Mercury In Every Fish Tested

From The NYT.

When government scientists went looking for mercury contamination in fish in 291 streams around the nation, they found it in every fish they tested, the Interior Department said, even in isolated rural waterways.[...]
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the findings underlined the need to act against mercury pollution. Emissions from coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury contamination in the United States.

Do Not Feed The Animals

A lady was killed by bears after years of feeding them.

The story of Donna Munson’s tragic death last week is a sad one. She was mauled to death by a bear at her home outside of Ouray.

The 74-year-old woman had been feeding bears on her 40-acre property for almost a decade, despite repeated warnings that she stop.

Bears, it turns out, don’t care how soft your heart is or how much you appreciate them. They care primarily about food and will attack people who get between them and their dinner.

It is sad she was killed but please do not feed the wildlife.

Do Not Feed The Animals

Most bear humans encounters occur because humans are careless about food.

No national numbers of conflicts were presented at the Nevada workshop, but participants said the number is growing. They said more regulations requiring bear-proof trash containers and improved public education of people living in bear-prone areas is needed to avoid potentially deadly encounters.

In the East, more than 70% of jurisdictions are reporting an increase in black bear populations, said Hank Hristienko, a big-game biologist for the Canadian province of Manitoba. And from Florida to New Hampshire and into Canada, there are increasing problems, he said.

"On almost 80% of the eastern part of the continent, you have an increasing trend of human-bear conflicts," he said.[...]

Bottom line: "People need to lock up their trash," said Carl Lackey, a Nevada Department of Wildlife biologist. "People really don't take notice until a bear is knocking on their front door."

Bears do not always knock on your door. When I lives in Truckee, CA, I had a bear come through the screen door. No knocking just ripping and tearing. Not really much of an impediment to a full grown bear. Let me tell you, a bear looks a whole lot bigger when your cooking breakfast in your boxers and it is less than five feet from you.

And then there is this idiot, feeding bears in the Alaskan wilderness.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — After 20 years of enticing bears into a remote compound tucked away in a little visited corner of Alaska’s Yentna River valley, retired Anchorage school teacher Charlie Vandergaw said last fall he was ready to end his bear-taming shenanigans.

Filmmaker Richard Terry, the man to whom Vandergaw made the statement, didn’t know whether to believe it or not.

Now skeptical state officials have taken action to make sure it happens. They have charged the 70-year-old Vandergaw with 20 counts of illegally feeding game. Two friends accused of assisting him were also charged.

This Is Cool

The pacific Barreleye. The fish has eyes inside it's head. They look out through a transparent canopy. More info from Mark at Daily Kos. His blog is here.

Cool!

Jaguar, originally uploaded by raysalaff103.

A jaguar was caught and released in Arizona.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - An extremely rare jaguar has been captured and fitted with a satellite tracking collar by researchers in Arizona, who hope to shed light on the habits of one of the United States' most elusive predators.

Arizona Game and Fish Department officials caught the male cat Wednesday in a rugged area southwest of Tucson during a study to better understand bear and mountain lion habitat.

Jaguars roam over a vast area ranging from northern Argentina in the south to the rugged borderland wildernesses of Arizona and New Mexico, where they were thought to have vanished until two confirmed sightings in 1996.

Only a handful have ever been sighted in the United States since then, and very little is known about their habits.

I think it is realyy cool that the large cats are still around. We have been working very hard to destroy wildlife habitate.

Climate Crisis Is Changing Bird's Habitats

chickadee, originally uploaded by redow.

Birds habitats are moving north because of the global climate crisis.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Climate change is pushing American birds northward, with some finches and chickadees moving hundreds of miles (km) into Canada, an Audubon Society study reported on Tuesday.

Drawing on citizen observations over a 40-year period, the society's scientists found that 58 percent of 305 widespread bird species found in the contiguous United States shifted significantly to the north.

While there are many factors that can make birds move, there's no question this is caused by human-spurred global warming, according to report co-author Greg Butcher.

Pelicans Are Falling From The Sky

Brown Pelican searches for the bait, originally uploaded by merigan.

It seems on the west coast pelicans are falling from the sky.

SANTA ANA, Calif. — Pelicans suffering from a mysterious malady are crashing into cars and boats, wandering along roadways and turning up dead by the hundreds across the West Coast, from southern Oregon to Baja California, Mexico, bird-rescue workers say.

Weak, disoriented birds are huddling in people's yards or being struck by cars. More than 100 have been rescued along the California coast, according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in San Pedro.

Hundreds of birds, disoriented or dead, have been observed across the West Coast.

The scientists are not really sure why.

Via Biomes.

Are Higher Temperatures Making Ticks More Aggressive?

A study on dog ticks has lead researchers to believe that warming temperatures make the ticks more likely to bite humans.

Dec. 30, 2008 -- The brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus) rarely bites people, far preferring the taste of dog. But global warming could be changing that, exposing people to dangerous diseases as a result.

In the spring of 2007, three men in France became seriously ill after sustaining bites from disease-infected dog ticks. The bites occurred after the hottest April since 1950, said Didier Raoult, a professor at the University of Marseille School of Medicine in France.

The incident reminded Raoult of two other recent cases. A 2004 outbreak of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in Arizona was also associated with dog ticks. And during the exceptionally hot summer of 2003, a man died after 20 brown dog ticks bit him at once.

I wonder if this is true of other ticks. In 2001, I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail and no one I know of got lyme disease. (Lyme disease is carried by deer ticks.) In 2006 and 2007, there were several people with lyme disease. 2001 was a cool summer on the AT.

Yellow Legged Frog

Rana boylii (Foothill yellow-legged frog), originally uploaded by birdgal5.

The Pacific Crest Trail is going to be re routed to protect the yellow legged frog.

Hikers and outdoor enthusiasts will still have to stay clear of a 1,000 acre area in the Angeles National Forest for another year, but for a good reason. The relatively small closure in the 655,000 acre forest is to protect a critical habitat for the endangered mountain yellow-legged frog.

"This once-abundant amphibian is disappearing," said Dr. Roland Knapp who runs a website and blog dedicated to the animal. "Many of the lakes and ponds in which I observed mountain yellow-legged frogs just a few years ago no longer contain them, leaving behind an eerie silence.

Frogs are a bell weather species. If the frogs are doing well the ecosystem is well.

Big Eye Tuna

Ahi (big eye tuna), originally uploaded by rnbonning.

Pacific nations are going to reduce catch of the Big Eye Tuna.

SEOUL (Reuters) - Asia-Pacific nations have agreed to cut their catches of bigeye tuna by 30 percent by 2011 in order to help preserve the fish that is popular in the region served raw as sushi and sashimi.

The deal, announced late on Friday, calls on the 25 members of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission to implement cuts of 10 percent a year on bigeye tuna from 2009 to 2011. The group met this week in the South Korean city of Busan.

The group, which includes South Korea, Japan and the United States, also agreed to place limits on the fishing season and ban fishing of bigeye tuna in international waters, according to a summary of the meeting provided by South Korea's fisheries agency on Saturday.

Too little, too late?

Salmon Tracking

Scientists are now putting small transmitters in salmon and other fish.

Their remarkable three-month, 1,500-mile journey of survival to the Gulf of Alaska was tracked by an underwater acoustic listening network that has wired the West Coast from just north of San Francisco to southeastern Alaska . The tracking network could provide a model for a global system.

A salmon's life in the ocean has always been one of nature's best kept mysteries.

However, scientists using the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking network have made some startling discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs about salmon survival and raise new cautions about how global warming may affect salmon and other marine species.[...]

Juvenile coho salmon, about five inches in length, can travel almost 20 miles a day in the ocean and nearly 40 miles in rivers, or about 200,000 body lengths a day, she said. An average-sized person swimming at the same rate would cover nearly 220 miles a day in the ocean and almost 435 miles in a river, Chittenden said.

Using the tracking system, Chittenden said, researchers also found that wild juvenile salmon take less time to enter the ocean than hatchery fish, perhaps because the hatchery fish tend to be heavier and slower. And wild fish adapt faster to saltwater than hatchery ones.

Maybe we can save the salmon from ourselves.

Buzz

England is having trouble with bees.

LONDON (Reuters) - Where in the United States, fruit farmers pay to have bees trucked thousands of miles to pollinate their crops and in parts of China, humans with feather dusters have taken on the task, in Britain most bees go nature's way.

Britons have a deep nostalgia for home-grown honey and its associations with an ordered rural lifestyle. But here, too, the honey bee population is dwindling, and with winter under way faces a tough fight for survival.

Besides warnings the country will run out of English honey by Christmas, there is a threat to growers of fruits such as apples and pears.

Close Call

Mike Simmons had a rare wildlife encounter.

"It could have been ugly," he said. "There would have been claws, antlers, hooves and coffee as we all scared the hell out of each other."

Instead, Simons was far enough off the path of what he's calling his "once-in-a-lifetime moment" when he witnessed a bear chasing a bull moose "full bore" and even got off a couple of shots with his camera.

"He is very lucky to have seen that and gotten some shots," said Fish and Game Department bear biologist Andrew Timmins. "It's a very unique situation."

It is an interesting article worth a read.

Mountain Lion Killed

In Arizona.

Game officers found and killed a mountain lion Sunday afternoon that stalked a hiker and his dog in a popular recreation area in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson.

The hiker was walking with his dog on a trail Saturday near Madera Canyon when he saw that he was being followed by a mountain lion, said Heidi Schewel, a spokeswoman for Coronado National Forest.

It's possible that the lion saw the dog as prey, she said.

As the mountain lion got closer, the hiker "did everything that he was supposed to do" — shouting and making himself look bigger by waving his arms, Schewel said.

When the lion didn't stop, the hiker fired two warning shots into the air with his gun. When the lion kept coming, he shot at it, and this time it ran away.

The hiker didn't know if he hit the lion or not, Schewel said.

The incident was troubling to Forest Service officials because the lion showed no fear of humans. "It was not acting in a way that normal mountain lions act," Schewel said.

Dolphin Jumps In Boat

Some folks In Florida were injured by a dolphin that jumped in their boat.

We were going under the bridge, and the next thing I knew I had a big old fish on top of us," Howard, 64, said while standing outside Bert Fish Medical Center, where he and his wife were treated and released Thursday afternoon. The couple suffered cuts, bumps and bruises.

While Howard could laugh about the incident a few hours later, when the 8- to 10-foot-long, estimated 400-pound mammal hit, there was nothing funny about it.

His first thought after the dolphin landed in their laps was to get it off. But as he pushed the flapping creature away, it knocked them to the boat's deck.

"I was just trying to get it off my wife," he said.

While, at the same time, he was being smacked by the tail.

"That thing had a good punch," Howard said. "Mike Tyson does not hit that hard."

Nature can be unpredictable at times. It is never a good idea to feed the wildlife. I am not suggesting they were feeding the dolphin. It is just a reminder. Do not feed the wildlife.

Polar Bears To Get Relief From Big Oil

Playful Polar Bear Cubs, originally uploaded by Vera Le Bail.

The US is going to limit oil development in sensitive polar bear territory.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - The U.S. Interior Department will designate within two years protected areas of the Arctic that are considered critical habitat for polar bears and cannot be harmed by oil development as part of a legal settlement with environmental groups on Monday.

The Interior Department formally listed polar bears as threatened in May, but did not create protected areas for them.

Environmental groups said the threatened listing needed to be coupled with habitat designations to protect polar bears from spreading oil development or other industry impacts.

"You can't protect a species without protecting the place where it lives," said Kassie Siegel, a staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the three groups who sued the Bush administration to secure the designation.

"After global warming, oil development is the biggest threat to polar bears," said Siegel

.

Kokanee Salmon Run

IMG_0107, originally uploaded by wakitu.

It is time for the annual Kokanee salmon run In Lake Tahoe.

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif.—One of Lake Tahoe's most popular nature shows of the year is off to a promising start.

Thousands of kokanee salmon are swimming up Taylor Creek off the lake's south shore as part of their annual spawning ritual.

U.S. Forest Service officials said while the run doesn't typically peak until mid-October, it's off to a good start. They said as many as 50,000 of the fish may make the journey upstream this year.

Landlocked cousins of the seagoing sockeye salmon, the kokanee were introduced to Lake Tahoe in 1944 by biologists, said Forest Service spokesman Rex Norman.

Super Kill, Super Thrill

Defenders of Wildlife have just put out this ad about Sarah Palin and aerial hunting of wolves.
Via, Kate at Gristmill.

Really Not Too Bright

About yesterdays mountain lion attack.

Kevin Lassiter told authorities he spotted a mother cougar and her cubs while walking Wednesday morning through Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park in Portola Hills. He said the mother cougar swiped at him with her paw, scratching him, when he tried to pet one of the cubs.
But a wildlife specialist with the Department of Fish and Game says Lassiter's wound is not consistent with an injury from a mountain lion attack.

He may be charged with making a false report. Idiot.

Not Too Bright

A man was attacked by a mountain lion after he petted her cubs.

Signs throughout the park warn that mountain lions live in the foothill wilderness. In 2004, a mountain biker was killed and another severely injured by a cougar in Whiting Ranch. The death of Mark Reynolds, 35, of Foothill Ranch, was the first in Orange County history and the only one statewide since 1994.

Today's attack happened about 8:30 a.m. a mile up the Borrego Trail. The hiker told authorities he came across a female lion and three cubs that he estimated were about 8 weeks old.

"He said they seemed so cute and cuddly and passive," Amormino said.

When he went to pet one of the cubs, the mother lunged at him -- and then ran off.

You just do not mess with animal's offspring. They get very protective.