The Idaho Statesman isn’t sure if the federal stimulus plan helped the nation recover from the recession, but in an editorial today it says that it was a good thing for wildlife because allowed a local partnership, including Idaho Fish and Game, built a wildlife underpass on Idaho 21. The underpass is a success.
Read the very brief editorial, here.
Read more about the underpass, and its success, also in the Idaho Statesman, here.
Allowing citizens to salvage road kill has it’s dicey issues, ranging from human health, human safety and enforcement issues. Idaho is plunging in with expanded road-kill salvage rules in the hope that letting people stop and pick up dead animals from the side of the road will lead to better data about where and when animals are being struck by cars.
There are a lot of caveats. See the press release for details.
It’s on clear what kind of data will come from limited access highways, since, as the press release points out, those roads only allow emergency stopping, and salvaging road kill is not an emergency.
The 2010 helicopter crash that killed Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologists Larry Barrett and Danielle Schiff, and pilot Perry J. Krinitt was caused when an aluminum clipboard hit the helicopter’s tail rotor, the the National Transportation Safety Board announced in a report released last Thursday.
The biologists were counting salmon redds from the helicopter.
Read the Associated Press story in the Spokane Spokesman-Review.
Things have actually been pretty quiet over the past month when it comes to wildlife diseases. The big news, of course, is white nose syndrome in Alabama, but there have been a few other stories worth noting.
Rabbits can get prion diseases. Once it looked like they were immune to diseases in the family of mad cow and chronic wasting disease, but the latest research shows they can get it. (See the original paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
At least one frog species, the Pacific chorus frog, is a carrier of chytrid fungus, a recent study found. Read the LiveScience story via MSNBC. The study was published recently in PLoS ONE, read it here. Or read the San Francisco State University press release, here.
A wolf suffering from parvovirus was discovered in Idaho. Parovirus effects all canids, including domestic dogs. There is a vaccine for the disease available for dogs. Read the Idaho Department of Fish and Game press release here.
Also, there has been an outbreak of canine distemper in gray foxes in Michigan.
For birds:
The red tides on the Gulf coast of Texas have caused the deaths of redhead ducks.
The death of eider ducks on Cape Cod (Massachusetts) has been pinned on a virus, named Wellfleet Bay virus.
Ten wild turkeys were found dead from avian pox, a virus, in southeast Montana.
Finally, back in late February, brucellosis, a cattle disease, was found in elk in Montana.
Photo: A Pacific chorus frog. Credit: Joyce Gross
USGS scientist and sUAS pilot Leanne Hanson holding the Raven A. USGS photo.
Call it a remote-controlled helicopter and it sounds like a toy. Call it a drone, and you know it is battle tested.
A drone helicopter, much like the ones used by the military, is being employed by Phil Groves, a wildlife biologist with the Idaho Power Company to survey for salmon redds, says an article in the Idaho Statesman. The US Geological Survey also uses them in Idaho to survey pygmy rabbits, it says.
The use of drones had been strictly limited by the FAA, the article says, but Congress recently introduced a law that will allow commercial uses by September 30, 2015.
In the article Groves says that the drones are much safer than conducting the surveys by helicopter. He was inspired to use the drone by the death of two fisheries colleagues in the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.
Read the entire article in the Idaho Statesman, here.
Of course, this isn’t the first time drones have been used to survey wildlife.
Read about the US Geological Survey’s work with drones and sandhill crane monitoring, here. (Includes links to more info.)
Read about drones in the tropics in Yale Environment 360, here.
Read about a seabird survey on the Rocky Mountain Tracking, Inc. blog, here.
Photo courtesy US Geological Survey
Mountain goats were introduced to the greater Yellowstone region decades ago, say articles in the Missoulian and the Jackson Hole News & Guide.
Since then, the goats have popped up in various locations around Jackson Hole, Wyoming Game and Fish wildlife biologist Doug Brimeyer said in an article in the Missoulian.
“In the Tetons, the bighorn sheep winter habitat is a relatively few isolated wind-swept slopes at high elevation, because they’ve lost their migration,” Wyoming Game and Fish habitat biologist Aly Courtemanch said in the Missoulian article. “They’re already surviving on this marginal winter habitat up there.
“It’s reasonable to expect that mountain goats, if they became established, would out-compete bighorn sheep for that very limited winter range.”
Researchers from Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are studying the situation, lead by Bob Garrott, of Montana State University’s Fish and Wildlife Ecology and Management Program.
The team will collar 12 goats with a GPS system that will send location data every six hours for two years. A second collar will activate when the GPS collar falls off and will provide less detailed information.
Read the Missoulian article here.
Read a shorter version of the story in the Billings Gazette, here.
There’s no link to the Jackson Hole News & Guide story that kicked off this flurry of coverage, because it doesn’t appear to be available on the newspaper’s website.
Photo: Bighorn in Montana. By Ryan Hagerty, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service
The first Canada lynx in Idaho in over 15 years was inadvertently caught in a leg-hold trap, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game said on Tuesday.
Read the article in the Chicago Tribune, here. The Idaho Dept. of Fish and Game release is here.
Elsewhere in the West, The Denver Post says that:
“Federal lawyers have backed away from fighting a federal judge’s ruling that favors lynx, clearing the way for possible broader protection of the quick-pawed predators in Colorado and other Western states.”
Read the whole article in The Denver Post, here.
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, there is evidence that the state’s lynx population is growing. (Growing from zero to something, maybe.) Read the blog entry in the Concord Monitor, here.
In Maine, they have so many lynx (600-1,200) that keeping them out of bobcat traps is becoming a problem. Recently, six lynx were trapped and another was killed. Read the story in the Bangor Daily News.
Lynx photo courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service
A year ago the Payette National Forest, in west-central Idaho, announced it was going to cut back on leases to domestic sheep ranchers to reduce the risk of a pneumonia-like disease spreading from the domestic sheep to the local, native bighorns.
Earlier this year a Washington State University researcher announced that he had developed a vaccine to protect the bighorns from the disease. That was wonderful news to an Idaho congressman, who introduced a rider to an appropriations bill that would delay the revocation of the sheep grazing leases for five years.
But in a letter to his funders, the WSU researcher said the bighorn vaccine is still 10 years from practical application. (Read more in the Lewiston Tribune.) This week a consortium of wildlife groups urged the congressman to withdraw his rider. (Read about it in the Idaho Statesman.)
The implications are bigger than Payette National Forest. The congressman has said that his rider merely stops other national forests from cutting back on their domestic sheep leases to protect bighorns from disease. (Read about it, again, in the Idaho Statesman.)
Photo by Ingrid Taylor (http://www.flickr.com/photos/taylar/) Colorado bighorn sheep
On September 30, a woman was attacked by a mule deer buck in southeast Idaho and was severely injured. She was rescued by a man, who was also injured, and his teenage daughter. I saw this press release from the Idaho Fish and Game Department yesterday, but didn’t think it was worth your time. These things happen, occassionally.
However, the story has been picked up by the Washington Post, Forbes and other major news outlets (which are all picking up the same Associated Press story). It has the potential to be one of those media-created issues (the New Year’s Eve blackbird “Aflockalypse” comes to mind), so you, as a state wildlife biologist, should know about it before you start getting phone calls. (And yes, I write that knowing that I am part of the media.)
Photo: Not guilty. These mule deer were photographed in California by Tupper Ansel Blake, and appear courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service for illustrative purposes. They didn’t attack anyone (that we know of).
On September 30, a woman was attacked by a mule deer buck in southeast Idaho and was severely injured. She was rescued by a man, who was also injured, and his teenage daughter. I saw this press release from the Idaho Fish and Game Department yesterday, but didn’t think it was worth your time. These things happen, occassionally.
However, the story has been picked up by the Washington Post, Forbes and other major news outlets (which are all picking up the same Associated Press story). It has the potential to be one of those media-created issues (the New Year’s Eve blackbird “Aflockalypse” comes to mind), so you, as a state wildlife biologist, should know about it before you start getting phone calls. (And yes, I write that knowing that I am part of the media.)
Photo: Not guilty. These mule deer were photographed in California by Tupper Ansel Blake, and appear courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service for illustrative purposes. They didn’t attack anyone (that we know of).