Wildlife Management

If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
– Aldo Leopold

The wolves of the Rocky Mountains are under attack. Idaho recently released its proposal for the 2011 hunting season, which calls for no limit on the number of wolves that can be killed. Yes, you read that correctly. The state that professed it will not manage its wolves has followed through and issued a public plan expressing there will be no limits on wolf hunting for this year. Based on the fact that Idaho, Wyoming and Montana are required to maintain a specific number of wolves in the three-state region, an undue burden has been placed on the other two states. One hopes Wyoming and Montana will take heed; however, at this writing, Montana has announced it expects to issue 220 permits, permission to take out roughly one-third of the total Montana wolf population.

There are those who argue that all wolves should be protected, no matter what. This is not an acceptable management approach when even endangered grizzlies that cause harm to a rancher are being culled. The other end of the spectrum is represented by a vocal and polar-opposite. These individuals profess a vested interest in nature, albeit a nature of their own design. 

National Park News

The hiker involved in a fatal fall on Monday, July 18, in Glacier National Park has been identified as 30-year old Nicholas Ryan from Omaha, Nebraska. 

Ryan and two friends were hiking the Grinnell Glacier Trail in the Many Glacier Valley when Ryan fell 50 to 100 feet on a steep snowfield. 

At approximately 11:50 a.m. that day, an interpretive park ranger leading a hike on the trail received a report of a male hiker who had taken a slide and needed medical assistance.

National Park Service Rangers, Kalispell Regional Medical Center’s ALERT helicopter and Minuteman Aviation responded. 

ESA News

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Department this week announced its conclusions from a 12-month study prompted by a petition to list the whitebark pine as endangered: The tree is threatened and deserves protection, but it won’t get that this time around.

The department’s announcement explained that “after review of all available scientific and commercial information, we find that listing P. albicaulis as threatened or endangered is warranted. However, currently listing [whitebark pine] is precluded by higher priority actions to amend the Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants.”

Instead, the tree will be added as a candidate to the species list, with a “proposed rule” to revisit listing it as endangered “as our priorities and funding will allow.”

Guest Column

Idaho is a sportsman’s paradise and a huge draw for outdoor recreation, including ORVs, or Outdoor Recreation Vehicles. More and more ORV riders are taking to the trails of Idaho’s popular destinations.

My concern is the disregard that a growing number of ORV riders have for rules and posted signs. Unfortunately, their irresponsible riding has led to a dramatic deterioration in the quality of the outdoor experience on both private and public forest lands.

Two years ago, I took along my 11-year-old son on an opening-day hunt on “Access Yes” forestland in Idaho’s panhandle. These lands were owned by a timber company that allowed public access, but restricted motorized use to mainline roads. After hiking three hours up a road closed to motorized use, we encountered two riders on ATVs. My son was discouraged after the long hike and I was upset, knowing his first hunt was cut short.

Mouthful of Feathers Feature

In the autumn, you dream of Huns bursting from the rubble that was the old milk house, and you carry your shotgun cradled ready. You follow the dogs, and they follow their noses.

But now the land is sharp green from rains that don’t seem to quit and when you go, you don’t follow the dogs, they follow you, and they don’t pick up scent, they pick up the bothersome beggars’ ticks burs from last years dried stalks of houndstongue. You go where you want and sometimes, you walk among the old buildings and think about a different time, a different era.

There’s a hand-dug well and 15 feet down, water. It is rock-lined and covered with rotting timbers. Peering down into those depths gives a tremor in your soul. A dark, wet, fearsome cavern. You think about being down in there, digging the damned thing by hand, and placing each one of those rocks. You think about the darkness, but then you look up and above, is freedom. Above, sky. Lots of sky.

AP Investigation

On May 8, 2009, a U.S. District Court jury acquitted W.R. Grace and Co. along with three former executives on charges of knowingly poisoning residents in the asbestos-tainted Northwest Montana town of Libby.

Immediately following the verdict, there was talk throughout Libby of ushering in a new era, one not defined by death and suffering. Hundreds of people have died from asbestos-related complications there and perhaps thousands more have been sickened.

This new era, the hopeful residents said, would be in the spirit of healing and economic development. Libby would be a safer, healthier and happier place to live.

“We’ve got to get on with life,” Dean Herreid, a Libby resident suffering from painful asbestosis, said shortly after the verdict. “Justice was attempted.”

Guest Column

The Yellowstone River oil spill is a stark reminder of something we often forget: oil spills aren’t just for coastal folks.

In case you missed the news, here’s what happened: On July 1, the Silvertip pipeline, an underground conduit for ExxonMobil, split open, spewing some 42,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River near Laurel, Mont. The breadth and depth of the impacts aren’t yet clear, but they can’t be good. Oil has been spotted as far as 240 miles downstream of the spill, and closer to the accident oil slicks shroud wetlands, crops and riparian habitat.

It’s not the first time dysfunctional pipelines have wreaked inland havoc. Last year saw a spate of spills. In July, more than 1 million gallons of oil gushed into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. More than 250,000 gallons leaked from a pipeline in the Chicago suburbs last fall. And an underground rupture spilled 21,000 gallons into Utah’s Jordan River and its tributaries, but luckily didn’t reach the Great Salt Lake.

These spills don’t make the impression on our collective memory that massive gushers like Exxon-Valdez or last year’s Gulf spill do. But they’re much more common, and potentially deeply insidious.

National Park News

Park officials announced last week that Going-to-the-Sun Road would at last open in Glacier National Park today.

According to the park’s website, they fulfilled that promise. The road is now open to vehicles and shuttle buses through Logan Pass, although there are limited services—and no water—at the visitor center there.

High Country News Feature

The largest fire in New Mexico’s recorded history, the Las Conchas, is 45 percent contained; its footprint covers 146,000 acres (not all of that land has been charred, though, since wildfires burn in patches). The blaze started on the afternoon of June 26 when an aspen tree fell onto a powerline southwest of Los Alamos. It exploded to 40,000 acres overnight, driven by high winds and crispy-dry forest fuels.

“I’d never seen fire behave that way,” says Bill Armstrong, fuels program specialist for the Santa Fe National Forest, describing how quickly the blaze spread. “It confounds everything I thought I knew.” Fires are crucial to the Southwest’s ecology, but the results of decades of fire suppression, drought and a warming climate mean that blazes are more and more likely to become massive and burn with a severity far beyond normal.

On June 30th, I took a field trip with Armstrong into the Santa

Wildlife Management

A cable TV news crew taping a segment on bear safety Friday in Yellowstone National Park got a little something extra in the bargain: a close encounter with a bear.

“That was what we refer to as an incident within an incident,” park spokesman Dan Hottle said Monday, joking that he worried some might think the encounter was staged.

Hottle had taken the crew from CNN to Joffe Lake — a five-minute drive from park headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs — where they were interviewing Yellowstone bear biologist Kerry Gunther.