My Page: Kylee Perez

New West Feature

Some bad smells in Superior, Colorado, are having some positive effects on the wildlife this winter and spring. The town has been using ammonia-soaked tennis balls to haze coyotes away from more populated areas.

“They don’t hurt the coyotes,” said Alan McBeath, the Town of Superior’s Parks and Recreation Open Space Director, who got the idea for using ammonia-soaked tennis balls to haze other wild animals like raccoons and rodents from the Colorado Division of Wildlife and began using them on coyotes last year. “It’s just to get them to move from really heavily populated areas like playgrounds and trailheads.”

Humans and coyotes have always had some conflicts in the Front Range because they live near one another, said Jennifer Churchill, spokesperson for the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Northeast region. But there’s been an uptick in incidents involving coyotes biting people since 2008 and it’s unclear why.

New West Feature

In Colorado, a proposed bill to extend black bear hunting season has been met with opposition from environmental groups and support from the agricultural community.

House Bill 1294, sponsored by Rep. J. Paul Brown, R-Ignacio, would allow the Division of Wildlife to remove restrictions on hunting bears between March 1 and Sept. 1 in the state, a legislative response to increasing conflicts between humans and bears. The bill won agricultural-committee approval 8 to 5 on April 18.

“Conflicts are not a function of more bears on the ground, although we do believe we may have more on the ground,” said Randy Hampton, statewide spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Wildlife. “There are other factors at play, such as increasing human population, increasing energy development and increasing recreational use.”

Ranchers and others involved with agriculture continue to struggle with bears, particularly in the spring when black bears may kill calves and sheep, said Shawn Martini, spokesperson for the Colorado Farm Bureau.

New West Feature

Knapweed, the much-maligned plant that has dominated whole swaths of the Western landscape, may have less of a hold thanks to some tiny insects.

Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder suggests knapweed may not be as uncontrollable as once thought. Tim Seastedt, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has been using the knapweed weevil and the seedhead weevil, both native to southern Europe and eastern Russia, to control the weed.

“The plant was spun as the wicked weed of the West and it’s clearly been oversold,” Seastedt said.

Spotted knapweed and diffuse knapweed are nonnative, invasive species that have the ability to take over entire ecosystems and crowd out native plants, said Steve Sauer, Boulder County weed supervisor for the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

New West Feature

A few years ago, while Chris Corbin was working in the sales and marketing department at Big Sky Brewing Company, he started thinking about water.

This was before he created a company that now helps other companies—including Big Sky—offset its water consumption by buying credits that have put water back into trout streams gone dry.

His Missoula-based company, Lotic, is a water-rights consulting firm that now manages 33 projects in 18 states.

“New opportunities exist that people aren’t looking at,” Corbin said recently. “I just saw a niche in the conservation, environmental and sustainable opportunities that have to do with water that people aren’t recognizing.”

New West Film

Westerns, on the most basic level, are about the conquest of the frontier and the confrontations that happen between the conqueror and the frontier’s natives, said panelist Stuart Schoffman, a journalist and a lifelong lover of the Western genre who now works on an Israeli-Palestinian version of Sesame Street.

But that basic story allows for a whole host of complexities for characters and the settings that can grow and change along with society.

“Westerns are not just good against bad,” said panelist Brian Hollywood, a BBC journalist who still remembers watching his first Western (High Noon).  “They’re able to be more complex than that in a way that very few other films can manage.”

The Western’s complexity has allowed it to morph from bank robbers and bandits to spaceships and intergalactic villains.

“I happen to think ‘Star Wars’ is a Western,” Hollywood said. “What is Darth Vader but the guy in the black hat? Luke Skywalker is a gunslinger that goes after him and you’ve got the posse involved.”

New West Feature

With the estimated 38,400 wild horses reproducing faster than the BLM can remove them, the BLM is looking to quadruple the use of another option it’s been using since 2004: the fertility control drug PZP.

A horse sperm has proteins that fit protein receptors on a horse egg. PZP is made up of sperm proteins, but from a pig. Once the vaccine is injected into a horse the horse’s body will create antibodies, which will attack the pig protein, said Jay Kirkpatrick, director of the Science and Conservation Center at ZooMontana in Billings, Montana.  Those same antibodies will attach to the sperm receptors on the horse egg and cause them to change so they can no longer receive the proteins from the horse sperm. The Science and Conservation center is one of the largest producers and distributors of the PZP vaccine.

After the mares are injected with the $24 PZP pellet they become infertile for 22 months, but in order to apply the fertility drug, the horses still have to be corralled by a helicopter.

New West Feature

Business leaders and young, aspiring entrepreneurs gathered in Boulder this week for the Conscious Capitalism Conference at the University of Colorado to discuss how socially responsible business models can be profitable.

In every business, the bottom line is important, regardless of how passionate the business is about environment and society. Namasté Solar, a solar system company based in Boulder and one of the companies represented at the summit, doesn’t try to sell its customers on the environmental benefits of solar panels.

“A lot of our customers we have don’t care about the environment,” said Blake Jones President and Co-Founder of Namasté Solar. “They’re doing this because it makes economic sense.”

But for Jones and the other entrepreneurs at the conference, the bottom line isn’t just the bottom line. For these businesses there are three bottom lines: people, the planet and profits, or a triple bottom line. 

New West Feature

Voters in five Rocky Mountain states say state and federal leaders should still fund programs that protect land, air and wildlife despite budget woes, according to the results of a recent survey titled “Conservation in the West.”

Pollsters called 2,200 voters throughout Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming in late January and asked them questions to create a snapshot of how Westerners viewed conservation and environmental issues.

“Residents reject the concept that the economy and environment are in conflict,” said Walt Hecox, a professor of environmental science at Colorado College and director of their State of the Rockies project. “In this trying economic time that’s really interesting.”

New West Feature

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer announced on Wednesday that the state’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks department can now remove whole wolf packs to allow the elk herds in the Bitterroot Valley to recover.

The new directive comes as Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks are in the early stages of a study to investigate why elk herds in the valley are declining at such an alarming rate. Wildlife officials believe wolves and other predators are to blame.

So far, Schweitzer’s announcement hasn’t changed plans to conduct the research.

“This shouldn’t affect the study,” said Vivaca Crowser, information officer with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “It amplifies the need for it, I think, because the importance of getting this information on just what effect the wolves are having is paramount now.”

The number of elk calves in the Bitterroot Valley has dipped from 35 calves per 100 cows in the early 2000s to 11 calves per 100 cows in 2010. Wildlife officials believe that increased wolf, mountain lion and bear populations are to blame for the low calf-survival rate.

New West Feature

Wolverines are notoriously difficult to find in the wild. As climate change begins to threaten their dens in the United States, researchers say the animals could become even more rare.

New studies from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the U.S. Forest service suggest that climate change will begin to affect the snowpack that wolverines depend on to make their dens in the mountains of Idaho, Montana, Washington and Wyoming .

Synte Peacock, a geophysical scientist at NCAR in Boulder, Colorado, focused on wolverines for her study because of a strong correlation between available snowpack and the animals’ ability to successfully produce offspring.

“[The snow] protects the kits from predators and it acts as insulation against the cold,” Peacock said. “They’re 100 grams and pure white so they need a thick insulator.”