Threats
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The collar of Grizzly #726, emitting a mortality signal, was detected during a routine flight on September 12, 2012. The collar hadn’t moved for a while so the mercury switch that tells the collar that the bear is still alive hadn’t been triggered, thus increasing the frequency of the beeps heard from the telemetry monitor.…
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Each spring hundreds of bison leave Yellowstone National Park in search of greening grass and birthing grounds. While on this search bison regularly cross highways 191 and 287 in the Hebgen Basin of Montana and Highway 89 near Gardiner, Montana. The Buffalo Field Campaign is also out there to warn motorists of this danger with…
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The month of March was an active month for sage grouse. Not only have sage grouse started to assemble on their strutting grounds known as leks due to the abnormally warm start of the month but the season for strutting has begun Washington D.C. and Boise, Idaho and other areas in western states. On March…
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Rex Rammell, the former gubernatorial candidate for Idaho who was convicted of poaching an elk in 2010 Tex Creek zone in eastern Idaho when he only had a tag for the Middle Fork zone of central Idaho, has lost the second appeal of his conviction. Rammell’s unsuccessful defense centered around his ignorance of the law…
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Leaks and spills of Canadian oil are happening now at a critical time- Back in 1989, all the political gears and levers were greased with money and Astroturf public opinion to approve leasing the National Arctic Wildlilfe Refuge for Oil Drilling. Today we seem to be at a similar juncture. In 1989 the political players…
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I attended the Fish and Wildlife Service’s wolverine listing hearings in Helena. Opponents, including a number of Montana state legislators as well as MDFWP, argued that wolverine populations were “stable” or even “increasing” and therefore did not warrant listing under the Endangered Species Act. While the ill-informed state legislators who testified could be forgiven for…
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The Supreme Court recently ruled in an 7-1 vote (Justice Stephen Breyer recused himself) that the EPA regulations about water pollution as mandated by the Clean Water Act did not apply to sediment and other pollution from logging operations. The timber industry is rejoicing over the ruling. But citizens should be less sanguine than industry.…
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Holistic grazing guru pieces together false assumptions to produce ineffective but popular recommendations on climate change- Allan Savory is a name not well known to most people concerned about climate change. However, he has been preaching his gospel of holistic grazing for a generation now and is somewhat loved by the Western livestock grazing industry,…