Is the Endangered Species Act Headed for the 'Threatened' List?
By Darryl Fears/The Washington Post
Photo by Mick Thompson/flickr
A Senate hearing to "modernize the Endangered Species Act" unfolded Wednesday just as supporters of the law had feared, with round after round of criticism from Republican lawmakers who said the federal effort to keep species from going extinct encroaches on states' rights, is unfair to landowners and stymies efforts by mining companies to extract resources and create jobs.
The two-hour meeting of the Environment and Public Works Committee was led by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who said last month that his focus in a bid to change the act would be "eliminating a lot of the red tape and the bureaucratic burdens that have been impacting our ability to create jobs," according to a report in Energy and Environment News.
In his opening remarks, Barrasso declared that the act "is not working today," adding that "states, counties, wildlife managers, home builders, construction companies, farmers, ranchers and other stakeholders" have made that clear in complaints about how it impedes land management plans, housing development and cattle grazing, particularly in western states, such as Wyoming.
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How Hunters Help Protect the Wild Sheep of America
By John Branch/The New York Times
Photo by USFWS Mountain Prairie/flickr
In 2013, a permit to hunt wild sheep in Montana
sold for $480,000
, still a record. The result was a large ram, and hundreds of thousands of dollars that went into the budget of Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.
"As far as sheep-hunting being a rich man's sport, that's absolutely true," said Vance Corrigan, 84, who lives along the Yellowstone River in Livingston, Mont., and is one of the most accomplished big-game hunters in the world. "But if it weren't for the rich man, those sheep wouldn't be there."
Non-hunters often presume that the biggest prize in North America is something large and fierce - some kind of bear, perhaps, or an elk, moose or a mountain lion. But the widespread belief among serious hunters is that rams are the ultimate pursuit.
That is for two reasons. One, opportunities to hunt sheep are scarce, and often prohibitively expensive. Two, the hunts are among the most difficult, often lasting weeks in some of the most remote regions on Earth.
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The World's Oceans Are Losing Oxygen, and That's Bad
By Chris Mooney/The Washington Post
Photo by CameliaTWU/flickr
A large research synthesis, published in one of the world's most influential scientific journals, has detected a decline in the amount of dissolved oxygen in oceans around the world - a long-predicted result of climate change that could have severe consequences for marine organisms if it continues.
The
paper
, published this week in the journal Nature by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko and two colleagues from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, found a decline of more than 2 percent in ocean oxygen content worldwide between 1960 and 2010. The loss, however, showed up in some ocean basins more than others. The largest overall volume of oxygen was lost in the largest ocean - the Pacific - but as a percentage, the decline was sharpest in the Arctic Ocean, a region facing Earth's most stark climate change.
The loss of ocean oxygen "has been assumed from models, and there have been lots of regional analysis that have shown local decline, but it has never been shown on the global scale, and never for the deep ocean," said Schmidtko, who conducted the research with Lothar Stramma and Martin Visbeck, also of GEOMAR.
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Ten More Reasons to Stay Concerned About Public Lands
Sportsmen flooded Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) with phone calls, letters, tweets, and Facebook messages about his perennially unpopular and dangerous public lands bill, H.R. 621. Shortly after, he
We celebrated. We were reminded that our voices have power. Then, we went back to work.
Here's the thing: The tug-of-war between Americans who are proud to have 640 million acres of public lands as their birthright and those who seek to undermine these lands has never been tied to one individual bill, state, or lawmaker-it's a longstanding ideological battle that puts conservation, access, and our hunting and fishing traditions on the line.
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In India, Brothers Work to Save Birds from Kites
By Katie Stacey/Audubon.org
Photo by Gordon Oliver/flickr
When brothers Mohammed Saud and Nadeem Shahzad found their first injured Black Kite, they had no idea what to do with the bloody bird. Kites are
abundant
in Delhi, India, where the siblings live, and swirls of the gregarious scavengers often fill the skies, especially where food is plentiful. Unfortunately for the acrobatic avians, competitive kite flying-a sport that involves outmaneuvering your opponents to cut their string with your own-is popular among the city's nearly 10 million human inhabitants. When the birds hit the sharpened string necessary to do battle, it "slices through their bodies like a knife," Saud says.
The bird the brothers came across 15 years ago had tangled with one of these paper kites and was too wounded to fly, so they took it to the Jain Bird Hospital. They were turned away. The people who ran the clinic adhered to a strict vegetarian diet for
religious
reasons; they couldn't, they explained, care for the raptor because they could not feed it meat. Out of options, Saud and Shahzad regretfully put the bird back where they had picked it up.
Today Saud and Shahzad are expert rehabilitators who run their clinic,
Wildlife Rescue
, on a Delhi rooftop.
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