NEWS ROUNDUP

State considers strategy on wolves The state Department of Fish and Wildlife says it expects increasing numbers of gray wolves to migrate into Washington from neighboring states and Canada, and officials want to know what to do about it. The department has named 18 people to a working group to come up with a conservation and management strategy for dealing with the wolves. The group includes ranchers, farmers, government workers, conservationists, biologists and hunters. Gray wolves were largely eradicated in Washington by the 1930s, but sightings have increased since federal wolf-recovery efforts began in Idaho and Montana in the mid-1990s. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed removing gray wolf populations from the federal list of endangered species in three states and parts of four other states, including Washington....
Creating a home for pure bison to roam The animals certainly looked like bison, with the characteristic humps and beards. But just to make sure, a bison wrangler shot a drug- filled dart into one of several calves. A few minutes later the anesthetized animal was on the ground, grunting and squirming. Several men warily moved in to hobble the animal and take blood samples. This bison wrangling was being done to test the genetics of a herd of 39 animals that is being used by the American Prairie Foundation as seed stock to re-create a large-scale native prairie landscape. The researchers want animals with only pure bison genes, which are not so easy to find. "The majority of public herds have some level of hybridization with cattle," said Kyran Kunkel, a World Wildlife Fund biologist who is doing the sampling. "You can't see any difference visually. But we don't know what the long-term ecological or biological impacts would be."....
4 feed grounds receive permits Bridger-Teton National Forest granted temporary permits for four existing feed grounds Friday, including Muddy Creek, where the Game and Fish Department plans to continue a test-and-slaughter program later this month. The permits come as U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson deliberates a lawsuit by conservation groups, including Earthjustice, that seeks to close feed grounds on federal land. The groups say the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management illegally granted permits for 12 feed grounds and the Muddy Creek test-and-slaughter program without the proper environmental review. In addition to Muddy Creek, Bridger-Teton officials also granted permits to Game and Fish for the Pritchard and Fish Creek feed grounds in the Jackson Ranger District and the Fall Creek feed ground in the Pinedale Ranger District. The permits will expire April 15. Abigail Dillen, staff attorney for Earthjustice, said the decision ignores the dangers of brucellosis and chronic wasting disease....
Reid’s ‘earmark’ gets veto of home county From securing money for a modern national park visitors’ center to landing an alternative-energy grant for a local school, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has come through over the years for rural and cash-poor White Pine County. But a White Pine lands bill that Reid attached to the 109th Congress’s final legislation lost the official endorsement of the very county it affects, leaving disappointed Nevadans in its wake. White Pine officials wanted funding added to the bill for a study of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s (SNWA) plan for a 285-mile pipeline snaking through their region, sending groundwater south to glittering Las Vegas. County commissioners said Reid and Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) told them the addition would sink the bill, but the commission was willing to take the risk. Both senators and several local groups praise the bill for designating more than a half-million acres of newly protected wilderness. But some in White Pine and elsewhere in the West contend that the requested water study fell victim to Reid’s support for a pipeline sought by Clark County, home of Las Vegas, where the majority leader’s son Rory is board chairman....
Corps stiffens dam control The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has tightened its management protocol for Libby Dam in northwest Montana. The change comes six months after widespread flooding downstream from the dam near Bonners Ferry, Idaho. The corps said the flooding might have been avoided had the dam been operated in strict accordance with a program known as variable discharge. Some residents living near the river and local government officials, however, want the corps to abandon the program entirely and revert to more conservative dam management operations. The variable discharge program attempts to control flooding while also mimicking the Kootenai River's ancient flow patterns. This means storing more water behind the dam in winter to provide higher river flows when threatened and endangered fish spawn in spring....
Cook Inlet belugas under "considerable" extinction risk, report says The beluga whales swimming off Alaska's largest city are at considerable risk of going extinct unless something changes, a federal study says. The study by the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle says if the Cook Inlet belugas go extinct, another group of the white whales probably won't come in to swim the silty waters off Anchorage. "The population is discrete and unique with respect to the species, and if it should fail to survive, it is highly unlikely that Cook Inlet would be repopulated with belugas," the study says. The study found there is a 26 percent chance the Cook Inlet belugas will be extinct in 100 years and a 68 percent chance they'll be gone in 300 years. To make matters worse, it finds that the whales are becoming increasingly vulnerable to a catastrophic event because they are tending to gather in a restricted area in the upper Cook Inlet....
No Protection for Slickspot Peppergrass The U-S Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that it won't list the slickspot peppergrass for protection under the Endangered Species Act. The plant grows almost exclusively in the Snake River Plain and the foothills in southwestern Idaho. A separate population grows on the Owyhee Plateau. The federal agency said a review shows that while the plant's known habitat has decreased, the current population does not appear to have been impacted by habitat degradation. Instead, the agency attributed less-than-robust population growth to a lack of spring rains....
Bush Administration Suppressed Scientific Panel Recommendation to Keep Arizona Bald Eagle on Endangered Species List The Center for Biological Diversity and the Maricopa Audubon Society filed suit today challenging the Bush administration's suppression of scientific reports concluding that the Arizona Bald Eagle should remain on the endangered species list. The suit seeks an injunction barring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from removing the Arizona eagle from the endangered list and requiring it to incorporate the scientific studies in its management plans. Nationally, the bald eagle has experienced an extraordinary recovery, growing from just 416 pairs in 1963 to about 10,000 pairs today. The recovery of the Arizona population, however, has been much more modest. Historically, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managed the Arizona bald eagle as a population distinct from all other eagles in the U.S. It has its own recovery plan and recovery program. In 1999, however, the agency proposed to treat all eagles in the lower 48 as a single population and remove them from the endangered list. The agency convened a seven-member scientific panel to peer-review the delisting proposal. On Aug. 11, 2006, the panel approved of the national delisting effort but recommended that the Arizona population not be delisted....
U.S. Sportsmen's Foundation Joins Lawsuit to Save Hunting The U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance Foundation has filed to represent sportsmen in a precedent-setting lawsuit brought by animal activists to derail hunting, fishing and trapping for abundant game wherever endangered or threatened species exist. On Jan. 4, the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance Foundation (USSAF) asked U.S. District Judge John A. Woodcock Jr. for permission to join a federal lawsuit brought by the Animal Protection Institute against the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. In October 2006, the animal rights group sued to expand endangered and threatened species protections to healthy and abundant wildlife populations. "Our goal is to prevent the animal rights movement from manipulating the Endangered Species Act to ban hunting, fishing and trapping," said Rob Sexton, USSAF vice president for government affairs. "The case could set a precedent that affects the future of hunting, fishing and trapping and how they are used as wildlife management tools."....
'Cover your deer' bill sparks debate In a place where the right to hunt is in the state constitution, some hunters believe it is poor manners to display dead, bloody animals on their vehicles as they're hauling them home. Others say the state has no business forcing hunters to throw a tarp over their game when they're traveling down North Dakota's highways. Rep. Duane DeKrey, R-Pettibone, said he expected to provoke a debate when he introduced a bill last week that sought to require hunters to cover their game. But he said he did not anticipate the uproar that ensued, one that he said was so extensive that he withdrew the measure Monday. Neither the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies nor the Wildlife Management Institute tracks the number of states that have carcass-covering rules. But Steve Williams, president of the institute and a former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the nationwide trend in the past couple of decades has been to promote the covering of dead animals, and not just to remove the possibility of offending someone....
Dormant Yuma desalting plant to get restart A $250 million desalting plant west of Yuma that has sat dormant since shortly after it was completed in the early 1990s is set to restart for a test run by June. Engineers have been getting the plant ready to operate, doing pressure testing on plumbing and checking valves and motors, said Jack Simes, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The plant was built to reduce salt in agriculture runoff to help meet a water delivery treaty obligation with Mexico, but ran for only a six-month test in 1992-93. Since then, the U.S. has been able to meet its obligations because of high Colorado River flows that diluted the salt.
The ongoing drought in the West and increased water demand because of growth now require the plant to be ready to operate....
Keeping rivers flowing As New Mexico’s state engineer, John D’Antonio has legal power over all the state’s streams, rivers and underground waters. Balancing that authority with the political and social realities of water is like walking through a mine field, D’Antonio said. “You want to make enough progress that you keep the momentum going forward without going so far that you step on a land mine, like a lawsuit, that stops everything,” D’Antonio said. Three decades of booming population growth and the recent drought are forcing the state to deal with water in a way it hasn’t had to previously, D’Antonio said. “The drought opened our eyes that we’re way behind in putting tools in place to actively manage our water resources,” he said. “We have to put water masters in the field. We have to (enact) rules and regulations for water. We have to have those tools in place before we can go out and stop over-diversions (of water), illegal diversions and start enforcing by priority.”....
What bonds bought Most of the $68 million spent on open space under a 2004 bond program has bought ranch or farm property in Pima County. In what has been a hot real estate market, an incentive offered to ranchers and farmers has lowered the price of land that might have otherwise been too expensive for the county. The county allows ranchers and farmers continued use of the land while stopping further development, a goal of the county's Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. The deals have helped Pima County protect important plants and wildlife and preserve a ranching tradition dating back to the area's settlement, officials say. The county has spent a little under half of the $164 million approved for open space purchases in the May 2004 bond election. Of that, $50 million has bought land on seven ranches and a farm, property that makes up 92 percent of the land acquired under the bond program. But some environmentalists say the ranch deals have come with another cost: cattle grazing, which is destroying some of the species intended for protection....
Colorado Group Estimates up to 15,000 Cattle Killed in Storm Up to 15,000 cattle may have been killed by a snowstorm that buried southeastern Colorado under several feet of snow and built drifts up to 15 feet high, a Colorado Cattlemen's Association official said Monday. That would be more than four times higher than the 3,500 cattle that state officials estimated were killed, but the smaller number included only range cattle and did not account for thousands of livestock in feedlot pens. Terry Fankhauser, executive vice president of the state Cattlemen's Association, said he estimates between 10,000 and 15,000 cattle died. He said he based his estimate on conversations with ranchers and feedlot owners. "We're waiting on pins and needles" to hear whether ranchers will receive federal disaster aid as requested by the state, Fankhauser said. State officials have said many ranchers will not have an accurate count of their losses until more snow melts. Fankhauser estimated that up to one-third of ranchers in the area have not located all their cattle....
Officials count up losses, especially among cattle Area Farm Service Agency offices - the grass-roots level of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - are still awaiting notification of assistance that may be available to ranchers as the result of President Bush's declaration of an emergency in the year-end record snowstorms in Southeastern Colorado. Whatever the government does, he added, ag producers will have to give documentation of their damages. He advised owners to take digital pictures of dead livestock or damaged property. "And if they have dead mother cows, most of them have ear-tags," Hanagan said. "We're advising people to cut the ears off and keep them to document the loss." Hanagan estimated that 1,000 head of cattle are known to be dead in Otero County, "but we still have several producers who haven't found their animals yet," he said. "We've probably got eight to 10 producers who are actively looking for some large numbers of stock, south of Highway 350 down toward the Kim area. But there is still some hope that cattle may have gotten down in a draw with a little shelter and survive."....
Feds pushing for a national livestock ID tracking system After a single cow in Washington state was diagnosed with mad cow disease in 2003, it took investigators four months to track down all cattle that had come in contact with the diseased animal. Since that outbreak, about 25 countries shut off or threatened to close their markets to U.S. beef exports, said Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, speaking Monday to the American Farm Bureau Federation's convention, which has drawn 5,000 farmers and ranchers to Salt Lake City. Had a national animal identification tracking system been in place, supporters say, an investigation to contain the disease could have been completed within 48 hours. Yet efforts to implement such a system bogged down when producers argued over whether registering their livestock should be mandatory or voluntary. "We needed to move beyond the debate," said Undersecretary Bruce Knight, so a voluntary system was adopted. Knight predicted that as U.S. restaurants, retail outlets and consumers demand information, more producers will voluntarily register. Still, only 24 percent of the nation's livestock owners have joined the first phase of the program, which lists only a contact person and business address. In contrast, Utah has moved to the top 10 states in numbers of farmers and ranchers signing on to the infant U.S. system (64 percent). Terry Menlove, director of the state's Animal Industry Division, credits the comparatively high numbers in Utah to a level of trust built between state inspectors and individual ranchers....
Rescued animals help kids recover In the quiet hills of Castro Valley, children in crisis and rescued horses help each other heal. Many children at SonRise Equestrian Foundation come from troubled homes or have suffered violence, depression or serious illnesses. Others have experienced the illness or loss of a family member. SonRise founder and Director Melanie Buerke believes the kids and horses are attracted to each other because they've had similar pasts. SonRise horses have had their own traumas and were rescued from abuse or neglect. One horse was aptlynamed Cougar after he was attacked by his namesake. Once the horses are taken in, they undergo a health screening and evaluation to see if their temperament is suitable for working with children. "Horses have an uncanny ability to heal the human heart," Buerke said....
It's All Trew: Bankers heroes of early cattle industry The history of the cattle industry in the Old West is filled with accounts of cattlemen whose holdings were almost unbelievable in size and scope. Famous names like Goodnight, King and Anderson stand out as leaders in the ranching world. However, the real heroes of the industry were the early day bankers and backers of these large operators. The book "Great Plains Cattle Empire, the Story of the Thatcher Brothers & Associates, 1875-1945" by Paul Patterson and Joy Poole details the careers of the quiet bankers and often silent partners of many of the famous early day ranching giants. John Thatcher traveled west from Pennsylvania in the early 1860s to establish a small store in Pueblo, Colo. He had experience in merchandising from working in his father's store. John tried school teaching for a short time, but the lure of the West brought him to Pueblo. He unloaded his wagon full of goods into a small 10-foot-by-10-foot board-and-batten building with a sod roof sprouting weeds and grass. The counter consisted of wooden planks laid across two empty whiskey barrels. Back in a corner stood a metal safe that was too heavy to lift and carry....