Ranchers, farmers blast Army plan Nearly 200 ranchers, farmers and supporters filled a conference room here Tuesday, sending a resounding message to Army brass that they will fight the Army's attempt to take their lands for an expansion of its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site northeast of Trinidad. A meeting to brief businesspeople on Fort Carson's addition of 8,000 to 10,000 troops in the next three years and the effects of that growth was overshadowed by the fort's pending proposal to triple the size of its maneuver site in southeastern Colorado. "I want to know what in the heck they're going to do and when the heck they're going to do it," said Judy Benevidez, who lives near the current maneuver site in Model. "This shows me the lack of concern the Army has, because they will not give us any information," she said. "They have all this business stuff taken care of, but they don't have enough information to give to the farmers. And that is wrong."....
Vegas can take Spring Valley water In a decision that could have eventual repercussions for Utah, Nevada's state engineer has determined that Las Vegas water authorities are entitled to roughly half the groundwater they have requested for a proposed pipeline project that would ship water from the eastern part of the state to southern Nevada. Nevada State Engineer Tracy Taylor issued a 56-page decision this week authorizing the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) to take up to 40,000 acre-feet of water annually from Spring Valley, located west of Great Basin National Park, for a 10-year period. An acre-foot is typically the amount of water a family of four consumes in a year. If it is determined there are minimal or no impacts from such a withdrawal, the state will authorize the withdrawal of an additional 20,000 acre-feet annually, bringing the total yearly take to 60,000 acre-feet. The SNWA's permit application requested a withdrawal of 91,000 acre-feet annually. Utah water officials say they don't expect the decision, outwardly anyway, to affect negotiations between the states over how groundwater in neighboring Snake Valley, located east of Spring Valley along the state line, will be shared. Such an agreement is necessary before the SNWA can pursue groundwater in Snake Valley - the next phase of its pipeline project....
Fossil from a forest that gave Earth its breath of fresh air A fossil tree with its roots and leaves still attached has provided a tantalising glimpse of what the Earth’s first forests looked like long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Wattieza trees covered vast swaths 385 million years ago, before even amphibians managed to clamber on to land, and had such an impact that they helped to change the planet’s atmosphere. They were the monsters of their age and are thought not only to have changed the face of the planet but also to have altered even the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The plant, which grew to at least 26 feet (8m) in height and probably to more than 40 feet, looked similar to a tree fern with a long, bare trunk that was crowned at the top with branches and leaves. Millions of the Wattieza trees would have covered the ground in coastal and other lowland regions of the planet 140 million years before the first dinosaurs....
Wyo. flock to be killed, tested after scrapie found Somewhere near Moorcroft, in an unincorporated area of northeastern Wyoming, a livestock owner will hand over his entire flock of sheep next week to the federal government for a mass execution. The rancher knows what will happen: his herd of roughly 300 sheep will be transported live out of state and taken to a slaughter plant where they will be euthanized, their brains and lymph node tissue harvested for testing. He'll lose his herd because he owned the first U.S. sheep to test positive for a rare strain of scrapie _ a disease found in sheep and goats that's similar to mad cow disease in cattle and chronic wasting disease in sheep and elk. Still, state statute prohibits officials from releasing the rancher's identity, and attempts by The Associated Press to reach him were unsuccessful. Scrapie itself is rare in the United States. Out of more than 115,000 animals tested since 2003, only 300 have tested positive; federal officials hope to eliminate scrapie from U.S. herds by the end of 2010. But the Wyoming rancher's case is even more rare: Fewer than 300 cases worldwide have been recorded of the "Nor98-like" strain of scrapie, so-named because it was first diagnosed in Norway in 1998. "This is very unusual," Larry Cooper, regional spokesman in Fort Collins, Colo., for Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, said of the first discovery of a Nor98-like strain of scrapie in the U.S. "It doesn't indicate that we're going to have mass outbreaks of this particular strain, it just indicates that one of these animals from Europe ended up in our system." There are no known human health risks associated with scrapie....
Dope tries to rope deer I had this idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it. The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that since they congregated at my cattle feeder and did not seem to fear when we were there. A bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the bags of feed while I am in the back of the truck not four feet away. It shouldn't be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down) then hog tie it to transport it home. I filled the cattle feeder then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, who had seen the roping thing before, stayed well back. They were not having any of it. I only had to wait for 20 minutes before three deer showed up. I picked one out, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and threw my rope. The deer just stood there and stared at me. I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold. The deer still just stood and stared at me, but you could tell it was mildly concerned about the whole rope situation. I took a step towards it. It took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope and received an education....