Brian Ertz

  • Environmentalists Couldn’t Stop the Slaughter at Idaho’s Annual Coyote and Wolf Derby

    Last year I learned that anti-predator activists were organizing a predator killing derby to take place in Salmon, Idaho – a place smack dab amidst one of the largest and most breathtakingly diverse public landscapes in the country. A few of us infiltrated the event with the aim of exposing the extent of the depravity…

  • “Goat Man” Prompts Speculation, Awe

    The sighting of a man or woman who has fashioned a goat costume and taken to the mountain to be among the wild goats of northern Utah has prompted the awe and adoration of at least one wildlife activist known to readers of The Wildlife News. ‘Goat man’ seen among wild goats in northern Utah – Associated…

  • A Big Bonehead

    Politico‘s Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist Matt Wuerker weighs in on Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson’s use of a Congressional Rider to attempt to deny bighorn sheep protections on national forests in order to allow a few lone sheepman access to graze domestic sheep that transmit deadly disease to imperiled bighorns on National Forest public lands.  

  • Another Kill Order for Wolves via Flat Top Ranch

    Less than a year after Flat Top Ranch was awarded $600,000 for a conservation easement – half of which was paid for by a Blaine County levy assessed to protect wildlife –  Flat Top Ranch has run into more conflicts with wolves: Jerome Hansen, supervisor of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s Magic Valley Region,…

  • BLM Report: Public lands ranching fails rangeland health standards on a third of rangelands assessed, 33 million acres

    A new federal assessment of rangelands in the West finds a disturbingly large portion fails to meet range health standards principally due to commercial livestock operations.  In the last decade as more land has been assessed, estimates of damaged lands have doubled in the 13-state Western area where the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM)…

  • Conservation Groups and Livestock Interests Work to Create a New $25 Million Rancher Slush Fund

    Recently we were informed of a new effort by two conservation groups, a Native American tribe and livestock interests “to secure $25 million from the upcoming 2012 Farm Bill to help livestock producers reduce the risk of livestock losses to grizzly bears, wolves, black bears and mountain lions.” This taxpayer money is meant to “reduce…

  • The Path of the Pronghorn Protected

    Forest Service agrees to remove livestock corrals that impede the pronghorn’s migration. Cheyenne, WY- Conservationists and the US Forest Service today signed a settlement agreement that will protect a 6,000-year-old, critical migratory corridor necessary for the survival of North America’s fastest land animal, the pronghorn. The Path of the Pronghorn is the longest remaining migration…

  • County vs Federal Flare-Up On Herd Creek, Central Idaho

    Federal Judge Douses the Flames – For Now Custer County Commissioners have been rattling their sabres over a central Idaho road closure enforced by the Bureau of Land Management.  The closure occurred 12 years ago after a landslide and prevents off-road-vehicles (ORVs) from access to the Jerry Peak Wilderness Study Area. Despite being given the…

×