Resource Management Plans Won’t Affect Already Permitted Activities With a decision by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) about whether sage grouse should receive Endangered Species Act protection due by 2015, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has begun a process to revise the Resource Management Plans (RMP’s) which dictate how resources are managed…
A disgrace for the Salmon Challis National Forest Basin Creek is a headwater tributary of the Little Lost River drainage in Idaho. It was home to bull trout and had a series of wet meadows which are in the process of eroding away and becoming biological wastelands. Western Watersheds Project staff and supporters visited this…
Yesterday, Western Watersheds Project, Hells Canyon Preservation Council, and The Wilderness Society filed a motion in federal district court seeking to halt domestic sheep grazing on three allotments in the Payette National Forest in order to protect imperiled bighorn sheep in Hells Canyon, and native bighorns in the Salmon River Canyon. In 2010, the Forest…
Extractive Industry Determines the Fate of Sage Grouse in Idaho. On Monday, March 12, 2011, the Idaho Governor Butch Otter’s Sage Grouse Task Force had its first formal meeting. Originally the meeting was to be organized by the Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation (OSC) but something happened and rather than have OSC organize the…
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife recently purchased private checkerboard land intermingled with Forest Service lands in the Rock Creek watershed north of Yakima. Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation combined forces and purchased 16 square miles of lands…
Years of legal pressure prompts favorable policy change Public land domestic sheep grazers and bighorn advocates have been clashing for decades over land-use conflicts which place bighorn sheep populations at risk of deadly disease. With the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012, favorable policy change promises new avenues of conflict resolution that may…
Wolf delisting rider and most of the highly unpopular giveaways to polluters and abusers of our public lands are defeated- The conference report on the 2012 appropriations bill for most non-defense expenditures has been finalized. Instead of merely appropriating more or less money for agencies many ideologically loaded amendments or riders were added, mostly by…
On December 1st, at a presentation given by Bob Budd about the Wyoming Core Habitat Plan for sage grouse, it was pretty obvious that the livestock industry has things pretty much locked up with the agencies and politicians. The presentation was given in one of the big, new hearing rooms in the basement of the…
Ken Cole is a 5th generation Idahoan, an avid fly fisherman, wildlife enthusiast, and photographer. He is the interim Idaho Director for Western Watersheds Project.
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