Wildlife Habitat

  • The effort to list the Greater Sage-grouse via the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been an uphill battle.  However, even as the end-game has yet to be realized, the effort itself has been remarkably successful at prompting bureaucratic backflips and a whole lot of paper-shuffling to accommodate consideration of the species.  Unfortunately, many of the existing and developing…

  • REVA (H.R. 3432) Would Provide Cash Option for Grazing Permittees Conservationists hailed the introduction of the Rural Economic Vitalization Act (H.R. 3432) in Congress, a bill that would allow federal grazing permittees to voluntarily relinquish their grazing permits back to the managing federal agency in exchange for compensation paid by a third party. The bill…

  • People just won’t be quiet about this oil company slash at the planet and America- Developing the Alberta tar sands keeps getting more and more controversial. First it was the pits and the megaloads, but now the anger has shifted to the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring the said-to-be toxic syncrude from Alberta to…

  • Beavers play an important role in North America and its ecology. Beaver dams provide enormous benefits for all kinds of wildlife. In the West, they are very beneficial to trout by providing slower water refuges where the fish can grow to larger sizes, thus producing more eggs and offspring. The riparian vegetation that grows in…

  • Record mortality in 2010 took its toll- Population goes from 602 to 593. Fifty-five grizzly died or were killed by people in 2010, a record. That pace is off slightly in 2011 (35 so far).  A large number of grizzly food sources have disappeared in recent years, most notably whitebark pine seeds and cutthroat trout.…

  • The sage grouse population of Idaho has been in steep decline for years. It is now getting to the point where hunting has declined to a one-week season where hunters are limited to one bird a day. It seems a bit odd to me that there isn’t more outrage by the hunting community over this…

  • We ran a story on this earlier — they are going to shoot a lot of wolves because tar sand mining is ruining the mountain caribou habitat. Now this in the Huffington Post. Wolves, Caribou, Tar Sands and Canada’s Oily Ethics. By Chris Genovali. Executive Director, Raincoast Conservation Foundation

  • Twin Falls Ranger District’s Trout Creek, habitat for the Yellowstone cutthroat trout, was among the locations found damaged by livestock grazing when Don Oman became the district ranger in 1986. In this video, Mr. Oman describes the dramatic environmental improvement that occurred after livestock were excluded from a short segment of the creek. Don Oman…

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