Sightline Institute.........Sustainiability non profit in Seattle focuses on state of wildlife in this region

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rick Meril <rick.meril@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 10:39 PM
Subject: Re: Key NW species still at risk
To: Michelle Harvey <michelleh@sightline.org>

Michelle...............would love to collaborate with you and Sightline Institute...................send me whatever information you have on a regular basis and i will post all of it for my blog readers. So nice of you to reach out to me..............Please feel free to use anything on my blog that you deem useful and informative.

Rick

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Michelle Harvey <michelleh@sightline.org> wrote:

Dear Rick,

I'm contacting you on behalf of Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit research and communications center that works on sustainability issues in the Northwest. I've been reading through your blog, Coyotes, Wolves, and Cougars...forever, and love your information on native animals in the Americas. We feel that your interests match our own, and we'd love to support your blog by providing relevant research.  

Sightline Institute just released its annual wildlife indicator update, in which we track five Northwest species that give us a glimpse into the state of our natural heritage. We'd love for you to use our information to inform your readers about the condition of Pacific Northwest wildlife.   

You can view the full report here.

After reading through your blog, here are some tidbits I thought might interest you:

• At the end of 2009, wolf populations in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon showed a 3.2 percent increase over 2008, even as 2009 was the first year that gray wolves were open for sport hunting. This exceeds federal recovery goals, but wolf populations are still at a fraction of historic abundance.
• The hunts were a hotly contested issue. Interestingly, there were more wolves killed as a result of shrinking habitat area and little protection of livestock. The total number of legal wolf killings resulting from domestic animal attacks is higher than the number of wolves killed for sport.
• Sage-grouse are specially positioned to be an indicator for the overall health of their ecosystem, mainly because almost every human activity, from fencing to mismanaged land practices, affects their populations. For the last decade, the sage-grouse population in Oregon appeared stable. However, after a serious drought in eastern Oregon, sage-grouse populations have recently dipped significantly. Biologists estimate that about 22,000 sage-grouse remain in Oregon, which is at about 13 percent of historic abundance for Oregon.

We are excited about the work you are doing, and hope you consider using our research in your blog.

Sincerely,

Michelle Harvey

Sightline Institute

To learn more about Sightline Institute, please visit our webpage.