WWPBlog

This wolf was apparently legally killed near Cambridge Idaho.

Click for larger view. More photos below :

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The LA Times covers translocation efforts after a 2001 Ft. Irwin military expansion right over endangered Desert Tortoise’s habitat. Now, the translocated tortoises are encountering coyote predation, an oversight conservationists maintain should have been foreseen.

A good video clip including Western Watersheds Project’s California Science Director Michael Connor’s take is included in the article:

Slow, Steady — and under siege
LA Times

Photograph Copyright Micheal Connor

WWP commented on and is planning to protest the proposed continuation on livestock grazing on the hot desert lands of the Yuma Field Office, Bureau of Land Management. The proposed Resource Management Plan makes a big deal out of closing part of the planning area (889,700 acres) to livestock grazing, but then admits that permits on those 12 allotments weren’t being used anyway and haven’t been for up to thirty years.

What the BLM doesn’t seem to get is that the proposed plan to reauthorize grazing on 643,500 acres of the planning area on a perennial basis is outrageous. These lands have been continuously grazed yearlong at ratios as low as 14.9 acres per AUM in areas that receive less than 6 inches of rain a year.

Even the agency’s own assessments include statements like these:

The public lands do not regularly produce sufficient amounts of forage to sustain a consistent livestock grazing program throughout the allotment Cattle are principally grazers, and the ecological sites do not have the potential to produce sufficient quantities of grasses. Further, as the uncontrolled private land is developed, the allotment will become fragmented and almost unusable in many places. The land use plan is the most appropriate process to determine whether perennial grazing use continues to be considered and appropriate on these lands.

So why didn’t they propose closing the allotments? Apparently, the $4,443 dollar value and the 0.03 jobs associated with grazing cattle on these BLM lands is more important to the agency than the resource protection that closing these allotments would afford. The 1.46 jobs resulting from direct employment on the associated ranches means more to the BLM than the public interest in providing habitat for the Sonoran desert tortoise, the pronghorn, bighorn sheep, and numerous other species who are uniquely adapted to dwell in these regions and who are threatened by livestock grazing.

Is it any wonder we end up in court all the time?

Anonymous :

Got this ticket in the Owyhees while [..] hiking around a small lake. The vehicle that left it looked like a road maintenance truck.

It appears that the Owyhee County Sheriffs office and the Owyhee Cattleman’s Association have merged and are now deputizing people to hand out tickets? I noticed the ticket writer did not sign their name.

Along with a coalition of conservation partners, Western Watersheds Project has formally filed complaint asking a federal court for an injunction to state management of wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains.

For those interested, WWP has posted its legal filings in support of the lawsuit:

WWP’s Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Delisting Legal Filings