Wildlife Habitat
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Not to be confused with the numerous barren ground caribou or the woodland caribou, the mountain caribou is faltering all over B.C. In the United States it would be, and in fact it is, an endangered species. A tiny herd hangs on in northern Idaho. It wanders back and forth over the border. This sad…
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I put up a brief story on this last week. Many mainstream media stories simply said “Mine to benefit grizzly bear” as though the bears might gain nourishment from the tailings. Wild Bill writes that the Rock Creek Mine Decision Sells Off Grizzly’s Future. New West.
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Dear Buffalo Friends, As the buffalo fall migration begins, your tax dollars have been hard at work this week with Department of Livestock (DOL) agents out scouring the landscape for “rougue” buffalo. Of course, any that they find they will attempt to chase back into Yellowstone National Park. As luck would have it, the buffalo…
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The post on the lack of cougars resulting in damage to the ecology of Zion National Park has prompted a lot of comments. I thought I’d post a photo I took of the Virgin River in Zion Canyon last March. The streambanks are trampled and bare or are calving off where the silt is deep.…
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“In Montana, we said it’s a bad idea to pen up a bunch of elk, feed them oats and have fat bankers from New York City shoot them while they’ve got their heads in a grain bucket,” Schweitzer said Wednesday during an interview in the Boise offices of The Associated Press.
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I always wondered why the Virgin River looked so oddly entrenched and actively eroding in Zion NP. It may be an indirect effect of the loss of the cougar. As any visitor will attest, the deer are everywhere. Cougar predation key to ecosystem health
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Brodie Farquhar is writing in New West about the snowmobiles in Yellowstone, which are supposed to be much quieter now with their 4-stroke engines. I didn’t realize this, but the Park is going to have yet another comment period on snowmobiles. This time it is on a draft environmental impact statement that will be released…
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In the past five years, the Bush administration has leased 35 million acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling — the equivalent of 15 Yellowstone National Parks. It’s wrecking the West. It’s violating the law — courts have held the government ignored the National Environmental Policy Act’s requirement to weigh environmental consequences of…