NEWS ROUNDUP

Report: BLM right to suspend employee The Bureau of Land Management could have done more to ease tension among staff in Bakersfield, but the agency was right to discipline an employee who later killed herself, a federal investigation found. Marlene Braun, former manager of Carrizo Plain National Monument, shot her two dogs and then herself in May 2005. In a suicide note, she blamed her boss, Ron Huntsinger, saying "she could no longer take (his) abuse, humiliation and lies," wrote Earl Devaney, inspector general of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Devaney's office has yet to release a detailed account of Braun's death, but its findings are summarized in a two-page letter sent to members of Congress and others Aug. 8. These are its main points: * BLM was right to suspend Braun for complaining about Huntsinger to the Nature Conservancy and state Department of Fish and Game, BLM's partners in managing the Carrizo Plain. * As a manager, Braun had become "confrontational and one-sided," steamrolling opposition and refusing to attend management training....
Northern Nevadans Don't Want to Gamble With Their Water Las Vegas is a parched desert city in a four-year drought, with new residents pouring in at a rate of at least 5,000 per month. So water officials plan to tap a great system of aquifers that form underground lakes in a swath across Nevada, some of them hundreds of miles away. But the water is not free for the taking. On top of the aquifers are ranches and small towns, where a small, tenacious group of rural residents are fighting hard to keep Las Vegas from sucking them dry. "It's a question of values," said Dean Baker, a rancher with 2,000 head of cattle in White Pine County. "Will society accept drying up this environment to feed Las Vegas's money appetite?" The battle is the latest in a long series of skirmishes between Western cities and rural areas over limited supplies of water and how it should be allocated. Typically, cities win. Coastal California, Phoenix and Salt Lake City all rely on distant groundwater supplies. Such transfers of water from rural to urban areas "have not yet occurred in Nevada," said Hal Rothman, a professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "But they are beginning here."....
Gypsum settles out of court on water After 15 years of negotiations that culminated with a condemnation lawsuit, the town of Gypsum has settled its water rights fight with Gypsum Creek rancher Ned Goldsmith. The out-of-court settlement specifies that the town will pay Goldsmith and his companies, Agvest LLC and L.E.D.E. Limited Liability, $2 million over a four-year period. In exchange, the town gets water rights and water storage rights out of L.E.D.E. Reservoir, located on Forest Service land about 20 miles up Gypsum Creek. A limited portion of the water rights will remain available to Goldsmith. Paul Noto, the town’s water attorney, described the out-of-court settlement as a “win-win for all involved.” Goldsmith sees the deal differently. “I felt like I was negotiating with a gun held to my head,” he said. The town has been seeking to bolster its water rights on Gypsum Creek for decades. Noto said that during the drought of 2002, town leaders saw a need to find another source of water to ensure residents would be supplied adequately in dry years....
Burns defends right to question fire tactics U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns has defended his right to question how the Bundy Railroad fire was fought near Worden last month and accused his opponents of making “a little political hay” over the issue. Burns, a Republican up for re-election this year, told a picnic of campaign supporters in Billings last Thursday night that he only asked a question to some firefighters at the Billings airport on July 23, contrary to what has been reported previously. Burns and the firefighters were waiting to catch an airplane that was delayed by mechanical problems. The senator also acknowledged at the picnic that he has the ability to say things off the cuff that can hurt him politically. The Burns comments came from a transcript prepared by Montana Democrats, who videotape Burns at every public event. The Burns campaign did not dispute the transcript. “But nonetheless, my first obligation is to the ranching and the farming community of this state,” Burns said. “That's my first obligation. The ranchers down there, some of whom were not allowed to go back, even on their own ranches and fight that fire. And so that's, that's the bottom line. I represent them. And I'll continue to do that. That's just the way I am. So is that all right?”....
Heat kills fish High temperatures and prolonged drought led to a major fish kill at Great Salt Plains Lake in northcentral Oklahoma this week. Biologists with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation estimate 10,000 fish have died due to low dissolved oxygen levels in the lake. “This is a major fish kill and it reflects how this abnormal weather not only affects farmers and ranchers, but it also affects our lakes and our fisheries resources,” said Barry Bolton, assistant chief of fisheries for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. “We are monitoring the situation closely. Unfortunately, there is simply not anything we can do to remedy high heat and lack of rain.” According to Bolton, Great Salt Plains is a relatively shallow reservoir making it particularly susceptible to warm water temperatures....
California's New Experimental Forest The U.S. Forest Service has just dedicated the first new experimental forest in California in 40 years. That means science and research will get priority over all other activities in the area. The Sagehen Forest is in the Lake Tahoe Basin, eight miles outside of Truckee. In this Assignment 7 report we take you there for a look at what it is all about. This is bug boot camp. A right of passage for UC students studying insects. Students spend five weeks, from early in the morning until late at night, collecting and examining bugs in one of the most diverse habitats in the world. Prof. Phil Ward, UC Davis: "There are about 600 families of insects in North America and we have recorded about 340 of them just within the Sagehen Creek Basin, so that's more than half of all the families of insects in North America are found just within this one basin."....
Suit: Plans won't protect tortoise The two huge plans designed to protect the threatened desert tortoise and other rare species in the desert are actually damaging the environment by expanding routes for off-roading enthusiasts, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Monday. "We want the desert tortoise recovered and that's what the law requires,'' said Daniel Patterson, an ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, the Tucson-based group that has filed scores of environmental lawsuits. The suit filed in San Francisco against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeks to have the plans modified or invalidated. Fifteen years in the making, the West Mojave Plan covers 9.3 million acres, or roughly 14,500 square miles, in San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Inyo and Kern counties. The Northern and Eastern Colorado Desert Coordinated Management Plan covers about 5.5 million acres of the Sonoran Desert in San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties....
NIFC Turns to Military For Help There are 38 blazes burning across the country, most in western states, Michigan and Florida. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise is busy dispatching resources to those fires. Now, they're relying on at least one Army battalion to help suppress a blaze burning forest land in Washington state. Getting the upper hand on fast moving wildfires is the goal of firefighters across the country, battling 38 blazes right now. There's such a need for resources that the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise has called on an army battalion from Fort Lewis to help. The 500-soldier unit is working on the Tripod Complex Fire burning northeast of Winthrop, Washington. "The National Interagency Fire Center has an agreement with the Department of Defense through U.S. Northern Command to activate soldiers if we need them to fight fire, dig fire line," said Rose Davis with the National Interagency Fire Center. NIFC not only requests help from the military in the form of personnel, but also equipment. Last month, the agency activated Air National Guard Units with the Modular Airborne Firefighting System to serve as airtankers....
Gators vs. people: Who's winning? Wildlife officer Chris Ehrismann says alligators are an inescapable part of Florida's landscape. There are, after all, nearly 1.5 million gators statewide and more than 17 million humans steadily encroaching on their turf, setting up confrontations that in one week in May ended in death for three women. But, since 1973, there have been only 20 fatal attacks, including several in Central Florida. People, Ehrismann said, must use common sense on the front lines of alligator habitat: Don't feed the reptiles, or they will associate humans with food. Don't antagonize them. Don't swim in fresh water during dusk or dawn, when gators are active. Keep small children and dogs away from the water's edge. The wildlife agency receives about 17,000 alligator complaints a year and authorizes the removal of about 7,000 gators annually. This year, perhaps because of the three deaths, complaint calls totaled 14,156, and 6,198 gators have been removed so far. "Be aware that there are alligators in almost any fresh water in Florida," said Allan Woodward, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who has studied gators for 30 years....
Comments old on new listening tour The Bush administration's "cooperative conservation" listening tour may be new, but the complaints coming from industry, environmentalist and farming groups don't appear to have changed much. Managers with the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture said they would take comments from Monday's listening session in Helena, the second of 25 planned around the country, to the White House. Environmentalists bemoaned what they called the Bush administration's attempts to undermine the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws, and inadequate federal funding for conservation. Representatives of the timber industry complained that a bureaucracy ties up timber projects and laws let environmentalists use the courts to delay logging. Farming groups said more money is needed to pay for conservation programs that pay farmers to preserve the land, and said the Endangered Species Act is being misused....
Researchers are cloning endangered plants Researchers at the Cincinnati Zoo are cloning a threatened plant for an Akron park, one of only two locations in Ohio where the northern monkshood has been found. The purple-blue northern monkshood, which can grow 4 feet tall, has been reproduced through cloning by a team led by Valerie Pence of the zoo's Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife. The northern monkshood has been on the federal threatened list since 1978. A threatened species is likely in the foreseeable future to become endangered and at risk of extinction, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The plan is to transplant 25 cloned plants to the Gorge Metro Park in Akron and adjacent Cuyahoga Falls to help boost the population of northern monkshood growing there. Northern monkshood, a relative of the buttercup, is found in only four states: Iowa, New York, Wisconsin and Ohio. In Ohio, it's found only in the Crane Hollow nature preserve in Hocking County southeast of Columbus and Gorge Park....
Experts say border fence would hurt bighorn sheep If a proposed 15-foot-tall triple barrier is built between the United States and Mexico, illegal immigrants may have to take a tip from The Odyssey to get across. That's assuming measures are taken to safeguard the crossing of the endangered peninsular ranges bighorn sheep, whose survival could be threatened by the wall. In Washington earlier this month, a legislative rider attached to the 2007 defense appropriations bill by Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., calls for spending $2 billion to construct the 370-mile-long wall. The bighorns, which inhabit parts of the San Bernardino National Forest and thrive on Mount San Jacinto, migrate across the border to mate with herds in Baja California. It fortifies the gene pool enhancing survival of the breed. "If the California herds are isolated from herds in Mexico, repopulation and genetic flow in both herds will be affected," said Daniel Patterson, desert ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity....
Fishing advocate says water district retaliating against scientist A biologist who reported the December deaths of hundreds of stranded salmon below a small dam operated by Stockton East Water District was ordered soon after by district officials to turn in the keys that gave him access to the river. Now, a sport fishing advocate says the district was retaliating against the scientist for providing information to authorities. The scientist, Trevor Kennedy of the Fishery Foundation, declined to discuss the matter in detail, saying he did not want to foster poor relations with the water district. Foundation scientists are still under a federal contract to study salmon and steelhead and to help ensure the survival of those species on the Calaveras River. But Kennedy acknowledged that Stockton East Water District ordered him to turn in his keys shortly after he reported the salmon stranding and other problems with the district's management of the river....
Two Michigan swans have avian flu; experts quell concerns The federal government announced today that two swans in Michigan tested positive for both the H5 and N1 avian influenza subtypes, but initial genetic sequencing suggests that it is a low-pathogenic type rather than the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain spreading through birds in Asia, Europe, and Africa and causing deaths in humans. Ron DeHaven, chief veterinary officer for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), said at a media briefing today that the birds appeared healthy and normal and were part of a group of 20 nonmigratory, resident mute swans that were sacrificed and tested on Aug 8 as part of a population reduction plan at a game area on Lake Erie in southeast Michigan. Bill Raub, science advisor to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the findings should not cause alarm. "There is no threat to human health, and there is no cause for any special actions," he said. "This is a matter of wildlife biology." On Aug 9 the samples were tested at Michigan State University's Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health, part of the USDA's National Animal Health Laboratory Network, where tests confirmed the presence of an H5 avian influenza virus. The samples were then sent to the USDA's National Veterinary Services Laboratory (NVSL) in Ames, Iowa, which is the only national reference laboratory that can confirm the H5N1 virus. Confirmatory tests at the NVSL lab showed the presence of an H5 virus along with an N1 subtype; however, experts aren't sure if the birds were infected with two separate avian influenza strains or if the findings represent low-pathogenic H5N1. Testing began at the NVSL on Aug 12 to further characterize the virus, and results are expected in about 2 weeks....
Veterinary students urged to specialize in large-animal care Students should be encouraged to pursue careers in large-animal veterinary medicine to help replenish declining numbers in the field, vets and ranchers said. Participants at a meeting hosted by the Texas Veterinary Medical Association said rural areas need more vets who specialize in treating cattle and horses. Dr. Guy Sheppard, the association's president, said most of the students who graduate from the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine choose to practice small-animal medicine in larger cities. "I think the biggest challenge we have is trying to attract young people to go to vet school and want to do what we do," said Sheppard, of San Angelo. Participants at the meeting said large-animal vets are important to livestock production, food hygiene, controlling animal disease and public health....
The West recognizes 'Cowboy' His full name is William Daven Farr, but for most of his 96 years he's been W.D., or, in his younger years, Cowboy. But more appropriately, for the past 25 year or more, it's been Mr. Farr, a title he more than deserves. He is the only true pioneer left in Greeley and its only true statesman. His amazing career will be recognized once again next spring when he is inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. He will join other illustrious members of the hall: Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody, Gene Autry, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Zane Grey, and others. It is a Who's Who list of not only Western American history but American history. Just to be considered for such an honor is an honor in itself....