New Sierra Bighorn Herd in California

“Our recovery goals are both numeric and geographic,” said Tom Stephenson, California Department of Fish and Wildlife bighorn recovery program leader, in an article in The Los Angeles Times about the recent establishment of a new herd of federally endangered Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep.

“This is the first reintroduction effort of a new herd of Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep since 1988,” he said in a CDFW press release. The release explains:

During the week of March 25, 2013, ten female and four male bighorn sheep were captured from two of the largest existing herds in the Sierra Nevada and reintroduced to the vacant herd unit of Olancha Peak at the southern end of the range in Inyo County.

The newly created herd is the tenth herd of Sierra bighorn between Owens Lake and Mono Lake, the release says. Three additional herds are needed to meet recovery goals. There are now 500 Sierra bighorns, which as an increase from the low of just over 100 of them.

Read more in The Los Angeles Times, here.
Read the CDFW press release here.

Photo: A Sierra bighorn is released in a new area to create a new herd. Courtesy CDFW.

3rd Draft for Prairie Chickens

Five states submitted a plan for conserving lesser prairie chickens to the US Fish and Wildlife Service last week. It is the third draft for the plan, Lone Star Outdoor News reports. The five states are Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. The multi-state conservation plan is a bid to keep the bird of the federal endangered species list.

The planning process began a year ago, in April 2012. The USFWS will make its final ruling on September 30, 2013.

Read the press release from the Kansas Department of Parks, Tourism and Wildlife here.
Read the same press release from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department here.
Lone Star Outdoor News adds a headline that mentions the third draft, here.

Photo: © Gerard Bertrand, courtesy Texas Parks and Wildlife Department

USFWS Turns ESA Take Permits Over to Florida

Last year the US Fish and Wildlife Service quietly handed over the responsibility for issuing incidental take permits for species listed under the federal Endangered Species Act to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Now, two environmental groups, the Center for Biodiversity and Conservancy of Southwest Florida, have given the US Fish and Wildlife Service 60 days to settle with them, or they will sue.

The Tampa Bay Times article notes that Florida developers were pleased with the switch to state control over the federal endangered species law. That may be because, the article says, two members of the eight member Florida commission are developers and a third is a paving contractor.

The feds turned over EPA enforcement to the Florida state government as well, the article notes.

Read the whole Tampa Bay Times article here.

Photo: Florida scrub jay, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

The Word on Birds

The recent issue of The Auk (subscription or fee required to read full articles) has several articles of interest to state wildlife biologists:

It has long been assumed that early successional forests are important habitat for young ovenbirds. A paper by Andrew Vitz, now with the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, tested that hypothesis experimentally. He found that the density of understory vegetation was a factor in the birds’ survival, but that the birds could do well in smaller patches of early successional habitat, such as microhabitats within mature forests.

Read the ovenbird paper here.

A paper on California spotted owls found that two is the magic number for a number of offspring. Owls that were part of a pair of nestlings had higher survival rates that onlies or triplets. The research also found that the number of young produced is a good indicator of habitat quality.

Read the spotted owl paper here.

Piping plovers hatched earlier in the season in the Great Lakes region had a higher survival rate than those born later in the season, another paper reported. Nest sites that were closer to trees also had lower survival rates. The older the plover chicks were, the more likely they were to live another day. Because the Great Lakes population of piping plovers is federally endangered (with other populations being threatened), these factors can help inform management strategies.

Read the piping plover paper here.

Photo: ovenbird, courtesy Wisconsin Division of Natural Resources

 

Water Users v. Cranes in Texas

In 2009, 23 federally endangered whooping cranes died because of a drought. A recent court ruling says that this is an illegal take of a federally-endangered species, and that the federal law has precedence over Texas state law, which says that water is doled out on a first come, first served basis, says an article in Bloomberg.

The Texas state agencies will appeal the ruling, the article says.

The whooping crane flock in question is the world’s only self-sustaining wild flock, the article says, migrating from Canada to Texas. The article also implies that what was once “an isolated stretch of Texas coastal marsh,” where a tiny flock of whooping cranes survived unnoticed at a time when the species was thought to be extinct, is now home to the “world’s largest concentration of refineries and petrochemical plants.”

Read the Bloomberg article here.

Photo: Whooping cranes at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, by Steve Hillebrand, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service.

 

Nevada Wildlife Director Gone — Again

Ken Mayer, director of the Nevada Department of Wildlife, resigned “abruptly” last week, at the governor’s request. It was the second time he has left the position as the state’s wildlife director in the last three years. In 2010 he was dismissed by a departing governor, only to be reinstated by the incoming governor, Brian Sandoval, the same governor who asked for his resignation this time.

It’s clear that the true conflict is with the Nevada Wildlife Commission. An Associated Press article in the Reno Gazette-Journal suggests that the commission supports outdated wildlife management techniques, such as using predator control to boost game populations.

Is it a simple case of science versus politics, or are there other issues? Unless someone in the Nevada media chooses to dig in to the matter, it’s unlikely that we’ll know the full story.

Read the Reno Gazette-Journal article here.

There’s another article in the Reno Gazette-Journal that talks about the implications of Mayer’s departure for the conservation of sage grouse, but it is a little confusing because at first, it talks about listing the sage grouse as a federally endangered species as a goal harmed by Mayer’s departure, without mentioning — until the second page of the article — that the states have been working hard to enact conservation methods to keep sage grouse off the federal endangered species list. Whew. You can read that second Reno Gazette-Journal article here.

Photo: Ken Mayer, courtesy Nevada Dept. of Wildlife

Lynx Killed in Idaho

A trapper killed a lynx in northern Idaho earlier this month, thinking it was a bobcat, the Coeur d’Alene Press reports. He immediately called state wildlife officials when he realized his mistake, the article says.

The animal was trapped just outside a region in northern Idaho that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had designated as critical habitat for the species listed as federally threatened. Even so, the CDA Press article says, lynx are rare in the region. The article says:

“Losing a lynx to trapping or any other cause is disheartening,” said Jim Hayden, Idaho Fish and Game regional wildlife manager for the Panhandle region. “Fortunately these are very rare events.”

 

Bobcats and lynx are similar looking, the article notes. Lynx have much larger feet and have fur between their foot pads.

Read the Coeur d’Alene Press article here.
This month’s Wildlife Express, a school newsletter from the Idaho Fish and Game Department focuses on lynx.

Photo: lynx in snow from USFWS

Good News from Pygmy Rabbit Relocation Project

Penny Becker, a research scientist overseeing the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit recovery effort for the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife is pleased with the 40 percent survival rate of the rabbits released through a breeding program that brought in rabbits from surrounding states, according to an article in the Seattle Times.

That 40 percent survival rate compares to a survival rate of 10 percent for wildlife pygmy rabbits in Oregon, and 22 percent for wild pygmy rabbits in Idaho, the article says. The population was listed as federally endangered in 2003.

Read the entire story in the Seattle Times, here.

Photo: pygmy rabbit, perhaps in Idaho. Courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management.

Not Seeing Spots

A designation as endangered or threatened for the Western population of the northern leopard frog was deemed “not warranted” by the US Fish and Wildlife Service late last year.

According to a US Forest Service report, the northern leopard frog is, however, “listed as a sensitive species by the Northern (Region 1) and Rocky Mountain (Region 2) regions of the USFS, and by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) state offices in Wyoming and Colorado.”

The report also notes that, “Northern leopard frogs are considered to be of special concern in Idaho, Colorado, Indiana, and Connecticut, while Montana considers it endangered on the western side of the Continental Divide and of special concern to the east. It is protected in Oregon and classified as endangered in Washington.”

There are some dozen species of leopard frog, and sometimes there is confusion in sorting them out, as the discovery of a new species of leopard frog in New York City, announced in March, shows.

A close look at Northern leopard frog populations in Nevada, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution in July, showed that the two remaining populations in the western part of the state are genetically distinct from populations in the eastern part of the state.

The work shows the difficulty of Northern leopard frog conservation.

Read the paper in Ecology and Evolution. (A fee or subscription is required.)

Photo: Northern leopard frog, from the western population in Arizona. Credit:Shaula Hedwall/USFWS

 

Summer’s Grizzly-death Pattern a Puzzle

The percentage grizzly bears dieing from natural causes is up, so the percentage of grizzly bears killed by humans in the Greater Yellowstone area so far this summer is way down, says an article in the Jackson Hole News & Guide, citing data from Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team.

The increase in natural deaths may be due to the advancing age of the grizzly population, the article says.

The study team is collecting data that will inform a decision on whether area grizzly bears will remain “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act.

See the numbers and the theories behind the unusual mortality numbers in the Jackson Hole News & Guide article.

Photo of a grizzly bear in Yellowstone by Terry Tollefsbol