Monthly Archives: August 2012

Not Eager for Beavers

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Garfield County, Utah has said “no thank you,” to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources’ offer to transplant nuisance beavers from other parts of the state to the county to help restore high elevation wetlands, the Salt Lake City Tribune reports.

Although, if they had actually said “no thank you,” you probably wouldn’t be reading about this. What they did say was that they were afraid the beavers would become a tool for the environmental community to use against against cattle.

Utah DWR says that they’ll make the offer again another time.

Read the whole story in the Salt Lake City Tribune, and make sure to keep scrolling down past the ad, because there is more text after it.

(Thanks to Mountain West News for literally calling this story out with a quote at the top of their homepage, even though the story was a small one, on the second page.)

 

Research Round-up

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Earlier this summer, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife biologists banded 15 peregrine falcon chicks from five nests in western New York State. The birds are part of the growing peregrine population in the state.

Read the NYS DEC press release here.

The California Department of Fish and Game recently caught and captured 10 female deer as part of a study of habitat usage along I-280 in the San Francisco region. The information collected is part of an 18-month study that will allow scientists suggest ways to keep deer off the busy roadway.

Read the California DFG press release here.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that a recent sampling did not find Asian carp in western Lake Erie. A week of electrofishing and gill-netting did not turn up Asian carp. The survey was conducted because last summer, DNA samples revealed the presence of the invasive carp.

Read a press release from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources here.

The Bend (Ore.) Bulletin reports that wildlife biologists will set out camera traps in the Cascade mountains hoping to catch a glimpse of wolverines, which are listed as threatened in the state.

Read the article in the Bend Bulletin here.

Photo: Wildlife Biologists process a sedated deer for the I-280 deer study courtesy of California Department of Fish and Game

New Spider Species Found in Oregon

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In 2010 scientists found unusual spiders in caves in southwestern Oregon. This month they described those spiders as a new genus and a new species: Trogloraptor marchingtoni. The species was described in the journal ZooKeys (and in this case “open access” doesn’t mean free access to the journal. You must pony up 33 Euros to read the article.

The abstract says that spiders in this genus are “known only from caves and old growth forest understory in the Klamath-Siskiyou region of Oregon and California.”

Read ScienceNOW from AAAS for a great photo and a brief summary of the discovery.

If you can’t get enough of new spider species news, all the usual suspects have a news story on this species:
Discover
Scientific American
Wired.

Hunting and Fishing Up, Feds Say

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A new report from the US Fish and Wildlife Service says that the number of hunters nationwide has increased nine percent 2006 to 2011 and the number of anglers increased by 11 percent. More than 71 million people watched wildlife in those five years.

Wildlife-related recreation makes up one percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the report says. (Now you can say that you are part of the one percent.)

While the news on hunting represents the halt in a decades’ long decline, the report is not all good news for wildlife managers. Not only did the number of people who watched wildlife not increase from 2006 to 2011, but most wildlife watchers never leave home to do so. While “wildlife watching” includes photographing and observing, for 74% of all wildlife watchers, the wildlife activity enjoyed is feeding wildlife.

The 24-page preliminary report is available now. (Here.) A more detailed report will be available in November, and reports on each state will be released starting in December.
Get the highlights in the press release, found here.

Photo courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

Sage Grouse Faces Off With Energy in the West

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Western states are trying to keep the sage grouse off the endangered species list. Energy companies are trying to build transmission lines and wind facilities. Increasingly, those two goals are in conflict.

The Twins Falls Times-News takes a close look at the situation in southern Idaho, including providing a cool map. The article concludes that so far, the sage grouse are coming out on top, with regulators keeping their promises to prevent development in core sage grouse areas. Applications for high voltage power lines have dropped.

Read more in the Twins Falls Times-News, here.

Photo: Sage grouse by Stephen Ting. Courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service.

 

EHD Round-Up

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It’s the season for epizootic hemorrhagic disease, and the states are reporting in. The disease has been found in deer in: (Click on the state name for more information on the local outbreak.)

Indiana
Iowa
Michigan
Kansas
Nebraska

It’s suspected in Arkansas, according to the Baxter Bulletin. And a mystery disease of deer in Oklahoma may be epizootic hemorrhagic disease, or blue-green algae poisoning, or something else. Read more about the situation in the Tulsa World, here.

Photo: Healthy deer, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

Birds and Windows: NPR Series

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Yesterday, NPR’s Morning Edition began a two part series on birds and windows. The focus of part one was on the Powdermill Avian Research Center in western Pennsylvania. Today’s story will be about “an architectural firm that’s leading the search for bird-friendly buildings.”

If you are familiar with the issues behind bird collisions with windows, the NPR story may not have news for you. But if you find yourself responding to a sudden increase in concern about bird collisions, this series during the AM drive-time may have inspired it. (It was one of the top emailed stories of the day.)

Read and listen to the NPR Morning Edition story, here. There are also photos.
You’ll find today’s story here, as soon as we get a link.

Snow Goose Origins

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Snow geese present a tricky wildlife management situation. Their numbers have increased so much that they are harming the Arctic tundra where they raise their young.

Where are all these geese coming from? One theory says that they are fattening up on rice farms in the South. Since we can’t fly along with the geese as they migrate from their wintering grounds to their breeding grounds, questions remain.

A paper in a recent issue of the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology shows how stable isotopes can be used to determine the wintering grounds of northbound migrant lesser snow geese in the Mississippi and Central flyways. The paper suggests that the same technique can be used to determine the summer location of southbound migrants in the fall.

Finally, the authors say that their techniques can also be used to determine critical habitat for other waterfowl species.

The Avian Conservation and Ecology paper is open access. Read it here.

Photo: Snow geese in Iowa. Photo by Dave Menke, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

Snow Goose Origins

Posted on by
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Snow geese present a tricky wildlife management situation. Their numbers have increased so much that they are harming the Arctic tundra where they raise their young.

Where are all these geese coming from? One theory says that they are fattening up on rice farms in the South. Since we can’t fly along with the geese as they migrate from their wintering grounds to their breeding grounds, questions remain.

A paper in a recent issue of the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology shows how stable isotopes can be used to determine the wintering grounds of northbound migrant lesser snow geese in the Mississippi and Central flyways. The paper suggests that the same technique can be used to determine the summer location of southbound migrants in the fall.

Finally, the authors say that their techniques can also be used to determine critical habitat for other waterfowl species.

The Avian Conservation and Ecology paper is open access. Read it here.

Photo: Snow geese in Iowa. Photo by Dave Menke, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service