Freudenthal's call for a halt to the process, the U.S. Forest Service is proceeding to offer nearly 20,000 acres on the Bridger-Teton National Forest for lease for oil and gas development at auction today. In a letter last week to federal land managers, Freudenthal said it would make sense to resolve pending protests of an energy lease sale last December of land within the Bridger-Teton before offering more of the forest lands for lease. Conservation groups, as well as outfitters and guides, protested December's lease sale, saying drilling on the Forest Service lands threatened to harm trout streams and other wildlife habitat in the Wyoming Range. Those appeals are still pending with the BLM, which handles energy leasing on both its own and Forest Service lands. Freudenthal last week wrote to Jack Troyer, regional forester with the U.S. Forest Service in Ogden, Utah, and Bob Bennett, Wyoming state director of the BLM. "All told, 44,000 acres have been slated for oil and gas leasing in the Bridger-Teton," Freudenthal wrote. "Such leasing has raised the ire of a varied range of groups and constituencies."....
Column: Troubled National Forest waters Our national forests. The very places we can always count on to have healthy stream flows. Right? Not necessarily. Protection of streams, wetlands and groundwater on national forests will be profoundly affected by quiet negotiations occurring today between the U.S. Forest Service and an under-the-radar state authority called the Montana Reserved Water Rights Compact Commission. So far the seemingly sensible concept of leaving water in stream for fish, recreation and public health — and to provide continuous flows for accommodating existing water-right holders downstream on private land — isn’t winning the day. The negotiations are arcane and mind-numbing, but the result could be far-reaching. It will ultimately settle whether the Forest Service has a legal right — and if so, how meaningful it will be — to protect streams from future development under Montana’s “first in time, first in right” water use law. A Forest Service and commission accord could settle for perpetuity who has priority say in the future of all water on national forests in Montana — including in developed and undeveloped tracts, designated wilderness, and wild and scenic rivers. At stake is the protection of water for countless lakes, waterfalls, wetlands, critical fisheries and spectacular vistas. Curiously, the state’s negotiators on the commission appear reluctant to recognize any legal ability in the Forest Service to protect these public resources beyond a few paltry tools granted by (and revocable by) Congress. And they’re playing hardball, forcing the Forest Service to navigate technical and legal knotholes in order to justify the seemingly common sense conclusion that to be healthy the public’s streams, fisheries and natural areas need water....
Colorado ski development clears hurdle A hotly contested proposal for a major development near one of Colorado's most rustic ski areas cleared a key hurdle Monday when federal officials approved construction of two short roads across national forest to reach the site. The Village at Wolf Creek, proposed by Texas billionaire Billy Joe ''Red'' McCombs, could eventually include 222,100 square feet of commercial space and enough housing for up to 10,500 people. The surrounding Mineral County in the San Juan Mountains about 170 miles southwest of Denver has fewer than 1,000 full-time residents. ''We are relieved this process has come to this point,'' developer Bob Honts said. ''We thank the U.S. Forest Service for the opportunity to build the village with reasonable access.''....
Once foes, forest service and Nevada county back road deal After years of battling over a remote Nevada road and its effect on a threatened fish, the Forest Service and Elko County tried to persuade a federal judge Monday to ignore environmentalists' objections and ratify a settlement that grants the county a right of way to the route. U.S. District Judge David Hagen ruled in June 2003 that the compromise agreement was illegal because it violated several environmental laws. Hagen, who has since retired, stayed the deal pending an appeal by the county. On Monday, the county's lawyers began presenting evidence in a scheduled five-day hearing to try to have the agreement reinstated. Among other things, they argue the South Canyon Road near the Idaho border was built before the Humboldt National Forest was established in 1909 and should never have been considered a national forest road....
Regulators calculate higher bond for Troy Mine Regulators say the bond for eventual reclamation of a copper and silver mine in northwestern Montana is too small for the job, and should increase by about $2.5 million. The Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Forest Service want a bond of nearly $13 million for the Troy Mine, 15 miles from Troy. Inflation and fuel costs were among the considerations in calculating the new amount as part of a routine review conducted at five-year intervals, Warren McCullough of DEQ's Environmental Management Bureau said Monday. ''There were some areas that we did not agree with, but we are moving forward to increase the bond nonetheless,'' said Carson Rife, vice president at Revett Minerals Inc. in Spokane, Wash. The company's subsidiary, Genesis Inc., operates the Troy Mine on private and Forest Service land. In a March 22 letter to DEQ, Genesis disputed both the size of the increase and the process used to calculate it. McCullough and John McKay of the Kootenai National Forest staff said a response to the company is pending. The bond is a safety net for financing reclamation if Genesis were to stop mining, the required environmental work did not occur and government agencies stepped in. Operation of the mine is projected to span at least the next five years, mine manager Doug Miller said....
Feds to Do Own Spotted Owl Recovery Plan Citing federal budget cuts, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided it can't afford to pay an outside contractor to develop the long-overdue recovery plan for the northern spotted owl, so it will develop the blueprint for saving the threatened species from extinction on its own. "We had hoped to get a special funding allocation to handle a contractor who could help us with what will be a very labor intensive recovery planning process," said Fish and Wildlife spokesman David Patte. "It just didn't come to bear." The owl's dependence on old growth forests forced a dramatic cutback in logging on national forests in Washington, Oregon and Northern California in the 1990s. However, owl numbers continue to fall as the species confronts new threats with no clear way to stop any of them _ disease, wildfire and the barred owl, a cousin from eastern Canada that is pushing spotted owls from the best habitat. The decision to pursue a recovery plan, shelved before it was finished in 1992, is part of the settlement of a timber industry lawsuit demanding a new look at the federal lands set aside from logging as critical habitat for the bird....
A Weed, a Fly, a Mouse and a Chain of Unintended Consequences First came the knapweed. Then came the gall fly. And now the mice population is exploding — the mice that carry hantavirus. In a classic case of unintended ecological consequences, an attempt to control an unwanted plant has exacerbated a human health problem. Spotted knapweed, a European plant, is a tough, spindly scourge that has spread across hills and mountainsides across the West. In Montana alone, one of the worst-hit states, it covers more than four million acres. In the 1970's, biologists imported a native enemy of knapweed, the gall fly. The insect lays eggs inside the seed head, and the plant then forms a gall, or tumor, around the eggs. When the larva hatches, it eats the seeds. Dean Pearson, who works at the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the United States Forest Service, said the fly had not halted the spread of knapweed. In a report in Ecology Letters, however, Dr. Pearson reports that the introduced fly has changed the ecosystem's dynamics. The fly larvae provide an abundant food source for deer mice in the winter, above the snow. Instead of dying out, as is often the case in cold and snowy weather, the deer mice climb the stalk of the plant above the snow to the seed head. They can eat as many as 1,200 larvae a night, at a time when there is normally no other food. Mice numbers have tripled because of this food supply, said Dr. Pearson, and with them hantavirus, a viral infection is spread by urine and droppings. It is rare, but can cause a pneumonialike disease that can be fatal to humans....
Outdoor Industry Leaders Lobby for Roadless Land Nearly 50 companies specializing in outdoor recreation sent letters to the U.S. Forest Service on Friday requesting that roadless wildlands in America's national forests be protected from logging and other development. The companies, among them such industry leaders as Patagonia and The North Face, argued in the joint letter that their businesses depend on customer participation in a wide variety of outdoor activities and that any losses to America's roadless areas would "constrain our customers' activities and diminish our business opportunities." The outdoor recreation industry currently brings in $33 billion each year. "America's pristine roadless forests are public assets that provide our customers with incredible recreational opportunities," Patagonia's CEO Casey Sheahan said in a statement. "Without these wild backcountry lands, our business opportunities would be significantly restricted."....
Out of Bounds In the 100 years since concerted restoration efforts returned healthy numbers of bison to the plains of Wyoming, the animal has become as much a part of Yellowstone’s landscape as the geysers and sulfur springs that dot the terrain. But in recent decades, bison have been treated less like wild animals and more like livestock. By 1902, the number of bison in the Greater Yellowstone had dropped below 30, a far cry from the days when more than 30 million bison grazed on western lands. That year, Yellowstone officials brought back a few dozen members of the original herd that had been shipped out of the state years earlier. In the hundred years since, bison numbers have increased dramatically: Last summer, nearly 5,000 buffalo roamed throughout the park. But today that tally is now closer to 4,000. This winter the Park Service sent more than 900 bison to slaughter, ostensibly because of the risks the animals pose to cattle grazing on adjacent lands....
Sempra drops plans for Idaho coal-fired plant Sempra Energy said on Wednesday it was dropping plans to build a coal-fired power plant in Idaho in the face of strong opposition to the proposed $1 billion project. In a letter sent on Wednesday to Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and leaders of the state legislature, Michael Niggli, president of Sempra Generation, said the company would sell the development rights to the project. The plant would have been the first coal-fired generating station in the state. Idaho now gets most of its electricity from hydropower. A few hours after the letter was received, the Idaho Senate passed by a 30-to-5 vote and sent to the governor a bill calling for a two-year moratorium on coal-fired power plants. The Idaho House overwhelmingly passed the measure last week. The moratorium bill says "coal-fired power plants may have a significant negative impact upon the health, safety and welfare" of people, financial security of agricultural business, and the protection of natural resources....
Future of mountain cabins could be at risk Family traditions, rich in history, are celebrated every summer in the cabin villages on Mount Graham - but the future existence of the cabins is at risk. “We are doing an environmental study of the impact the cabins are having on issues such as the endangered red squirrel and with sacred, mountain grounds of the Apache Indians,” Recreation and Special Uses Program Manager Bill Lewis said. The Safford Ranger District of the Forest Service hosted an open house at the Arizona Room of the Manor House on Tuesday for cabin owners of Mount Graham to ask questions about the renewal process for permits. Summer homeowners spoke directly to several Forest Service officials at four separate stations. Many questions and concerns were expressed by families that have owned a cabin since as early as 1920....
Forest Service buys Blackfoot acreage The U.S. Forest Service has acquired nearly 11,300 acres bordering national forestlands in the Blackfoot watershed. The agency bought the land -- six separate parcels in Powell and Lewis and Clark counties -- from the Nature Conservancy last week using $10 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The conservancy acquired the property in 2004 from the Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Co. as part of the 88,000-acre Blackfoot Community Project. "This is great news for the Blackfoot because it puts in public ownership lands that local residents wanted to see continued public access on," said Hank Goetz, lands director for the Blackfoot Challenge, the landowner group leading the conservation effort....
Authorities want say in forest buy Lawrence County officials want to have input before the U.S. Forest Service buys more land in the county for the Wayne National Forest. The forest service has $800,000 that it wants to use to buy property in Washington Township that currently belongs to The Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy has bought some 3,600 acres of property in the county for $2.8 million in the past few years. The proposed purchase would cover only about 1,000 acres or so, said Gloria Chrismer, Ironton district ranger at the Wayne. "I'm surprised by (the opposition)," Chrismer said last week. "I'm disappointed. We've been talking about this for several years." County Commissioner Jason Stephens said the federal government already owns more than 25 percent of the land in Lawrence County. Future purchases takes the land off tax rolls and decreases tax revenues to local schools and pulls the land off any list for possible development. "Local people should have some say" in future land purchases, Stephens said. The Lawrence County Board of Commissioners will be asking local legislators and Gov. Bob Taft about changing the law to give counties input on future land sales, he said....
Sedona jeep tours bring money and concerns They roar through the ravines and mesas of some of Arizona's most beautiful country, hundreds of tour jeeps carrying nearly 350,000 tourists annually. But the tours are becoming so popular that they are not only threatening the solitude of the high country but also the environment. "It's hard to believe that this area has been used for spiritual renewal, given all the din now," said Dianne Leibensperge, who lives in the upscale Broken Arrow neighborhood of Sedona, on the main thoroughfare to the vistas. She said the neighborhood has a carnival atmosphere and the jeeps have put hip-deep ruts in nearby roads. As the state's estimated $15 million-a-year jeep-tour industry pits residents against operators, Forest Service planners are caught in the middle, trying to balance environmental concerns with the rights of businesses in Sedona and beyond....
Forestry official: Make some noise Montana's wood products industry is nearing the tipping point - and could end up following in the footsteps of Southwestern states where lumber mills have virtually disappeared - if the logjam on public lands doesn't change. That message Friday from keynote speaker Jim Petersen started a two-day Montana Society of American Foresters conference titled “The Law and Forestry” at the Holiday Inn Parkside in Missoula. Petersen, of Bigfork, is director of the Evergreen Foundation, a nonprofit forestry research and educational organization. Between 1989 and 2004, 414 wood products plants closed in five Western states, he said. In Montana alone, 27 mills have shut their doors since 1989. Petersen said 48,501 forest industry jobs in the West were lost because of those closures. Many of the shutdowns were the result of a dwindling log supply from federal lands due to appeals and litigation....
Eye in the sky: Red-tailed Hawk favorite of falconers From heights where the large birds are barely distinguishable by the human eye, the red-tailed hawk, with eyesight eight times greater than a human's, can spot potential prey the size of a small mouse. Their fantastic hunting capabilities and ability to hover on warm air thermals makes birds of prey awe-inspiring to people. The Red-tailed Hawk, the most widespread of the Buteo family and a favorite of falconers, resides in the Southwest year-round, enjoying the mild winters and an abundance of prey. Armed with strong grasping feet and sharp talons ideal for perching and clutching, the hawk, as well as most raptors, capitalizes on various hunting techniques. Whether soaring or perched it is safe to say the powerful eyes of the hawk are constantly scanning the ground, Klinger said....
Wild About Wild Flowers John Thomas stands in a field at Wildseed Farms near Fredericksburg, Texas (pop. 8,911), and surveys the surrounding canvas of mixed wildflowers—black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers, white daisies, red and orange California poppies, yellow coreopsis and pink buttercups. He knows that next spring the seeds from his farm will blanket the edges of highways across America. Today, Wildseed Farms is one of the most successful wildflower production farms in the nation, with 65 employees that include horticulturists and botanists. Eighty-eight varieties of seeds are collected on 200 scattered acres in the Texas Hill Country near Fredericksburg, and on another 1,000 acres in Eagle Lake, Texas (pop. 3,664), along the Gulf Coast. Last year, the farms harvested 50,000 pounds of bluebonnet seeds—70 percent of the world’s supply....
Conservation Planning Pilot Project Results Announced In California, as many as 140 customers signed up for conservation planning assistance during the recent Natural Resources Conservation Service's (NRCS) Conservation Planning Pilot Project, according to initial project results announced today by State Conservationist Lincoln E. Burton. California was one of nine states participating in the conservation planning sign-up, a pilot initiative that emphasized the importance of conservation planning to help farmers and ranchers be better prepared to apply for conservation programs and to comply with federal, state, tribal and local environmental regulations. Nine California field offices participated in the pilot project. Using a landowner self-assessment process, individuals who wanted technical assistance to develop a conservation plan applied at their local NRCS office during the specified sign-up periods that ranged from October 31 to December 30. All agricultural land was eligible for conservation planning technical assistance, including cropland, orchards, vineyards, pasture and range, woodland and farmsteads....
Strange love on the ranch Love comes in many types. Tough love, puppy love, love at first sight, love 'em and leave 'em, first crushes, infatuation. And, of course, the obsessive kind which can lead to restraining orders. It is the latter that has struck a midvalley couple. But no one is calling for a judge to intervene. In fact, said rancher Rory Cerise, most people who stop by think the peculiar relationship of Petunia and Chicken is cute. Chicken is actually an African flightless goose who, about six years ago, took a shining to Petunia, a retired saddle mare, on the Cerises' ranch near Emma. Chicken's name comes from his demeanor, Cerise said. But his cowardice might have saved his neck, which he sticks completely vertical as he bellows and hisses to protect his betrothed. Chicken, his brother and two ducks were orphaned one January morning at the foot of the ranch's driveway, Cerise said. Raccoons, and then dogs, got the ducks; Chicken's brother met his end March 12 under the heavy hooves of the ranch's cows. Now there's just Chicken. But he has also known the pain love can bring. Petunia has stepped on his webbed feet, broke his toes and made him lame, Cerise said. "She doesn't even know he's there," he said, which may be the worst misery of all. Chicken's love is undying, but it's costing him calories....
It's All Trew: A criminal or a saint? You never know On at 9 a.m. Feb. 4, 1931, two men entered the First State Bank of Alanreed, and demanded money, according to Fort Worth newspaper articles sent to me by T. Lindsay Baker. E. B. Hedrick, bank cashier, was forced at gunpoint to open the vault where the cash was taken. He was then ordered to lie on the bank floor until the thieves departed. Just as the robbers were leaving the bank, local blacksmith Jim Bryant entered for his daily free cup of coffee provided by the bank. The robbers ordered Jim to lie down on the floor. Jim was hard of hearing and didn't understand the order. When he didn't obey, one of the robbers shot him in the stomach. The robbers then left in one car, switched to another car and fled the scene....
Monday, April 03, 2006
NEWS ROUNDUP
Deals Turn Swaths of Timber Company Land Into Development-Free Areas Timber companies and conservation organizations have been working to arrange and announce a cascade of deals transferring large, unbroken swaths of forestland into the hands of government, nonprofit — or even commercial — groups that are committed to keeping them free from development. On Tuesday, the International Paper Company announced it would receive $300 million in a deal arranged by the Nature Conservancy and the Conservation Fund for 217,000 acres in 10 states around the Southeast. The largest single tract, an unkempt 25,668-acre peninsula between the Pee Dee and Little Pee Dee Rivers in South Carolina, will ideally revert to the cypress and longleaf-pine forest that once covered these sandy flatlands. The company also said it had sold 69,000 acres of forestland in Wisconsin for $83 million to the Nature Conservancy. The third and largest deal is intended to preserve up to 400,000 acres of land near Moosehead Lake in central Maine. Financial and other details are still being worked out between the Plum Creek Timber Company, the Nature Conservancy and two regional conservation groups. But for all the good news, celebrated by all sides, a stubborn fact remains: The nearly one million acres that have been preserved in these deals over the past two years, including a 257,000-acre tract in the Adirondacks, represent barely 2 percent of timber company lands that are coming on the market in the East....
River May Flow Again, Full of Salmon Big rivers in the West are reliable sources of bad news. Dammed for electricity and drained for irrigation, they have pushed salmon into extinction, fishermen into bankruptcy and Indians into despair. This dismal pattern, though, may be ending on the Klamath, which straddles the Oregon-California border and has long been one of the nation's most thoroughly fouled-up rivers. Its woes include massive fish kills, blooms of poisonous algae, diabetic Indians, fuming irrigators, litigious environmentalists and aging dams that produce little power while squatting stolidly in the way of reviving the river. Two decisions last week -- one by a federal court in California, the other by the Bush administration -- raise the surprising possibility that the Klamath may overcome many of these troubles. For the first time in the nearly eight decades since the river was dammed, Indians and commercial fishermen, environmentalists and federal fish scientists agree that there are sound reasons to believe in the comeback of a river that once supported the third largest salmon runs on the West Coast....
A fighting chance for the Klamath These are times of both deep despair and unprecedented hope for California's $100 million salmon industry. Despair, because a federal agency is expected this week to recommend either canceling or severely curtailing the 2006 commercial and sport fishing seasons because of collapsing stocks on the Klamath River. Hope, because for the first time in years, genuine progress is being made on a long-term solution to the problem. Though the situation is mired in competing scientific theories, lawsuits and political skirmishing, the bottom line is fairly simple: There are plenty of Chinook salmon in the ocean now, but most of them originated in the Sacramento River. Salmon from the Klamath River, once a producer of millions of fish, are at all-time lows, compelling federal protections. Fewer than 30,000 Klamath Chinook salmon are expected to return to the river this year, well below the 35,000 fish biologists say are needed to sustain the runs. And because both populations mingle in the open sea, fishing for Sacramento River Chinook could imperil the Klamath salmon that remain. Though some biologists say part of the decline is due to poor marine conditions, most researchers say the main problem with the Klamath's salmon is the river itself. Over the years, it has become inhospitable to fish. Much of its water is diverted for agriculture, reducing flows critical to salmon....
EPA May Weaken Rule on Water Quality The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to allow higher levels of contaminants such as arsenic in the drinking water used by small rural communities, in response to complaints that they cannot afford to comply with recently imposed limits. The proposal would roll back a rule that went into effect earlier this year and make it permissible for water systems serving 10,000 or fewer residents to have three times the level of contaminants allowed under that regulation. About 50 million people live in communities that would be affected by the proposed change. In the case of arsenic, the most recent EPA data suggest as many as 10 million Americans are drinking water that does not meet the new federal standards. Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Water, said the agency was trying to satisfy Congress, which instructed EPA in 1996 to take into account that it costs small rural towns proportionately more to meet federal drinking water standards....
Desalination research could 'drought-proof' West Texas towns, businesses West Texas is awash in crude oil while water is a precious and perplexing commodity. In fact, in the 1930s, it's said a barrel of water sold for 10 times the amount of a barrel of crude oil. Water is perplexing because so many of the Permian Basin's oil wells produce water along with oil or natural gas, forcing operators to pay large sums to have it trucked away or otherwise disposed of. At the same time, West Texas communities are looking at ways to ensure plentiful supplies of water for their residents. David Burnett, director of technology at the Global Petroleum Research Institute at Texas A&M and his colleagues think they are nearing a solution to both problems, and their work has earned them the Hearst Energy Award for Technology. Burnett and his colleagues are focused on the desalination of the brackish brine water so plentiful in West Texas and are on the verge of developing a desalination unit small enough for small communities to afford or for a rancher to operate to ensure his livestock have plenty to drink during times of drought, all for about the cost of maintaining a swimming pool....
No beaver left behind: Settling a gnawing issue Every beaver a wanted beaver. That could be the motto of state Rep. Joel Kretz, an Okanogan County rancher who shepherded a beaver relocation bill to unanimous approval in the Legislature – only to see it brutally vetoed last week by Gov. Chris Gregoire. Yes, a beaver relocation bill. Kretz’s brainchild would have allowed Eastern Washington landowners who have longed for a beaver of their own to trap one in Western Washington and bring it back to a loving home. Like Kretz’s ranch. The freshman Republican owns 1,300 acres in Wauconda. His spread has cattle. It has horses. It has timber. What it doesn’t have is a beaver. No beaver to gnaw down the scenery, build dams or whack its tail on the water when the wolves come round. Kretz wanted one badly enough to talk 98 members of the House and 45 members of the Senate into letting him get one....
Endangered lynx set free Volunteers opened metal animal crates in a campground here, but at first nothing came out. Then, its footsteps soundless, a lynx sprinted from its nest of hay and vanished into the snowy Weminuche wilderness, its fur a perfect match for the winter-deadened landscape. Researchers released four Canada lynx on Saturday, another step in a reintroduction program started in 1999 and put into action seven years ago. Unbeknownst to the lynx freed Saturday, they are charged with repopulating a species considered endangered in Colorado and threatened in 47 other states. The Colorado Division of Wildlife (DOW) plans to release 218 Canada lynx to the San Juan Mountains by the end of April. While the reintroduction program cannot be classified as successful yet, researchers said there is definite progress. Lynx, brown and gray wild cats similar to bobcats, weigh between 18 and 44 pounds, and have tufted ears. Their broad paws -- a trademark feature -- act as natural snowshoes and help them move through the winter landscape. Trackers describe the cats as shy, elusive animals who enjoy living in dark timber....
Grizzly bear experts at odds The government's call to remove federal protections for grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park has sparked sharp debate among some of the country's leading bear experts, who are divided over whether the bear population has recovered enough. On one side, some experts believe delisting the bears now - without greater habitat protections or long- term funding commitments - would mean erasing gains made over the past 30 years and could once again leave the grizzlies in peril. Other experts, however, insist that recovery goals have been met and that it's time for the federal government to focus on lesser-known, struggling bear populations in the West. "The Endangered Species Act was set up to get to what we have now in Yellowstone, a recovered population, and not set up to immunize a species against any kind of threat somebody's imagination might think would happen in the future," said Sterling Miller, who's studied bears for three decades and is now a senior wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Federation in Missoula, Mont. How scientists working with the same data can reach such wildly different conclusions about the fate of the bears is partly a matter of specialty: Many of those who have taken sides are considered either conservation biologists or wildlife biologists - and tend to view the issue and science from those sometimes contrasting perspectives....
Sea Lions' Dining Habits Stump the Corps A particularly crafty sea lion is befuddling the Army Corps of Engineers. Sea lions have been camping out at the base of the Bonneville Dam and eating salmon trying to migrate up the Columbia River to spawn. Last year they ate some 3.5 percent of the migrating run when salmon numbers were down. This year's run begins in earnest this month, but it is off to a slow start. The Seattle Times reported that, as of Tuesday, about 200 of the chinook, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act, had gone through the dam's fish passage, compared with an average of 3,085 for the date. Biologists are unsure why that is, but it makes the sea lions' take all the more important. One lion in particular, named C404 after a brand applied by a state and federal program, is in a class by himself. He has figured out how to get into fish ladders that help fish past the dam. The engineers have installed gates and tried huge firecrackers, rockets, rubber bullets and noises that sea lions do not like. Nothing has worked....
The Job No Americans Want Isn't Getting Any Easier The seven sheepherders were eating lunch in a trailer with no toilet, heat or water, its leaky roof held down by a rope. A lunch break, especially one together, was a rare event. But they were celebrating, sort of. Lambing season was ending. That's when the ewes give birth and the sheepherders who come to this country on three-year work visas put in their hardest 12- to 16-hour days, seven days a week. Still, the sheepherders were steeling themselves for spring. From late March until fall, sheepherding is almost unbearably lonely. Each herder is driven deep into pastures far from town or even a paved road. For weeks on end, he sees no one but the boss, and rarely does he have a cellphone or radio. In the list of jobs immigrants perform that no U.S. citizen wants, sheepherding must rank near the top. The 825 or so sheepherders who work the nation's sheep farms -- mostly in California, Texas and Wyoming -- are immigrants here on H-2A visas from Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Mexico, according to the Western Range Association, an industry group....
Beef trial under way in Aberdeen federal court A jury of four men and four women from northeast South Dakota will decide whether meat packers cost cattle producers as much as $42.79 million during the spring of 2001. The federal court case started with jury selection and opening arguments Friday in Aberdeen. Three cattlemen filed the suit two and a half years ago. It alleges that the nation's four largest meat packers knowingly took advantage of a U.S. Department of Agriculture error to lower the amounts paid to farmers and ranchers for their live cattle. All of the meat packers named in the case say they didn't know about the USDA error so it couldn't have impacted live cattle prices. That there was an error is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that it was not the fault of the packers. From April 2 to May 11, 2001, the USDA incorrectly reported the prices of what are called cutout averages for some beef. Cutout reports, which the USDA is in charge of issuing twice each market day, contain average prices of various cuts of meat. During the time frame in question, cutout averages for choice and select meat were too low because a lower quality of meat was used, in part, to figure them. The mistake was the result of an error in computer software provided by a federal government contractor....
No one survived crash in rugged terrain Commercial airline travel in the United States was relatively new when a Transcontinental Air Transport (T.A.T.) plane disappeared en route from Albuquerque to Winslow with three crew members and five passengers on board in early September 1929. A.B. McGaffey, a highly respected businessman from western Valencia County, was among the five missing passengers. Searchers combed the area on land and from the air. Even Charles Lindbergh joined the search, accompanied by his bride, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Although every rumor of a sighting was pursued, nothing had been found of the plane (with wing number 9649) or its passengers and crew for three long days. But then the searchers' luck suddenly seemed to have changed. On Friday, Sept. 6, search plane pilot D.W. Tomlinson delivered promising news after returning from a flight to an area about a hundred miles north of Winslow....
Relative recalls life of Texas gunslinger John King Fisher was killed during an ambush at the old Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio. He was a colorful guy. He wore colorful clothes — big sombreros and Mexican vests stitched with gold. He had colorful friends and colorful enemies. King Fisher wasn’t the target of the ambush. He was with Ben Thompson, the legendary marshal of Austin. Several years before the fateful performance, Thompson had killed the owner of the theater. Unfortunately for Thompson and Fisher, the new owner had been a friend of the old owner and knew how to carry a grudge. King Fisher died in 1884 after a full life. He was 29....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Dead cat sends bridge luncheon ladies to E.R. The scene at the emergency room was right out of "ER." But it was not a four-car pile up, a Metamucil overdose, or a hippopotamus attack, no. Six women, age 41 to 62, were admitted with food poisoning. The woman in charge, who had also been the hostess of the Women's Bridge Luncheon Party, had sent out invitations. She planned on serving a salmon mousse, vinaigrette salad, cold asparagus spears a la Miracle Whip, with Kit Kats and coffee for dessert. Lunch had gone well. All the guests had eaten their salmon mousse. The hostess had been worried since the salmon was farm raised, but it was three times cheaper....
Deals Turn Swaths of Timber Company Land Into Development-Free Areas Timber companies and conservation organizations have been working to arrange and announce a cascade of deals transferring large, unbroken swaths of forestland into the hands of government, nonprofit — or even commercial — groups that are committed to keeping them free from development. On Tuesday, the International Paper Company announced it would receive $300 million in a deal arranged by the Nature Conservancy and the Conservation Fund for 217,000 acres in 10 states around the Southeast. The largest single tract, an unkempt 25,668-acre peninsula between the Pee Dee and Little Pee Dee Rivers in South Carolina, will ideally revert to the cypress and longleaf-pine forest that once covered these sandy flatlands. The company also said it had sold 69,000 acres of forestland in Wisconsin for $83 million to the Nature Conservancy. The third and largest deal is intended to preserve up to 400,000 acres of land near Moosehead Lake in central Maine. Financial and other details are still being worked out between the Plum Creek Timber Company, the Nature Conservancy and two regional conservation groups. But for all the good news, celebrated by all sides, a stubborn fact remains: The nearly one million acres that have been preserved in these deals over the past two years, including a 257,000-acre tract in the Adirondacks, represent barely 2 percent of timber company lands that are coming on the market in the East....
River May Flow Again, Full of Salmon Big rivers in the West are reliable sources of bad news. Dammed for electricity and drained for irrigation, they have pushed salmon into extinction, fishermen into bankruptcy and Indians into despair. This dismal pattern, though, may be ending on the Klamath, which straddles the Oregon-California border and has long been one of the nation's most thoroughly fouled-up rivers. Its woes include massive fish kills, blooms of poisonous algae, diabetic Indians, fuming irrigators, litigious environmentalists and aging dams that produce little power while squatting stolidly in the way of reviving the river. Two decisions last week -- one by a federal court in California, the other by the Bush administration -- raise the surprising possibility that the Klamath may overcome many of these troubles. For the first time in the nearly eight decades since the river was dammed, Indians and commercial fishermen, environmentalists and federal fish scientists agree that there are sound reasons to believe in the comeback of a river that once supported the third largest salmon runs on the West Coast....
A fighting chance for the Klamath These are times of both deep despair and unprecedented hope for California's $100 million salmon industry. Despair, because a federal agency is expected this week to recommend either canceling or severely curtailing the 2006 commercial and sport fishing seasons because of collapsing stocks on the Klamath River. Hope, because for the first time in years, genuine progress is being made on a long-term solution to the problem. Though the situation is mired in competing scientific theories, lawsuits and political skirmishing, the bottom line is fairly simple: There are plenty of Chinook salmon in the ocean now, but most of them originated in the Sacramento River. Salmon from the Klamath River, once a producer of millions of fish, are at all-time lows, compelling federal protections. Fewer than 30,000 Klamath Chinook salmon are expected to return to the river this year, well below the 35,000 fish biologists say are needed to sustain the runs. And because both populations mingle in the open sea, fishing for Sacramento River Chinook could imperil the Klamath salmon that remain. Though some biologists say part of the decline is due to poor marine conditions, most researchers say the main problem with the Klamath's salmon is the river itself. Over the years, it has become inhospitable to fish. Much of its water is diverted for agriculture, reducing flows critical to salmon....
EPA May Weaken Rule on Water Quality The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to allow higher levels of contaminants such as arsenic in the drinking water used by small rural communities, in response to complaints that they cannot afford to comply with recently imposed limits. The proposal would roll back a rule that went into effect earlier this year and make it permissible for water systems serving 10,000 or fewer residents to have three times the level of contaminants allowed under that regulation. About 50 million people live in communities that would be affected by the proposed change. In the case of arsenic, the most recent EPA data suggest as many as 10 million Americans are drinking water that does not meet the new federal standards. Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Water, said the agency was trying to satisfy Congress, which instructed EPA in 1996 to take into account that it costs small rural towns proportionately more to meet federal drinking water standards....
Desalination research could 'drought-proof' West Texas towns, businesses West Texas is awash in crude oil while water is a precious and perplexing commodity. In fact, in the 1930s, it's said a barrel of water sold for 10 times the amount of a barrel of crude oil. Water is perplexing because so many of the Permian Basin's oil wells produce water along with oil or natural gas, forcing operators to pay large sums to have it trucked away or otherwise disposed of. At the same time, West Texas communities are looking at ways to ensure plentiful supplies of water for their residents. David Burnett, director of technology at the Global Petroleum Research Institute at Texas A&M and his colleagues think they are nearing a solution to both problems, and their work has earned them the Hearst Energy Award for Technology. Burnett and his colleagues are focused on the desalination of the brackish brine water so plentiful in West Texas and are on the verge of developing a desalination unit small enough for small communities to afford or for a rancher to operate to ensure his livestock have plenty to drink during times of drought, all for about the cost of maintaining a swimming pool....
No beaver left behind: Settling a gnawing issue Every beaver a wanted beaver. That could be the motto of state Rep. Joel Kretz, an Okanogan County rancher who shepherded a beaver relocation bill to unanimous approval in the Legislature – only to see it brutally vetoed last week by Gov. Chris Gregoire. Yes, a beaver relocation bill. Kretz’s brainchild would have allowed Eastern Washington landowners who have longed for a beaver of their own to trap one in Western Washington and bring it back to a loving home. Like Kretz’s ranch. The freshman Republican owns 1,300 acres in Wauconda. His spread has cattle. It has horses. It has timber. What it doesn’t have is a beaver. No beaver to gnaw down the scenery, build dams or whack its tail on the water when the wolves come round. Kretz wanted one badly enough to talk 98 members of the House and 45 members of the Senate into letting him get one....
Endangered lynx set free Volunteers opened metal animal crates in a campground here, but at first nothing came out. Then, its footsteps soundless, a lynx sprinted from its nest of hay and vanished into the snowy Weminuche wilderness, its fur a perfect match for the winter-deadened landscape. Researchers released four Canada lynx on Saturday, another step in a reintroduction program started in 1999 and put into action seven years ago. Unbeknownst to the lynx freed Saturday, they are charged with repopulating a species considered endangered in Colorado and threatened in 47 other states. The Colorado Division of Wildlife (DOW) plans to release 218 Canada lynx to the San Juan Mountains by the end of April. While the reintroduction program cannot be classified as successful yet, researchers said there is definite progress. Lynx, brown and gray wild cats similar to bobcats, weigh between 18 and 44 pounds, and have tufted ears. Their broad paws -- a trademark feature -- act as natural snowshoes and help them move through the winter landscape. Trackers describe the cats as shy, elusive animals who enjoy living in dark timber....
Grizzly bear experts at odds The government's call to remove federal protections for grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park has sparked sharp debate among some of the country's leading bear experts, who are divided over whether the bear population has recovered enough. On one side, some experts believe delisting the bears now - without greater habitat protections or long- term funding commitments - would mean erasing gains made over the past 30 years and could once again leave the grizzlies in peril. Other experts, however, insist that recovery goals have been met and that it's time for the federal government to focus on lesser-known, struggling bear populations in the West. "The Endangered Species Act was set up to get to what we have now in Yellowstone, a recovered population, and not set up to immunize a species against any kind of threat somebody's imagination might think would happen in the future," said Sterling Miller, who's studied bears for three decades and is now a senior wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Federation in Missoula, Mont. How scientists working with the same data can reach such wildly different conclusions about the fate of the bears is partly a matter of specialty: Many of those who have taken sides are considered either conservation biologists or wildlife biologists - and tend to view the issue and science from those sometimes contrasting perspectives....
Sea Lions' Dining Habits Stump the Corps A particularly crafty sea lion is befuddling the Army Corps of Engineers. Sea lions have been camping out at the base of the Bonneville Dam and eating salmon trying to migrate up the Columbia River to spawn. Last year they ate some 3.5 percent of the migrating run when salmon numbers were down. This year's run begins in earnest this month, but it is off to a slow start. The Seattle Times reported that, as of Tuesday, about 200 of the chinook, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act, had gone through the dam's fish passage, compared with an average of 3,085 for the date. Biologists are unsure why that is, but it makes the sea lions' take all the more important. One lion in particular, named C404 after a brand applied by a state and federal program, is in a class by himself. He has figured out how to get into fish ladders that help fish past the dam. The engineers have installed gates and tried huge firecrackers, rockets, rubber bullets and noises that sea lions do not like. Nothing has worked....
The Job No Americans Want Isn't Getting Any Easier The seven sheepherders were eating lunch in a trailer with no toilet, heat or water, its leaky roof held down by a rope. A lunch break, especially one together, was a rare event. But they were celebrating, sort of. Lambing season was ending. That's when the ewes give birth and the sheepherders who come to this country on three-year work visas put in their hardest 12- to 16-hour days, seven days a week. Still, the sheepherders were steeling themselves for spring. From late March until fall, sheepherding is almost unbearably lonely. Each herder is driven deep into pastures far from town or even a paved road. For weeks on end, he sees no one but the boss, and rarely does he have a cellphone or radio. In the list of jobs immigrants perform that no U.S. citizen wants, sheepherding must rank near the top. The 825 or so sheepherders who work the nation's sheep farms -- mostly in California, Texas and Wyoming -- are immigrants here on H-2A visas from Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Mexico, according to the Western Range Association, an industry group....
Beef trial under way in Aberdeen federal court A jury of four men and four women from northeast South Dakota will decide whether meat packers cost cattle producers as much as $42.79 million during the spring of 2001. The federal court case started with jury selection and opening arguments Friday in Aberdeen. Three cattlemen filed the suit two and a half years ago. It alleges that the nation's four largest meat packers knowingly took advantage of a U.S. Department of Agriculture error to lower the amounts paid to farmers and ranchers for their live cattle. All of the meat packers named in the case say they didn't know about the USDA error so it couldn't have impacted live cattle prices. That there was an error is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that it was not the fault of the packers. From April 2 to May 11, 2001, the USDA incorrectly reported the prices of what are called cutout averages for some beef. Cutout reports, which the USDA is in charge of issuing twice each market day, contain average prices of various cuts of meat. During the time frame in question, cutout averages for choice and select meat were too low because a lower quality of meat was used, in part, to figure them. The mistake was the result of an error in computer software provided by a federal government contractor....
No one survived crash in rugged terrain Commercial airline travel in the United States was relatively new when a Transcontinental Air Transport (T.A.T.) plane disappeared en route from Albuquerque to Winslow with three crew members and five passengers on board in early September 1929. A.B. McGaffey, a highly respected businessman from western Valencia County, was among the five missing passengers. Searchers combed the area on land and from the air. Even Charles Lindbergh joined the search, accompanied by his bride, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Although every rumor of a sighting was pursued, nothing had been found of the plane (with wing number 9649) or its passengers and crew for three long days. But then the searchers' luck suddenly seemed to have changed. On Friday, Sept. 6, search plane pilot D.W. Tomlinson delivered promising news after returning from a flight to an area about a hundred miles north of Winslow....
Relative recalls life of Texas gunslinger John King Fisher was killed during an ambush at the old Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio. He was a colorful guy. He wore colorful clothes — big sombreros and Mexican vests stitched with gold. He had colorful friends and colorful enemies. King Fisher wasn’t the target of the ambush. He was with Ben Thompson, the legendary marshal of Austin. Several years before the fateful performance, Thompson had killed the owner of the theater. Unfortunately for Thompson and Fisher, the new owner had been a friend of the old owner and knew how to carry a grudge. King Fisher died in 1884 after a full life. He was 29....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Dead cat sends bridge luncheon ladies to E.R. The scene at the emergency room was right out of "ER." But it was not a four-car pile up, a Metamucil overdose, or a hippopotamus attack, no. Six women, age 41 to 62, were admitted with food poisoning. The woman in charge, who had also been the hostess of the Women's Bridge Luncheon Party, had sent out invitations. She planned on serving a salmon mousse, vinaigrette salad, cold asparagus spears a la Miracle Whip, with Kit Kats and coffee for dessert. Lunch had gone well. All the guests had eaten their salmon mousse. The hostess had been worried since the salmon was farm raised, but it was three times cheaper....
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