Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Winds of Change.” If you think wind energy is a good alternative to fossil fuels, but you also care about wildlife, you’ve probably worried about the possible “lawnmower” effect of spinning wind turbines on birds and bats. At least some of that concern […]
Birds
Posted inWotr
Drive-up nature is better than nothing
The woman dubbed “eagle lady” grabbed a chunk of fish and threw it out on the sand in front of her trailer. Fifteen bald eagles immediately jumped off their perches and flew into a scuffle for the meat. A large, younger eagle, its feathers still gray-brown and mottled, emerged with the prize clamped in its […]
Posted inWotr
It takes a community to save the sage grouse
Way out on the sagebrush sea of the American West, people are embarking on an uncharted new journey called community-based conservation. Their flagship is the greater sage grouse, a bird that has narrowly avoided being added to the endangered species list because of the cooperative efforts of people around the region. The decision not to […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2004: Conservationist in a Conservative Land
Calling all birders
Ever wonder how your feathered friends are faring in the face of deforestation, farming and other formidable foes? You can find out in the National Audubon Society’s State of the Birds 2004 report. Using 40 years of data collected from the U.S. Geological Survey’s national Breeding Bird Survey, the National Audubon Society assessed population changes […]
Posted inAugust 16, 2004: Journey of Rediscovery
Truce holds on the Platte River
Environmentalists and farmers take a leap of faith for the sake of staying out of the courtroom
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
The common beauty of a spring day
In the afternoon, they drove side by side, three abreast in the big Ford, and watched the land. When they came to a small rise on a gravel road between nowhere and nowhere, they slowed to a stop and lowered the windows. They sat there like they might be sitting their horses, or at a […]
Posted inWotr
Era of the sage grouse is coming to an end
Sage grouse were an important part of this Wyoming ranch kid’s early life. My dad’s place included a range of sage-covered hills, and on those hills and many more between the ranch and foothills of the Wind River Mountain Range, there were thousands of sage grouse we sometimes called sage hens, or sage chickens. The […]
Posted inMarch 1, 2004: The Last Open Range
My great-grandfather the crow killer
The one time I met my great-grandfather was unexpectedly, at the Grand Canyon. It was on an overcast March day when I was 18. I wasn’t looking for any relatives. I was just trying to take photographs. I’d never visited the national park, and so my grandfather, Frederick, had driven my 11-year-old brother and me […]
Posted inApril 28, 2003: Indian Power
Birdman’s biography soars
He’s known as the Birdman of Boise, and is perhaps the most underrated conservationist in the West. In Cool North Wind: Morley Nelson’s Life with Birds of Prey, Idaho writer Stephen Stuebner tells the story of a former Soil Conservation Service employee, “a flamboyant salt-of-the-earth character, a father of four, a husband, a widower, a […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 2003: A breath of fresh air
84-year-old bird law no match for the military
The United States has once again declared itself to be above international law — this time, a law aimed at protecting birds. Last April, a federal judge ordered all branches of the military to comply with the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a law that protects 850 species of birds through agreements with Mexico, Canada, […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 2002: Delta Blues
Golfers may oust eagles
WYOMING A developer’s plan to install a golf course and 71 houses along the Snake River near Jackson has raised convoluted legal questions that sound more like bad jokes. One example: How many eagles does it take to build a golf course? That question came up when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service granted Dick […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
Raptors won’t fry away
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has monitored the electrocution of hawks and eagles, whose large wing spans can easily bridge the gap between live wires on power lines (HCN, 12/7/98: Power poles make deadly perches). Though the agency has the authority to prosecute electric companies under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Evicted terns get new habitat
OREGON Caspian terns, much maligned for feasting on declining salmon runs on the Columbia River, just got a wing up. Displaced by development along the Pacific Coast, the world’s largest tern colony settled several years ago on an island composed of dredging material disposed of by the Army Corps of Engineers. There, near the mouth […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
Snowy plover predators become prey
OREGON Many creatures that forage along the sand dunes of the Oregon Coast consider the snowy plover’s cream-colored eggs a savory delicacy, and all those stolen eggs add up. Since 1993, the shy shorebird has been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Despite federal and state wildlife agencies’ recovery efforts, such as fencing […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
Condor program laden with lead
Carcass-feeding condors dying from bullets
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Can cows and grouse coexist on the range?
Brad Phelps remembers sage grouse numbering in the hundreds in the uplands of his family’s 700-acre cattle ranch when he was a teenager. “Twenty years later, it was 12 birds,” Phelps says. But Phelps, a fourth-generation rancher in the Gunnison Valley and a member of the Colorado Wildlife Commission, doesn’t think the grouse’s problems can […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Last dance for the sage grouse?
GUNNISON, Colo. – The way to see sagebrush is not as most people do, through the windshield of a vehicle speeding toward someplace else. Slow down and get out of the car; walk in the midst of it. Then the sagebrush in the cold, dry Gunnison Valley can have a scraggly beauty. It rolls across […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Chick-a-boom-boom at the lek
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Male sage grouse congregate on leks for the same reason young men go to singles bars: They’re hoping to get lucky. For the grouse, sex is very much a one-night stand, which explains why the males gather in late winter at traditional sites to […]
Posted inFebruary 12, 2001: Mr. Babbitt's wild ride
Owl things considered
SOUTHWEST After eight years of legal wrangling, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has settled one of the Southwest’s most embittered endangered species debates – or has it? On Jan. 18, the Fish and Wildlife Service designated 4.6 million acres in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah as critical habitat for the Mexican spotted owl. […]
Posted inDecember 18, 2000: Still here: Can humans help other species defy extinction?
Of raptors, rats and roadkill
At the Northern Rockies Raptor Center in northwestern Montana, Ken Wolff has been nursing injured birds back to health for 12 years. But this August his nonprofit operation hit a small snag. Five hundred pounds of frozen rodents, which Wolff uses to feed birds of prey, failed to arrive at the Missoula airport. He spent […]