The West’s native sheep scramble for a foothold
Wildlife
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Macho rams ‘take a walk on the wild side’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In the social system of wild sheep, the ram with the largest horns rules. Not only does he breed most of the ewes, but he is followed around by an admiring throng of lesser males. It is not surprising, then, that bighorn rams are […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Not Mary’s little lamb
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. We who drink in rhymes about Mary’s little lamb and Bo Peep’s docile flock with our mothers’ milk have a hard time seeing wild sheep objectively. Our perceptions of this animal are inevitably colored by the stupid, meek, defenseless creature domestication made of it. […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Desert sheep aren’t exactly thriving
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. The discovery 300 years ago of a pile of over 100,000 horns at a native village in what is now Arizona suggests that the four subspecies of wild sheep collectively known as desert bighorns were once as numerous as their alpine relatives. Desert sheep, […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Is Craig’s bill Salvage Rider II?
One of the hottest environmental topics of the last Congress – forest management – is back, and, if early reaction is any gauge, it hasn’t cooled down any. Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, R, whose Energy and Natural Resources Committee produced the controversial salvage logging rider two years ago, recently drafted a massive bill that would […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
El Lobo to return
Once considered as endangered as the species itself, the proposal to restore Mexican gray wolves to the Southwest now appears to be back on track. After the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service released its final environmental analysis on the reintroduction of “el lobo” Dec. 27, biologists moved 10 of 149 captive Mexican wolves to New […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Western raptors on the rise
Some birds of prey in the West are fighting back. The Salt Lake City-based group, HawkWatch International, recently compiled up to 18 years’ of data on the birds collected from sites in Nevada, Utah and New Mexico and found a fast rate of growth among merlins, ospreys and peregrine falcons. The average annual population increase […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Bison deaths spur lawsuit
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Mont. – As temperatures dip to 30 below, park rangers are rounding up and shipping to slaughter all bison that approach private land on the park’s northern border. It’s the start of a new management plan that has generated controversy and a lawsuit. “It’s a sad day when it comes to this […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Hunters get standing
Hunters in Colorado recently won a legal victory in a dispute over expanding a state prison. The hunters and their environmental allies challenged Colorado’s use of state park land in Rifle for the prison, charging that money collected from fishermen and hunters through taxes on guns and other equipment had purchased the land. The federal […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Dombeck takes on a new agency
Michael Dombeck spent his first hour as the new chief of the U.S. Forest Service greeting agency employees in Washington, D.C., as they headed to work. For some who had never glimpsed former Chief Jack Ward Thomas, it was a comforting gesture. But it also became clear that old guard members of the agency should […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Bees under siege
The West’s unsung pollen ranchers struggle against mites, economics and an old killer from the sky
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Emerging from the shadows
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. TUBAC, Ariz. – Gary Nabhan squats down in the field of crooked-neck squash, reaches inside a large orange blossom and exclaims, “I got one.” “Don’t worry; this guy can’t sting,” Nabhan says, holding a tiny bee between his fingers. That’s because it’s not a […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Miles County
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Miles County lives near the town of Brush in northeastern Colorado. Last winter, he lost most of his bees and he suspects the cause was the insecticide Penncap-M. Miles County: “I think farmers started getting lazy in the 1950s and 1960s. There were so […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
When dead bees don’t make a case
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. If most beekeepers are the proverbial shy and retiring types, Tom Theobald isn’t one of them. From his beeyards in Niwot, just northeast of Boulder, Colo., he has pushed state and federal officials hard to address bee kills he believes have been caused by […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Rain and clearcuts make fatal brew
UMPQUA, Ore. – In their octagonal house on a remote forested slope 30 miles northwest of Roseburg, Rick and Susan Moon and their next-door neighbor, Sharon Marvin, sat in the path of disaster Nov. 18. Above them in the gathering dark, curtains of rain were working away at the mountain, swelling a small creek and […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Checks are in the mail
Home siding by Louisiana-Pacific Inc. sold as a cheap alternative to cedar turned out to be more expensive than expected. When it swelled, buckled, soaked up water, rotted and even grew a mushroomlike fungus in wet weather, customers began frantically calling the company about their Inner Seal siding (HCN, 8/21/95). Now, Louisiana-Pacific says it will […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Where’s the fish?
Maps from Washington state’s Department of Natural Resources show more than a thousand miles of the state’s streams contain no fish. But they’re wrong. This distinction is important because state law requires that loggers and developers leave protective corridors of vegetation for erosion control next to fish-bearing streams. But biologists fear the mapping mistakes have […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Wear what you sow
South Dakotan Michael Melius sells jewelry you plant – -Seed Beads’ loaded with seeds of increasingly rare native grasses and wildflowers and strung on scraps of linen thread. It was the simplest packaging Melius could think of. “I had tried to sell seed mixes in packets with little success, I think, because that packaging implies […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
This machine makes trails …
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Parked in the back lot of the Forest Service office in Delta, Colo., is a skinny little bulldozer that looks almost like a toy. Designed to build trails, the Swepco 450 is tricky to maneuver since 8,000 pounds of steel balance on tracks only […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
…while ‘Rambo Cat’ obliterates them
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. The Forest Service’s Alan Vandiver is boss of some 800 miles of roads in the Hebgen Lake District in Montana, just outside Yellowstone National Park. That’s a lot of road, but it’s 130 miles less than it used to be, thanks to a road-ripping […]