Beavers play an important role in North America and its ecology. Beaver dams provide enormous benefits for all kinds of wildlife. In the West, they are very beneficial to trout by providing slower water refuges where the fish can grow to larger sizes, thus producing more eggs and offspring. The riparian vegetation that grows [...]
Continue Reading →A guest article by Mike Settell
On June 26th, 2010, I inspected the South Fork of Mink Creek to document conditions of the Box Canyon road culvert that was being plugged by beaver. Like many roads throughout the west, the South Fork Road parallels the creek and so problems with the road-creek interface are, at best, [...]
Continue Reading →The dam is over a half mile long-
World’s biggest beaver dam discovered in northern Canada. by Michel Comte and Jacques Lemieux. Yahoo News.
Regarding beaver locally (near Pocatello, ID), today I went up to check on the big beaver ponds below Scout Mountain. I found some ATV vandal today or yesterday had ridden [...]
Continue Reading →Reported sightings in the Cascades of Washington State lead to funding to search for grizzlies.
There have been reported sightings of grizzly bears for many years in the Cascades of Washington but very little has been confirmed. As the article states, grizzly bears don’t usually disperse long distances like wolves do so colonizing new areas [...]
Continue Reading →Utah gets a beaver management plan-
Restoring beaver to a creek changes just about everything, mostly for the good, especially if there are no buildings or needed roads near the creek.
Story on Utah’s first beaver management plan. Plan looks to use the large rodents as a watershed restoration tool. By Brett Prettyman. The [...]
Continue Reading →Made by Man (Active Restoration)
Dan McCormick combines art, ecology, and engineering to build sculptures that simulate a natural process/feature (ex: beaver dam) of a typical watershed that filters sediment, recharges a floodplain, establishes riparian vegetation/wildlife habitat and promotes general watershed health.
When people actively work ~ say, planting willows or spreading seed ~ to [...]
Continue Reading →5/17/09
Continue Reading →Bison will be able to occupy the Horse Butte area for the first time-
Finally, the bison will be able to leave the Park and occupy this now cow-free area area for the first time this winter.
Conservation groups and the couple who bought Horse Butte have prepared the way, and it looks like the [...]
Continue Reading →Biologists push for action on grizzly plan. Bear population continues in decline despite 2002 warning in report.
Darcy Henton, The Edmonton Journal.
Perhaps only 500 grizzlies are left in this vast province, fewer than the Bob Marshall/Glacier National Park grizzly recovery area* just to the south of Alberta.
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*Officially named the Northern [...]
Continue Reading →Some time ago, this web site posted the opinion of public lands rancher and state legislator Bert Brackett on the Murphy fire complex.
Here again is Brackett’s opinion. Failed policy based on flawed science has gotten us here. Guest opinion in the Idaho Statesman. Brackett blamed the Western Watersheds Project because it won a [...]
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