NEWS ROUNDUP

Grizzly suspected in attack on park safety manager A Yellowstone National Park employee was attacked by a bear early Sunday morning near Gardiner, just north of the park. Ken Meyer, the park's safety manager, was hunting for black bear when he was mauled by what is believed to be a female grizzly bear with cubs, Al Nash, a Yellowstone spokesman, said Sunday night. Meyer sustained injuries to his arms, legs and chest, he said. He underwent surgery at Livingston Memorial Hospital. He remained hospitalized Sunday night but his condition was not available. Nash said details of the incident were still sketchy Sunday night. Meyer was apparently walking near or along Little Trail Creek, which is north and west of Gardiner, early Sunday morning when he came upon what he said was a grizzly, Nash said. The bear attacked him, retreated at some point, then attacked again, Nash said. Meyer said he shot the bear with his rifle, possibly wounding it, before he walked out of the woods and called for help....
Free range Livestock foraging on 160 million acres of public lands could roam more freely than ever, thanks to a recent policy change at the Bureau of Land Management. On Aug. 14, the BLM granted eight new “categorical exclusions,” designed to speed up the approval process for a slew of activities on public lands, including grazing, logging, oil and gas drilling and recreational use. Among the major changes is a paring down of the renewal process for the roughly 18,000 grazing permits the agency administers. Previously, when a permit was up for renewal, the BLM was obliged to conduct a formal environmental assessment and call for public comments under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), giving the average citizen an open invitation to speak up. Now, under the new guidelines, if a grazing allotment appears to be in good shape and the permit is being renewed for roughly the same use as before, the agency may approve the renewal without a rigorous environmental assessment – or formal public comment. It’s this last part that has environmentalists worried. Bobby McEnaney, public-lands advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, is concerned about losing the eyes and ears of the public in the renewal process....
Farmers, Park Service face off in battle over oyster farm When kevin lunny looks out at the sparkling waters of Drakes Estero, he sees the cleanest, most ideal area in the state to grow oysters. "This is the healthiest estuary on the Pacific Coast," said Lunny, owner of Drakes Bay Family Farms, a 1,050-acre property that produces 80 percent of the county's $3.3 million in farmed shellfish - and more than half of all oysters grown in California. "Wildlife is abundant. It's all that you could ask for in terms of habitat." When Lunny's landlords at the National Park Service view the estero, however, they see something quite different: a sanctuary for birds, seals and marine life that is scheduled to become a wilderness preserve in five years. "Coming Soon! A Restored Wilderness Estuary!" declares the description of Drakes Estero at the Point Reyes National Seashore Web site. Park officials say the change will take place in 2012, and that there's no place for an oyster farm in an area designated as "wilderness." "Right now, our concern is making sure the commercial operation is under permit, which it's not," said John Dell'Osso, chief of interpretation and resource education at the national seashore. "We've said all along that there was never an issue up to 2012. If they wanted to stay beyond that date, or how something like that could even occur - that is not part of the negotiations going on now." The controversy has called into question the future of the state's largest oyster-growing operation, and ignited a debate as to whether agriculture can continue in areas designated for environmental protection....
Oyster farmer says dispute hurting family ranch Oyster farmer Kevin Lunny said his crusade to extend the lease of Drakes Bay Family Farms has led to reprisals by the National Park Service against his family's cattle ranch, which lies within the Point Reyes National Seashore. "When this controversy started going on, the neighbors warned us that if we got into a battle with the park, they would go after the ranch," Lunny said. "And they did." The Lunnys rotate a herd of 250 cows among three ranches, including the "G" ranch in the national seashore and an adjacent ranch on property owned by the Coast Guard. Lunny said the Park Service penalized his parents for having too many cows on the "G" ranch, even though the herd was grazing on the Coast Guard property. The action has cost his family more than $60,000, he said, because they had to sell their cattle before the cows had reached their ideal weight. "This is over the controversy," Lunny said. "My actions have jeopardized the ranch, and it's sad." Park spokesman John Dell'Osso said the two issues are entirely unrelated....
Death of calf is proof wolves back in Washington A calf in northeastern Washington was killed by a wolf, proving the endangered species is once again within the borders of Washington after being killed off decades ago, wildlife officials said Friday. It is the first recorded killing of livestock by a wolf in the state's history, said Tom Buckley of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Spokane. "This would confirm at least the presence of one temporarily," Buckley said, speculating the wolf may be traveling between Canada and the United States, because the killing occurred in Stevens County, near the Canadian border. Wildlife officers on Tuesday investigated a rancher's report of a dead calf in northern Stevens County. "They observed large canid tracks around the carcass, which showed injury and trauma signs indicative of a wolf kill," according to a press release from FWS and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife....
Biologist: Water plan invites peril Nevada's water laws contradict the laws of nature, a prominent Nevada biologist says. And if water officials back a pipeline proposal to nurture Las Vegas growth at the expense of surrounding states, a water war and ecological disaster are guaranteed. In a study published this month in BioScience, a peer-reviewed science journal published by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, James E. Deacon says the Southern Nevada Water Authority's plans to take the water for golf course and home development in the Las Vegas area would hurt 20 federally protected species - including three endangered Utah fish - and risk harm to 137 others. Worse, "the community being built will depend on an unsustainable water source," Deacon said Friday. "And that's stupid." The report, "Fueling Population Growth in Las Vegas: How Large-scale Groundwater Withdrawal could Burn Regional Biodiversity," coincides with an accusation from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that Utah is trying to steal Nevada's water. The BioScience article also closely follows a demand from the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation for a study of how a proposed water pipeline would affect the sovereign nation in Snake Valley and Utah lawmakers' request for a new $6 million study of the aquifer that underlies eastern Nevada and Utah's west desert....
Hilton ranch serves as command post for missing pilot search Around a table in an aircraft hangar at Barron Hilton's ranch near Yerington, grim-faced men and women Thursday pored over maps and aerial photos as single-engine planes landed and took off in the search for missing pilot Steve Fossett. The million-acre Flying M Ranch, for decades an exclusive enclave for Hilton's aviation hobby, is the command post for the bi-state search. Barron Hilton, 79, son of hotel mogul Conrad Hilton and grandfather to celebutante Paris, is an experienced pilot who bought the ranch in the mid-1960s. It was called Mitchell Springs in the 1860s and was owned by rancher Henry Morgan since 1870, according to the book "Place Names of Lyon County." The "M" originally stood for San Francisco businessman Stanfield Murphy, who bought the ranch from Morgan, but Hilton kept the name in honor of his wife, Marilyn, according to an article in Airport Journal. Hilton owns 20,000 acres of the ranch and leases an additional 980,000 acres from the federal government, making the ranch about the size of Rhode Island....
Son's plane crash becomes mother's mission Matthew Ramige is back doing the things he loves -- hiking, kayaking and skiing in the Montana back country -- nearly three years after surviving a small plane crash in those mountains. His mother, Wendy Becker, an assistant professor of management at the University at Albany, has spent that time dissecting the Sept. 20, 2004, accident near Glacier National Park that nearly killed him. Despite having a broken back and serious burns, Ramige was able to walk to safety with another survivor a day after authorities declared them both dead. Now 32, Ramige is back in Montana, pursuing his MBA degree at the University of Montana at Missoula. "His back is OK, but he will still need more procedures for burning and scarring," Becker said. After poring over the National Transportation Safety Board report, she went even further, using the federal Freedom of Information Act to get records that didn't make it into the report. She concluded that failures by the U.S. Forest Service and local officials helped lead to a rushed, flawed judgment that no one had survived and so ended the search. Ramige and four others were on a mission for the Forest Service at the time of the crash. The accident, like many, was caused by a chain of problems, starting with a pilot who had 14 hours of flying time in mountainous terrain, rather than the U.S. Forest Service minimum requirement of 200 hours. The pilot flew into a box canyon after misjudging his location and slammed the single-engine plane into a mountain. A witness who saw the troubled plane provided a map of its location to the Forest Service, but that map was not passed along to the local sheriff's department, which was coordinating the search. As a result, rescuers did not find the crash site for 21 hours, after Ramige and fellow survivor Jodee Hogg had gone....
Saving the sagebrush Alma Winward stands under blue skies amid a huge swath of decaying sagebrush along Cottonwood Creek near this tiny village in southwest Wyoming. Winward, a retired U.S. Forest Service regional ecologist and a leading expert on sagebrush habitat, reaches for his trusty short-saw and bends to cut the 3-foot-tall sagebrush plant in half. Using his saliva, Winward wets the cut end of the gray stalk to make the shrub's rings stand out. Then using a magnifying glass, he counts the rings much as one would count the rings of a tree to determine its age. "That sagebrush is 54 years old," he says finally to an awed group of onlookers touring the Bench Corral country. "This plant has had it, and it's soon to be out of the picture." Unfortunately, the picture isn't so rosy these days for the sagebrush in this part of the state -- or for the state's largest mule deer herd that depends on it....
Forest Service firing unjust? A former U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman says she was fired from her job because she refused to downplay the severity of the wildfire danger in the San Bernardino National Forest. Ruth Wenstrom, who spent nine years as the San Bernardino National Forest's public-affairs officer, was terminated July 2. Matt Mathes, the Forest Service's regional press officer based in Vallejo, near San Francisco, said he recalled that Wenstrom was "overstating the situation" in the forest. In a recent interview, Wenstrom said that in April 2006, National Forest officials were told not to request budgetary augmentation funds, known as "severity dollars," that they had asked for and received in the past. That meant cutting the number of engines being staffed in the forest, she said. Wenstrom said officials told her to draft a list of talking points to address the public's concerns about having fewer firefighters and engines in a forest filled with millions of dead trees and drought-weakened bushes. She said she wrote a draft and sent it to Mathes....
Lynx habitat politics under scrutiny A federal decision against designating Maine forestlands as protected habitat for Canada lynx is one of eight endangered species rulings getting a second look following the resignation of a U.S. Interior Department official accused of granting favors to industry. The official, Julie MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary of the interior, met with representatives of Plum Creek Timber Co. at least three times before the agency dropped the proposed habitat designation, which could affect Plum Creek's plans to develop thousands of acres in the state. One of the meetings in question was arranged by Maine's two senators after a request for help from Gov. John Baldacci. The Interior Department decided to reopen the Maine case in July, two months after MacDonald resigned. All eight Endangered Species Act decisions being reviewed around the country appear to have been guided more by MacDonald's political influence than scientific considerations, according to the department....
Monitoring the bighorns Human activity and the barren slopes of mines in Lucerne Valley have not been enough to drive away a small herd of bighorn sheep, which seem to like the hilly terrain and often approach trucks. They come so close to people that Dayan Anderson, the environmental engineer for Specialty Minerals Inc. mine, has given several of them nicknames. The small group of about 25 bighorns known as the Cushenbury herd appears to be doing well, but a collaborative of three local mines, the U.S. Forest Service, the California Department of Fish and Game and Victor Valley College is conducting an ongoing study to gain more insight on how the mines affect them. The High Desert Bighorn Collaborative has outfitted the sheep with collars that collect Global Positioning System, or GPS, information, and they are programmed to drop off the bighorns’ necks this fall....
Stolen petroglyphs headed home on Nevada mountain U.S. Forest Service officials never believed John Ligon's claim that he dug up three boulders etched with American Indian petroglyphs four years ago to put them in his front yard for safekeeping. But they did share a concern he voiced that someone would steal the centuries-old rock art on national forest land a few football fields away from a growing housing development. After they recovered the stolen property, federal land managers struggled for years with the question of what to do with the rock etchings of a bighorn sheep, an archer, a lizard and a wheel. Now, after initially thinking it was best to place them in a state museum, the agency - in consultation with local tribal leaders - has decided to return them to the mountainside where they were for perhaps as long as 1,000 years before they were disturbed. "It belongs out there," said Lynda Shoshone, cultural resources director for the Washoe Tribe in Nevada and California. She and others said removing the petroglyphs from the site takes them out of their spiritual context....
Black Bears Growing Nuisance in West Ted Grenda is downright inhospitable toward some of his neighbors, placing plywood strips with nails along his doors and windows. But wildlife officials say that makes him a good neighbor to the black bears that share the mountains especially this year, when a late freeze and drought across the West have drastically reduced their natural fare of berries and acorns. The bears' search for food, intensifying as they bulk up for hibernation, has driven the animals into towns to forage in garbage bins, bird feeders and even inside homes like Grenda's, where they've hauled off peaches and a 10-pound bag of sugar. Dozens of the intruders have been hit by cars or killed by wildlife officers. Colorado wildlife officers have killed at least 30 black bears this summer for having run-ins with people. Landowners defending livestock and federal agents have killed 42 more, and 29 bears were killed by vehicles. Bear mortality could rival 2002's record total of 404. There have been at least 877 reports of human-bear encounters this year, compared with 502 for all of last year. Officers in the resort city of Aspen field 20 to 40 bear complaints daily. Black bears are often seen digging in trash bins outside the town's upscale restaurants and scavenging around multimillion-dollar homes....
You know that something's really wrong when the forest starts to look more red than green Foresters thought they had the mountain pine beetle figured out. But one by one, it keeps chewing up expectations. First, there was the idea that the beetles wouldn't attack trees less than 80 years old, about 7 or 8 inches in diameter. They have done so; with so many beetles looking for food, they will settle for trees as small as 5 inches across. Then there was the saw that lodgepole and limber pines near the timberline were safe. They aren't. Warmer winters have allowed beetle larvae to survive in trees at high altitude. There was the adage that healthy trees were resistant. That one went out the window too. Healthy trees are succumbing just as quickly as sickly ones. Right now, it seems, all bets are off. Adriene Holcomb, a Laramie-based U.S. Forest Service forester, has been offering dire warnings to her seasonal workers in the Medicine Bow National Forest. "Take a good look now," she tells them, "because you're not going to see forests like this again in your lifetime."....
Park's back-to-nature look not growing on neighbors To preservationists, the mature stand of towering oaks, surrounded by nearly 2 acres of waist-high grass in West Pullman Park, is a thing of authentic beauty. But as many Far South Side neighbors gaze upon the rare oak savanna, they see a wild tangle of overgrown weeds. For them, it's an unwanted habitat that invites neighborhood drug dealers and prostitutes, and they continue to pressure the Chicago Park District to clean up the area. Similar scenarios played out in forest preserves in Cook and DuPage Counties when nature preservationists tried to re-create prairies and oak savannas. Opponents fiercely fought tree removals and controlled burns, forcing Cook and DuPage in 1996 to issue a moratorium on the controversial program to restore the native flora. The stay was recently lifted, sparking tree enthusiasts to regroup again. The same issues, with slightly different ecology, have sprouted around the nation. In San Francisco, for instance, efforts to replace introduced plants like eucalyptus trees with native shrubs proved contentious....
A Rainbow Family reunion in Crook County next week The Rainbows are coming again, and Crook County is prepared. Ten years ago, more than 20,000 members of the Rainbow Family, an international Utopian living group, met to camp, recreate and pray for peace at Indian Prairie, part of the Ochoco National Forest located approximately 30 miles northeast of Prineville. The group’s stay in Central Oregon was largely uneventful. But the influx of visitors and their back-to-nature lifestyle raised eyebrows among some Crook County residents and led to legal scuffles between Family members and the U.S. Forest Service. Next week, the Rainbow Family will return to the area, but this gathering is regional, rather than national, and will occur on a much smaller scale. This time, officials say, the community is ready — and more relaxed — for the Tuesday arrival of an estimated 200 to 2,000 Rainbow Family visitors....
Streams may be declared wild, scenic Hundreds of Colorado streams are being analyzed for possible protection under the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the largest such review in more than 30 years. The study comes as cities and water districts race to develop water in many of those same streams, efforts that will be much more difficult - and, in some cases, impossible - once the federal protective process is under way. In the decades since Congress passed the law, Colorado water utilities and the Colorado Water Conservation Board have often fought use of the scenic rivers act because they fear it will limit their ability to deliver much-needed water to cities and farms. Since its passage in 1968, just one stream segment in the state - on the Poudre River north of Fort Collins - has been formally protected under the act. Several other streams have been recommended for wild- and-scenic status but have never been formally listed by Congress in part because of Colorado's opposition....
Trail markers will help protect Sand Mountain butterfly Installation of more than 30 miles of trail markers at the Sand Mountain Recreation Area could begin as early as next month in an ongoing effort to help protect butterfly habitat. The Churchill County Commission voted last week to allow County Manager Brad Goetsch to solicit bids for the project, which would install galvanized steel posts at 20-foot intervals along the travel route and boundary of Sand Mountain. The trail system is a component of the Sand Mountain Blue Butterfly Conservation Plan which seeks to halt destruction of the butterflys host plant, the Kearney buckwheat, due to off-highway vehicle use. The project should cost $992,000, according to a funding agreement approved by the commission in February. Churchill County will pay one-fourth of that, or about $252,000. Before the trail markers can be placed, federal law requires a review to inventory all the archaeological and historic resources in the area....
Sockeye salmon, gold and copper mine in battle for hearts, minds in Alaska Fly overhead in a bush plane - there are no roads between native villages - and marvel: Eight giant rivers braid across hundreds of miles of wetlands, carving cobalt ribbons through snow-coned mountains before emptying into Bristol Bay. For more than a century, the wealth of this southwest Alaska watershed has sprung from the astonishing volume of salmon nurtured by those wild rivers. Bank-to-bank, gill-to-gill, tens of millions of silver-hued fish thrash upstream to spawn each year, unrestrained by dams, untainted by pollution. It is the largest sockeye run in the world, accounting for more than a quarter of wild salmon harvested in the United States, feeding millions at a time when fisheries are dwindling across the globe. But if fish have made the region's past and present fortune, the future sparkles with the promise of precious metal. Beneath the rolling tundra, straddling the headwaters of two of the watershed's most productive rivers, a Canadian company has discovered North America's biggest deposits of gold and copper, worth about $300 billion in today's soaring commodities markets....
From rolling seas to rolling plains, cowboy poetry is an oral tradition The material on which much of the early cowboy poetry was based came over the Appalachian Mountains, heading West. They were Scottish, Irish and English immigrants, some Civil War vets, singing old ballads by memory, said David Romtvedt, University of Wyoming associate English professor and state poet laureate. “Those ballads go way back to the British Isles and way before the ideal of cowboy poetry,” he said. Some of them were old ex-sailors, an occupation rich in song. Ballads like “The Cowboy and the Maiden,” actually sprung from “The Sailor and the Maiden,” but was instead strung with the ethos and habitat of a cowboy. “Basically, the words were changed from rolling seas to rolling plains,” said Hal Cannon, director and founder of the Western Folklife Center and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., the hub of modern day cowboy poetry. “For the cowboy, there was an extra-mythical basis for tradition.” A life set to the beat of horse hooves served as its own metronome to the ballad form. The rhyme and meter four-line verse, where two lines rhyme or every other line rhymes, seems to have been especially well-suited to the rhythm of a horse. And many conventional cowboy poems have that plodding, sing-song rhythm....