Tag Archives: wildlife

Great Gray Owl Study in Wyoming

Posted on by
Reply

great gray owlIt seems to be Wyoming week here at State Wildlife News. I hope you’ll forgive one more Wyoming story: The Wyoming Game and Fish Department are partnering with Craighead Beringia South, a non-profit research institute (yeah, them again) to study great gray owls in the Teton/Jackson Hole region, an article in the Jackson Hole News and Guide says.

“Great grays are probably the least-studied species of raptor in North America,” says Bryan Bedrosian, a researcher with Craighead Beringia South, in the article.

Up to 12 owls will be fitted with GPS backpacks for the study, which will evaluate a US Forest Service project that will clear brush and remove dead trees in the region.

Read the Jackson Hole News and Guide article here (on the Craighead Beringia South website).

Photo: Great gray owl in Oregon, by Don Virgovic, courtesy US Forest Service

Wyoming Bighorn Down and Up

Posted on by
Reply

Big Horn SheepA bacteria that often signals a pneumonia outbreak in bighorn sheep was found in 10 of the 14 bighorn sheep tested, says an article in the Jackson Hole News and Guide. The sheep were tested, the article says, because of a high mortality rate in bighorn sheep in the region. Scientists couldn’t test the dead sheep, the article notes.

The Jackson Hole bighorn sheep herd was struck by pneumonia in 2002, the article says, and dropped to just half its number.

There are lots of details in the Jackson Hole News and Guide article, here.

Just to the east, in Dubois, Wyoming, the news for bighorn sheep is better. According to County 10, Greg Anderson, wildlife biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department reported that the local bighorn herd’s numbers are stable and there was good lamb survival this year. The report was part of an annual meeting at the National Bighorn Sheep Interpretative Center.

Read the County 10 article here.

Photo: Bighorn in Montana. by Ryan Hagerty, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

Nevada Wildlife Director Gone — Again

Posted on by
Reply

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAKen Mayer, director of the Nevada Department of Wildlife, resigned “abruptly” last week, at the governor’s request. It was the second time he has left the position as the state’s wildlife director in the last three years. In 2010 he was dismissed by a departing governor, only to be reinstated by the incoming governor, Brian Sandoval, the same governor who asked for his resignation this time.

It’s clear that the true conflict is with the Nevada Wildlife Commission. An Associated Press article in the Reno Gazette-Journal suggests that the commission supports outdated wildlife management techniques, such as using predator control to boost game populations.

Is it a simple case of science versus politics, or are there other issues? Unless someone in the Nevada media chooses to dig in to the matter, it’s unlikely that we’ll know the full story.

Read the Reno Gazette-Journal article here.

There’s another article in the Reno Gazette-Journal that talks about the implications of Mayer’s departure for the conservation of sage grouse, but it is a little confusing because at first, it talks about listing the sage grouse as a federally endangered species as a goal harmed by Mayer’s departure, without mentioning — until the second page of the article — that the states have been working hard to enact conservation methods to keep sage grouse off the federal endangered species list. Whew. You can read that second Reno Gazette-Journal article here.

Photo: Ken Mayer, courtesy Nevada Dept. of Wildlife

Two Golden Eagles Killed; One Was In Study

Posted on by
Reply

golden eagle usfwsThree golden eagles were recently caught in snare traps in Montana. Two of the eagles were killed, and one of the dead eagles was part of a research project by Craighead Beringia South, a wildlife research and education institute based in Kelly, Wyoming.

The Jackson Hole Daily reports that the dead eagle was one of six golden eagles wearing a GPS backpack since 2010 in a project designed to study golden eagle migration corridors.

An article in the Ravalli Republic says that one of the golden eagles was found dead, the other had to be euthanized and the third is being rehabilitated. The article also notes that golden eagles have been in sharp decline in the region.

Read the Jackson Hole Daily article here.
Read the Ravalli Republic article here.

Photo: Golden eagle in Alaska, by Donna Dewhurst, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

Two Golden Eagles Killed; One Was In Study

Posted on by
Reply

golden eagle usfwsThree golden eagles were recently caught in snare traps in Montana. Two of the eagles were killed, and one of the dead eagles was part of a research project by Craighead Beringia South, a wildlife research and education institute based in Kelly, Wyoming.

The Jackson Hole Daily reports that the dead eagle was one of six golden eagles wearing a GPS backpack since 2010 in a project designed to study golden eagle migration corridors.

An article in the Ravalli Republic says that one of the golden eagles was found dead, the other had to be euthanized and the third is being rehabilitated. The article also notes that golden eagles have been in sharp decline in the region.

Read the Jackson Hole Daily article here.
Read the Ravalli Republic article here.

Photo: Golden eagle in Alaska, by Donna Dewhurst, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

Clever Monitoring with Mussels

Posted on by
Reply

You may never need to monitor aquatic nitrogen levels, but if you do, one way to keep your sensor package free of silt is to attach it to a freshwater mussel. New Scientist reports that researchers at the University of Iowa in Iowa City have tested a sensor that monitors how wide a freshwater mussel is gaping. A wider gape should indicate higher nitrogen levels.

The scheme beats other kinds of water monitoring sensors because they tend to get stuffed with silt. The mussels keep themselves, and therefore the sensor, clean.

The article says that the researchers will explain more in February at the Sensor Applications Symposium.

Read the New Scientist story here.
View a poster presentation on the project here. (PDF)

Western-most White Nose Syndrome?

Posted on by
Reply

WNS in MOI almost skipped the news that another white nose syndrome (WNS) site has been confirmed in Missouri, because WNS was confirmed in the state last year (covered here), and the new site didn’t seem to represent a significant change.

Leave it to ProMED, however, to point out that the new site, in Onondaga Cave at Onondaga Cave State Park in Crawford County, is the western-most confirmed site of white nose syndrome in bats. So it is significant after all.

ProMED got the news from OzarksFirst.com, here.
I read the press release from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, and you can too.

However, the fungus that causes white nose syndrome has been found farther west, in Oklahoma, although it did not cause white nose syndrome in bats there. That might be because of the warmer, shorter winters in Oklahoma or it might be because it was associated with a different species of bat. You can read the Bat Conservation International press release for more info on the situation in Oklahoma. (It’s a PDF.)

Photo: Little brown bat with visible fungus collected at Onondaga Cave. Photo credit: MDC/Shelly Colatskie

Pesticides Harm Frogs

Posted on by
Reply

Rana_temporaria_LC0183If you take frogs and spray them with some of the fungicides, insecticides and herbicides most commonly sprayed on crops, they will die. That is the conclusion of a recent paper by German and Swiss researchers in the journal Scientific Reports that received some notice in the European media.

A brief read-through suggests that the researchers stuck three frogs in a bucket then sprayed them with a pesticide.

Needless to say, the pesticide manufacturers, object, saying that the tested conditions are worse than what happens in real life, an article in The Guardian (a British newspaper) reports. The researchers counter in the Guardian article that when multiple applications of the pesticides wash into nearby bodies of water, it’s equivalent to at least one of the test conditions, were a 10 percent solution of the chemicals were used.

Read The Guardian article here.
Read an article in Agence France-Presse (AFP)

This news is interesting, although I have qualms about the methodology (not the direct spraying or even the bucket, but that according to the AFP article only three frogs were used for each test), but the journal, Scientific Reports, is interesting as well. It’s an open-access journal from Nature Publishing. Researchers pay to play. The journal promises on its website that once payment is received, the paper will be published promptly. It also promises at least one peer reviewer.

Read the whole paper here and see what you think, because, you know, it’s open access.

Photo: European common frog, the species in the study, in Germany. Photo by Jörg Hempel, used under Creative Commons license.

Controlling Invasive Bullfrogs

Posted on by
Reply

bullfrogIn the Pacific Northwest, it is not unusual to try to kill off invasive bullfrogs by drawing down managed wetlands in imitation of ephemeral wetlands, a paper in The Journal of Wildlife Management says. Because the bullfrogs over-winter as tadpoles, the idea is to remove that over-wintering habitat.

However, the paper notes, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, bullfrogs were observed metamorphosing after just four months. Some frogs can speed up their metamorphosis in response to a wetland that is drying out, can bullfrogs do this as well? If they could, this would be bad news for the invasive species control technique.

The study took bullfrog tadpoles from both ephemeral and permanent wetlands and subjected them to various regimes of water and lack of water. The study found that the bullfrog tadpoles did not speed up their metamorphosis in response to drying wetlands, but they did show a lot of variety in how long they took to mature.

The paper concluded that drawing down managed wetlands won’t cause bullfrog tadpoles to metamorphose faster, but that some bullfrogs may survive the draw-down because of the natural variability in the amount of time it takes them to become frogs.

Find the Journal of Wildlife Management article here. Reading it requires a fee or a subscription.

Help With Wetland Decisions

Posted on by
Reply

marsh.galena-001The federal Clean Water Act and regulations in many states require some kind of mitigation for wetland loss. A state wildlife biologist of some type is often involved in these decisions, even if it is not a biologist with the wildlife department.

As a general rule of thumb, these mitigation measures are a lose-lose proposition, because the restored wetlands do not have the diversity of natural wetlands, and the restored or mitigated wetland often has different properties (for example, at the headwaters versus mainstem). However, a recent paper in the journal Biological Conservation aims to provide a framework for better wetland mitigation decision making.

The model weighs three factors: time lags, uncertainty and measurability of the value being offset.

One of the authors suggests, in a University of Illinois press release, using established wetlands mitigation banks to counter-act the problem of created wetlands being less biologically diverse than established, natural wetlands.

The Biological Conservation paper, found here, requires a subscription or a fee.
You can read the press release from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, here.

Photo: Wetland, courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences