Wednesday, October 22, 2014

"The gray jay, Perisoreus canadensis, is the Jack Russell terrier of the bird world"................. "It’s smart, brazen, and attracted to people"................The gray jay lives year round in the spruce-fir forests of Canada and the northern U.S"................. "It’s a member of the corvid (crow) family, but even compared to its not-so-bashful blue jay and black crow cousins, this bird has a bold personality"......................"An omnivore if there ever was one, the gray jay has learned to associate humans with food. Barnard’s observations suggest adults teach their young to panhandle"................... "And they learn quickly"............... "No one knows when this started – perhaps when the first humans came across the Bering land bridge, they were met by a gray jay asking, “you want to share that mastodon meat?”-----Joe Rankin writes about forestry and nature from his home in central Maine

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Gray Jays: Birds With Attitude by Joe Rankin October 13th 2014 Outside Story 0 Comments ...
Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Only 63 confirmed sightings of lynx were documented in Minnesota from 2000 to 2006, according to the Department of Natural Resources.................Are there still enough of the "big pawed" cats out there in the Great Lake States to take advantage of the 8069 square mile critical habitat acreage that the USFW Agency has designated in Minnesota?.

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The full Blog post2, with any associated  images and links can be viewed here . Feds set 'critical  ...
Monday, October 20, 2014

Washington State Large Carnivore Lab Leader Rob Wielgus who has pioneered ground breaking research on how we humans exasperate Puma conflicts through the killing of mature males(allowing juvenile males to enter territories and take chances with livestock and people leading to conflicts) needs to be his best "salesman" to convince Washington area Ranchers to work with him on his non lethal wolf coexistence paradigm------Rob states: “Those cooperators who have accepted to work with us have experienced limited or no livestock depredation"........... “Some of those who refused to cooperate with us have experienced severe depredation events".................”Wielgus said he would find the kill immediately through radio collar tracking, use nonlethal methods and the depredations would likely cease

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http://www.capitalpress.com/Washington/20141020/ranchers-question-value-of-wolf-study#.VEXNuT4q2jk.email Ranchers question value of wolf ...
Sunday, October 19, 2014

Ecologist George Wuerthner espouses the principles that this Blog adheres to-----THERE IS NO REASON TO KILL CARNIVORES---THERE IS NO REASON TO "GARDEN" THE FOREST-----Listen and learn as George goes into the "no spin zone" and debunks the folly of the US Forest Service and it's claim that timber sales in National Forests support ecological health and provides income for communities that ring the forest-------"Current policies like "forest restoration" are actually degrading forest ecosystems".............. "Foresters cannot tell which trees, for instance, have a genetic propensity to withstand drought or tolerance for cold or ability to withstand fires and beetles".............. "Random removal of trees reduces the genetic resilience of the forest ecosystem"........... Logging removes biomass"........... "Reducing tree densities through logging short-circuits fires, beetles and other natural processes that create unique forest types like snag forests and are important for recruitment of dead trees".............."Even if one agreed that it is desirable for taxpayers to provide welfare to rural communities in the form of logging operations, this ignores the fact that corporate stockholders and company owners skim off a lot of that subsidy before it ever gets to mill workers and woods workers".................. "Indeed, some economic analyses show it would be better to simply give checks to employees to not log than incur the costs of a timber sale".............. "Better yet, pay people to fix all the things that are ignored or given little attention like wildlife surveys, decommissioning of roads, maintenance of campgrounds and so forth"........................."To use an old cliché, it adds insult to injury by allowing timber companies to haul trees off site, robbing the forest of critical nutrients and structural components"..............."This is analogous to the policies of fish and wildlife agencies that "control" wolves and mountain lions, then argue that elk and deer herds are too big, thus must be "thinned" by hunters"................ "Of course, research has more than adequately demonstrated that hunters kill different animals than native predators do, typically selecting the healthiest herd members including the biggest males and most productive age class of females, while native predators tend to take the young, old and injured"............... "Thus just as hunting policies as currently employed are degrading our wildlife population, current forest policies are having a similar negative effect on our forest ecosystems"

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Gardening the Forest You can't fix the forests with a chainsaw ARTICLE | OCTOBER 16, 2014 - 1:00AM | BY  GEORGE WUERTH...
Saturday, October 18, 2014

Crocodiles and Alligators might be second only to humans in their ability to hunt their prey with a team of others of their kind and in the process, coordinate their actions in sophisticated ways so that each individual animal takes advantage of their best inherent ability in generating a successful kill..................U. of Tennessee Researcher Bladimir Dinets has documented that larger Alligators and Crocodiles tend to drive fish from the deeper part of a lake into the shallows where smaller and more agile "gators and crocs" use their quickness to ambush and make the kill...............As virtually all of us know from grad school studies, Crocodiles and Alligators are some of the oldest creatures on the planet, dating back to the Dinosaur era............. What most of us were not aware of was their great brainpower on exhibit in their display of advanced parental care, complex communication between individuals and their ability to use tools for hunting(they often climb trees and use lures such as sticks to hunt prey)

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sciencedaily/plants_animals/~3/Xe0ot1p7yMQ/141013152654.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email Cr...
Friday, October 17, 2014

As we know from the studies conducted on the ten Pumas that still call the Greater Los Angeles basin home, highways literally stop dead the genetic flow of the big cat, isolating populations with inbreeding maladies being the result.............Researchers from the University of California, Davis,collected DNA samples from more than 350 mountain lions throughout California and found that animals separated by little more than a highway have far less genetic material in common than they did just 80 years ago..................We need highway culverts created for the Pumas so that they can move back and forth across territories and invigorate neighboring populations with their genes,,,,,,,,,,,,Othervwise the fact that California has been enlightened enough to ban the hunting of these animals will be all for naught with physical and mental abnormalities the eventual outcome of this man made array of physical blockades and the loss of resilience for the "lions"

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https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/science/a-threat-is-seen-in-pumas-isolation.html&ct...