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Interior Secretary Sally Jewell received two letters today from conservation scientists criticizing a draft Rule that would remove protections for wolves across the lower 48 states. One letter came from the American Society of Mammalogists, the other from 16 conservation scientists. Signatories include several scientists who conducted the research the government relied upon [...]
Continue Reading →The Supreme Court recently ruled in an 7-1 vote (Justice Stephen Breyer recused himself) that the EPA regulations about water pollution as mandated by the Clean Water Act did not apply to sediment and other pollution from logging operations. The timber industry is rejoicing over the ruling. But citizens should be less sanguine than industry. [...]
Continue Reading →By George Wuerthner
State Fish and Game agencies are in the midst of a funding and mission crisis. They appear unable to adapt to shifting political and demographic changes much as the Republican Party is failing to adjust to new voter realities. The crisis is nowhere more evident than in their attitudes towards predators like [...]
Continue Reading →Hailey, ID. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed an Endangered Species Act (ESA) listing rule and critical habitat designation for the Gunnison sage-grouse that will designate the species as Endangered and provide 1.7 million acres of critical habitat in Colorado and Utah.
Gunnison sage-grouse (Centrocercus minimus) has a more restricted range than the closely-related [...]
Continue Reading →Due to petitions of a number of environmental groups, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) appears likely to list the wolverine under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Once found across much of the West and northern-tier states from Minnesota to Maine, wolverine are now limited to a few isolated populations in the western United [...]
Continue Reading →Move makes Montana’s wolverine season doubly dead-
In a surprise move last Monday (Jan. 7), the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced that on Jan. 18 it would issue a proposed rule protecting wolverines under the Endangered Species Act. This probably means it will be proposed as a threatened species instead of its current [...]
Continue Reading →Today Montana Judge E. Wayne Phillips shot down a lawsuit brought by powerful livestock interests to stop the State of Montana from allowing bison to use areas of Montana outside of Yellowstone National Park.
In the spring of 2011, after many years of unsuccessfully trying to keep bison from leaving the northern boundary of Yellowstone [...]
Continue Reading →In their December 29th editorial in the Billings Gazette, Scott Talbott of the Wyoming Game and Fish and Harv Forsgren of the U.S. Forest Service wrote that hunting was another step towards grizzly bear recovery.
To read their editorial, go to this link: Guest opinion: Hunting another step toward grizzly bear recovery.
Specifically, the [...]
Continue Reading →Wyoming’s Wolf Plan Lethal for Wolves
Denver, CO. A coalition of grassroots conservation organizations filed suit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) today for removing gray wolves in Wyoming from the federal threatened and endangered species list. The Service approved the State’s management of wolves in September, and the Wyoming Game and Fish [...]
Continue Reading →SAGE GROUSE: PROXIMATE AND ULTIMATE CAUSES
When I was in college, one of my favorite courses was animal behavior. One of the more memorable lessons I learned was the difference between proximate and ultimate causes of behavior. Proximate and ultimate causes of events are important to distinguish.
For instance, say a researcher finds that sedimentation [...]
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