breaking news (Helena: insurance, to live, fence)

[ElkHunter]

You know MTS, there is a fine line in legalities. I think, if a wolf is seen, he is attacking my livelyhood. This is just a scouting trip.

Where I live, in the Big Horn Mountains, they have given us open season. The Fish and Game has come out "Officially" and said, "There are NO WOLVES" in the Big Horns". So the official status is that we are shooting wild dogs. No harm, no foul. Varmits are Varmits.

Rez. Scientists, I thought and I am probably very wrong, are always looking at "FACTS" and piecing them together to come up with new "FACTS". They say that they have all the data and just want to piece meal everything together. It is very refreshing to see one back up and take notice.

Now think about this. There are probably thousands of scientists that don't write papers or if they do, their papers are not printed. For those that are, we get to read them. More importantly, the extreme left wing, going to save everything from your carefully excersized harvest after years of research, type people are going to read it too. Then they are going to jump off the deep end and demand that everybody else comply.

When I lived in San Diego (while in the Navy) there was a big article in the paper. A small farmer North of San Diego was going to be fined because he had accidentally run over a special rat. The fine totaled up to well over $100,000. I don't remember the exact particulars but it was a "Long tailed, one toothed, left handed hopper." or some such. This guy lived on a 300 acre dry dirt farm and scratched a living for a family of 4. But the state wanted to make an example out of him. He actually drove over the critter while plowing a field on his 9N. Give me a break.

That is exactly what we don't need the wolf thing turning into.

They did NOT reintroduce wolves. They imported a completely different species and called it reintroduction.

[MTSilvertip]

Thank you for the kind words guys.

I agree Elkhunter, my perception of wolves is now on the "they are tring to figure a way to destroy my stock" instead of "he is minding his own business, let him go".

Apparently there is more concern for the feds heavy handed treatment of western states in this situation than I was aware of.

Western governors focus on endangered species

I had heard about the kangaroo mouse in california, but was unaware of the protected gophers in Utah.

Government flunkies have an inbred contempt for the citizens of the country I guess.

Tragic...

[Reziac]

A lot of those so-called endangered species are actually very widespread but were listed as 'endangered' due to bad information. Two that I can think of offhand:

Spotted owl. Very rarely seen, was thought to be in trouble. Turns out it's much less social than other owls and normally has a territory about 5 miles across, rather than a few hundred yards to a mile like other small owls. And when this is taken into consideration, turns out it's very well distributed and thriving all the way along the west coast from well up in Alaska to Central America (and apparently isn't actually all that picky about its environment). It's not the least bit endangered, it's just more spread out than they expected it to be.

Kangaroo rats. These were counted during daylight... which means few to none were seen, because they're nocturnal. At night the damned things are all over the place, sometimes to the point of being pests. Yet if a single one is seen on your property, it will be designated a restricted habitat that you can't use for anything, but still have to pay property taxes on. The upshot of this is that any time someone sees a kangaroo rat, it gets the 3S treatment.

[So far the wolf issue is the only one I've heard of impacting Montana. No, I take that back, there was some hoorah about a prairie dog colony, anyone remember anything about that?]

But does the Endangered Species Act take any such data into consideration? Of course not, because it's become less about preserving species than about treehugger politics -- which in turn has become a donations magnet and sometimes a land grab. How often do we have to repeat it, Follow The Money!!

While it's probably not good policy to completely ignore threatened species, the fact is that species come and go all the time -- millions of species have already become extinct, due to changes of environment, habitat pressures from other animals, new diseases, dead-end failures to adapt, etc, etc. And new species arise to take their place. THIS IS NORMAL. But the ESA wants to freeze nature into a stasis based on a current snapshot that (as noted above) may not even be particularly accurate.

And is it really a positive thing to preserve species that cannot adapt or compete? Doesn't that negate the valuable job performed by natural selection? Even human activity is a selection pressure; some species adapt, others don't, and natural selection does its job.

One wonders what would happen if there'd been an ESA back in the dinosaur or woolly mammoth eras... would we be trying to preserve the warm, moist climate** required to support megafauna?? What they did was the equivalent of introducing the extinct dire wolf into a system that no longer supports megafauna. I suppose since cloning from ice-age remains is on the scientific horizon, we can expect the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger to be "re-introduced" in the future.

Maybe Jurassic Park wasn't quite as fictional as we thought.

** Those who still believe in "global warming" need to look at this much longer-term graph, which shows (our best guess at) temperatures over the past 65 million years:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ate_Change.png

[ElkHunter]

I will, and have, relied on the 3 "s's."

[MTSilvertip]

If folks want to know what kind of people live in Montana, this is another example.

Billings Gazette again of course.

Rescuer: Man who drove off Clark Fork River bridge wasn't breathing

Kudos to Tyler Tuckett for being a stand up guy.

[Reziac]

Another cold wet rescue That's the thing about neighbourly people, you don't stop to worry about yourself, you just do what's needed.

BTW that link led me to another story where I came across the term "Standing Master", apparently something like a District Court Judge -- but I can't find any more info about it, or how it differs. Anyone??

[alaska961]

Opens door quietly to see what exciting news is going on.....quietly steps back out

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by alaska961

Opens door quietly to see what exciting news is going on.....quietly steps back out

Hey everybody -- there's Alaska -- don't let her get away!!

<steps back and watches stampede>

[alaska961]

Reziac you are too funny.
Ok I can't seem to keep my mouth shut with this one so hopefully my new friends will not befriend me with this post.

I am currently working on my B.S. degree and will eventually work as a wildlife biologist so this subject is dear to my heart on many different levels. It is ironic that I am reading a book on the reintroduction of the wolves to Yellowstone now and I was afraid to even getting involved with anything related to this suject on here, but as I said I can't shut my mouth so here goes.

I will not pretend to know all about this, but I do agree with Elkhunter and Reziac that this is not a true reintroduction because they were not gray wolves! The people involved with this project went to Canada and trapped three sets of 10 wolves to transplant 10 in Yellowstone, 10 in Northern Montana and 10 in Idaho. Two of these groups were hard released while the group in Yellowstone were kept in an acre sized pen for 6 weeks before being released.

I strongly feel that the public was not made aware of all the implications that this could and did have on the elk population and to the ranchers and to the states themselves. Basically I feel that everyone got to sappy about the idea of it without thinking things through. I will admit that I was excited at the prospect of the reintroduction, but I felt that we were lied to. Wolves will not only kill to eat, they mostly only eat a small portion of their kill which leads me to think that they are not killing in order to prevent starvation as most predators do....this was very shocking to me. They did not do their homework fully before jumping and now people and states will be paying for this mistake.

I also agree that for millions of years species go extinct while other new species evolve. I once read somewhere that the polar bear evolved from the brown bear due to the fact that food was scarce and so they migrated to find a new food source and over the years they changed and adapted to their new environment....they evolved as things in life do so in my opinion we really need to leave things alone to the way they will be and quit interfering with nature....we are not Gods.

[Reziac]

How about that, my Alaska trap worked! Of course I did bait it with a couple rep points.

Closer observation has revealed that ALL warmblooded predators kill not only to eat, but also for fun, for practice, for teaching the younger generation. We should have twigged to this from the fact that when a coyote or fox or bobcat or mink gets into a henhouse, rabbit hutch, or lamb pen, it kills all of them, not just its dinner... "Hey, this is fun and easy too!" (if it were a human, it'd be shooting fish in a barrel). We've had some rather skewed notions in the past, I think because it's only really easy to observe predators where they're sufficiently hungry to not care who's watching, and then of course they DO eat what they kill and won't be wasting energy in recreational slaughter. And more critical was the "Noble Savage" thing, which the previous generation of naturalists applied to the wild kingdom as broadly as did early anthropologists to primitive peoples.