Day: March 11, 2012

Wolverines in Eagle Cap Wilderness

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A wolverine reaches up to eat part of a deer carcass at a trail camera station in the Eagle Cap Wilderness last winter. Wolverines may have been living in Wallowa County for years but had not been detected until recently.

I always think it’s interesting when people study animals and find they were around but no one saw them. More so when they’re fairly large and carnivorous.

Ferocious loners
Written by Dick Mason, The Observer March 09, 2012 01:43 pm

Forest Service biologist shares insight about wolverines in Eagle Cap Wilderness

A wolverine reaches up to eat part of a deer carcass at a trail camera station in the Eagle Cap Wilderness last winter. Wolverines may have been living in Wallowa County for years but had not been detected until recently.
A wolverine reaches up to eat part of a deer carcass at a trail camera station in the Eagle Cap Wilderness last winter. Wolverines may have been living in Wallowa County for years but had not been detected until recently.

The connection is both intriguing and illuminating.

Wolverines and mountain goats appear to be linked. The connection is drawing increased interest from Northeast Oregon residents since it recently has been established that wolverines are living in Wallowa County.

“There appears to be a correlation in some areas between mountain goats and wolverines,” said Mark Penninger of La Grande, a U.S. Forest Service biologist who gave a presentation on wolverines March 1 at Cook Memorial Library.

Penninger said studies indicate that the distribution ranges of mountain goats almost always fall within those shared by wolverines. The biologist also stressed that wolverines are found in a wide variety of habitat.

“There are a lot of places where there are wolverines but not mountain goats,” Penninger said.

The wolverine-mountain goat link holds true in the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area. Mountain goats were introduced in the Eagle Caps years ago, and wolverines have been found to exist there over the past 14 months. In this span three wolverines have been documented in the Eagle Caps.

They are the only wolverines known to exist in Oregon.

One wolverine was caught and released from a bobcat trap in late December and also photographed by a trail cam in the winter of 2010-11. Two other wolverines were also photographed by trail cams last winter.

The odds are that all three have or will feed on mountain goats. This does not mean anyone can expect to see a wolverine soon attacking a mountain goat in the Eagle Caps. Wolverines do not hunt mountain goats, but they eat the carcasses of the many that die in falls or in avalanches. Wolverines are adept at finding mountain goats buried under many feet of snow and burrowing to reach them, Penninger said.

Wolverines face no competition for mountain goat carcasses in the winter since few if any other predators live at the high elevations. Wolverines do encounter competition for food in the spring and summer and are famous for ferociously defending the carcasses. They will fight off even wolves, black bears and grizzlies to keep a carcass. Documented cases of this happening are one of many reasons people view wolverines as fascinating. .

“They are charismatic in the minds of people. They are loners who cover huge amounts of territory and eke out a living in a hostile environment in the winter,” said Penninger. Biologists have learned a great deal about wolverines in Wallowa County in recent years thanks to a study funded by the U.S. Forest Service, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Wolverine Foundation and the Oregon Natural Heritage Foundation.

Biologists helping conduct the study include Penninger and Pat Valkenberg and his wife, Audrey Magoun. Valkenberg and Magoun live in both Alaska and Wallowa County and have studied wolverines for years. Penninger said they are widely recognized wolverine experts whom he has learned a tremendous amount from.

The couple first came to Wallowa County several years ago and soon suspected wolverines were in the Eagle Caps, Penninger said. They did so because of the terrain and habitat and their proximity to Idaho, which has an established wolverine population.

Valkenberg and Magoun then helped start a study to determine if wolverines were present. Working with Penninger and others, they set up stations with trail cameras and road-kill deer carcasses.

To date, the deer carcasses have drawn in a number of animals plus three wolverines. The wolverines were each photographed at the trail cam stations in the Eagle Caps. At the stations the wolverines left small hair samples for which DNA tests were conducted.

The tests indicate that the wolverines in Wallowa County are related to ones in Idaho. It appears that wolverines are able to move between Northeast Oregon and Idaho despite the Snake River barrier, Penninger said.

Wolverines may have been living in Wallowa County for years but had not been detected until recently. Penninger said wolverines have low population densities in many areas.

The three wolverines were documented in Wallowa County over the past 14 months are part of a short list in Oregon documented in the past 76 years. Following are the only other wolverines documented in Oregon since 1936, according the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife:

• In 1965, a male was killed on Three Fingered Jack in Linn County.

• In 1973, a wolverine was trapped and released on Steens Mountain in Harney County.

• In 1986, a wolverine was trapped in Wheeler County.

• In 1990, a dead wolverine was picked up on Interstate 84 in Hood River County.

• In 1992, a partial wolverine skeleton was recovered in Grant County.

Penninger said he believes wolverines may have also been in the Eagle Caps many years ago before having their numbers cut back by concerted efforts to wipe out wolves, cougars, coyotes and other predators via poisoning, trapping and other means. The biologist said wolverines might have been unintended victims of poisoning and trapping during this campaign, which continued into the 1960s.

Penninger spoke at a meeting of the Union/Wallowa County chapter of the Oregon Hunters Association. He said that the wolverine study, which started in 2010, is set to run through 2013. Tracking information being monitored as part of the study indicates that the wolverines in the Eagle Caps are traveling throughout the wilderness area.

Free America from her Public Lands?

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Robert H. Nelson is at it again, pitching the transfer, sale, or lease of much of our federal lands. Today’s installment comes from the Denver Post, 3/11/2011, where Nelson writes as “Guest Commentary” a little diatribe titled Free America’s West. I remember Nelson’s earlier attempts to sell the idea of selling or leasing much of the federal estate. I wrote about it in my little quasi-blog Eco-Watch in 1995, as Public Lands, Private Rights, Public Responsibilities. Let’s look at a bit of both my argument and Nelson’s. You can decide which is in the best interest of the American people.

Here is a snip from my “Public Lands, Private Rights, Public Responsibilities”, which was in part a response to Nelson’s Book Public Lands, Private Rights:

Even though much of the history of the West (or at least the mythology of the West) has been written in terms of individual rights and responsibilities, there has always been lurking in the shadows of conscience the public side of life and the responsibilities that accrue to living in communities, in regions, in nations, and on Earth. To highlight some of these issues consider the following: (1) responsibilities to maintain clean air and water systems; and (2) responsibilities to provide habitat for communities of species that keep landscapes functioning as forests, as marshlands, as prairies, etc. to form the environment that nurtures the variety of life that provides both sustenance and quality for our own existence?

What are we to do, if anything, to try to maintain the functions of the biosphere that cleanse both air and water throughout the world? Many of those functions are performed by our forests, rangelands, marshlands, and estuaries. Also, what value do we find in the presence of other species with whom we share the Earth? We commonly recognize and mourn the loss of each species that vanishes from the planet (at least those few that we hear about–or even know about) but we seem to forget that these ‘other’ species do not recognize our so-called property rights and often fall victim to human endeavors. …

Arguments that [Robert ] Nelson and others bring to the table are only germane when placed in context. Absent context how could we get to the heart of this or any other issue? What is at issue, it seems, is: Who are we as a people? What is our heritage? What heritage are we to leave to those who follow in our footsteps? Some of our collective desire to leave a proud heritage is wrapped up in the noble goals embodied in federal land and resource law. What are we to do, for example, about habitat needs for species that have grown up and flourished in Western wildlands? What about the access to relatively undeveloped public lands (also strictly undeveloped lands in primitive areas and wilderness areas) for recreation and spiritual renewal that so many take for granted? Would this access be retained in proposals for changing management? If so, where and at what cost to the user? What about the ‘attraction value’ that accrues to lands adjacent or in close proximity to federal set-asides from development? Are Sun Valley, ID, Jackson Hole, WY, Whitefish, MT, Telluride, Aspen, Vail, CO, Taos, NM, Moab, UT valuable in their own right as isolated communities filled with rather rich inhabitants? Or are the values somehow generated from the intertwining of private and public lands and the unspoken trust that the public lands are to remain intact? …

Yes, public land management is expensive. Federal government administration is expensive, as noted by all recent administrations as well as the Congress. So is a new home, a new car, or even most vacations we Americans take. But that is not to argue that we should abandon government improvement efforts. Government should be improved, and if the Government Performance Act of 1993 ever takes hold some of the costs of federal administration will better balance with the beneficial outcomes from that administration. And in part that balance will develop, assuming that it develops at all, due to partnerships between federal, state, county, and municipal government administrations working in concert with other organizations hand-in-glove for better government in general rather than locked in head-to-head competition one with another. As we begin to discuss these matters maybe we can find better roles for government generally and specifically in the hierarchy from local to federal government. But to ask right now, out-of-context, if federal government administration is too expensive is to ask a question anchored in air.

And here is a snip from Nelson’s “Free America’s West”:

The U.S. can no longer afford to keep tens of millions of acres of “public” land out of service. Some of these lands have great commercial value; others are environmental treasures. We need policies capable of distinguishing between the two. …

Probably no more than 20 percent of the tens of millions of acres of public lands are nationally important, requiring federal oversight and protection. This includes 45 million acres of Forest Service and BLM lands in the national wilderness system and other environmentally special areas such as BLM’s Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.

An additional 60 percent, perhaps, are ordinary lands, used principally for recreational purposes, such as hiking, hunting, fishing and off-road-vehicle use. Most of the remaining public lands are useful primarily for commercial purposes, such as the timber-rich forests in the Pacific Northwest.

A rational public lands policy more suited to current and future needs would put the nationally important lands into a newly reorganized federal environmental protection system. Ordinary recreational lands would be managed at the state and local level, perhaps by transferring them to local counties. What better steward of a local recreation area than the people who live in the area?

The commercially most valuable lands, meanwhile, would be transferred to new ownership or put under long-term federal leases. Lands that have real commercial value could produce a double benefit: revenue from leases and land sales, and additional revenue from the jobs, minerals, oil, gas, lumber and other commodities the freed-up lands would produce.

It is time to end outdated federal land policies that are draining our country’s wealth, tying up valuable resources in red tape and bureaucracy, and harming the environment.

Where will all the hot air around this issue go this time around?

“Collaboration on natural resource management is divide and conquer” The Wildlife News

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Found from another pingback… This is from the Wildlife News here. Here’s the “about” page for the Wildlife News.

Collaboration on natural resource management is divide and conquer
By Ralph Maughan On March 11, 2012 · 3 Comments
Collaboration is all the rage. How it has worked in Montana-

Past stories have not been very friendly to process called “collaboration” here at The Wildlife News although we not written of it for a while. That does not mean it has disappeared nor become friendly to conservation of our forests, grasslands, sage steppe, or alpine tundra in the meantime. The reason is that the collaborators who meet are almost always weighted by design in favor the the exploiters by right wing governors. It sucks up conservationist’s time, energy and causes the corroborating members to defend the scraps they think they have “saved” against criticism by those who think the process stinks.

The media usually thinks it is wonderful, however. They get to write feel good stories, at least a few years before they write about the natural gas and oil blowouts, the landslides, sinkholes, polluted air and water, and the demise of wildlife.

At the Missoula Independent, George Ochenski is not confused about the effects of collaboration in Montana as he writes, Hang the ‘collaborators’ And heed the clear-sighted “extremists” Here he expands on the presentation by Michael Donnelly at the recent Environmental Law Conference at Eugene, Oregon “The Wages of Compromise: When Environmentalists Collaborate.”

It should be noted that the Western Watersheds Project does not collaborate, and regional media do not write feel good stories about them. However, they usually win their battles.

The comments are also interesting.

JB had an interesting comment:

Okay, for once I’ll beat WM to the punch: I can’t but help point out how self-serving it is for a lawyer to come out against collaborative processes, which often help agencies AND conservation groups avoid lawsuits.

From the perspective of agencies who have a LEGAL MANDATE to allow for multiple uses, these processes can be useful for making decisions where there is no objectively *RIGHT* answer–which is often the case when it comes to the management of our National Forests. In fact, these processes are designed precisely to deal with the situation Ken laments–i.e., stakeholders have very different ideas about how lands should be managed (values) and there is no clear statutory guidance on which types of management priorities should prevail.

Concisely: Collaboration is a symptom, NOT the problem; the problem is that the federal statutes that direct agency activities (NFMA, FLPMA) set up multiple, competing uses (and interests) without clear guidance as to which use should prevail when conflicts arise. Going after collaboration won’t fix this (though it may make the lawyers happy). The only way to fix the problem is to change the law.

.Ken Cole of Western Watershed project says..

The collaborative process is designed to bypass the processes of these laws and make people feel good about doing so.

Note from Sharon: I don’t think that’s an accurate statement. I think collaborative FS efforts are intended to get people to work with each other and with the FS to jointly think about things; learn about things; and debate things to help inform FS decisions that still have to abide by the same laws. I wonder why people keep saying “intended to bypass” when it’s not true?

Baldcypress on the De Soto National Forest

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While inspecting the work of re-establishing property lines in the De Soto National Forest in Mississippi, I ran across this patch of baldcypress trees. They immediately became one of my favorite trees, when I first discovered them, years before, in South Carolina. One of the oddest things I saw was a mall parking lot planted with baldcypress. About half of them weren’t doing very well but, the other half had those “knees” coming up through the pavement. On that same assignment, I saw some of the Katrina damages, as well. You can see a few downed trees, in this picture.