Read and Watch: McGraw's Coyote Research on WTTW
By Sean Keenehan/WTTW
McGraw photo
Pursuing a radio-collared coyote by foot, Stan Gehrt loses a fading signal from his handheld antenna.
The elusive predator seems to know that Gehrt is on its tail. With the coyote on the run along a Chicago railroad embankment, Gehrt does not give up. He joins his team in a nearby antenna-mounted pickup truck and they hit the road in hot pursuit. Gehrt's team optimistically takes turns spinning the antenna's cabin contraption for frequencies until they finally corner the coyote.
This coyote is no stranger to this team of researchers. Gehrt's team knows her as coyote 977, an adult alpha female they captured and collared in February 2016.
Gehrt has been studying the behavioral patterns of urban coyotes for 16 years. As the chair of research at the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation, Gehrt established the Cook County Urban Coyote Project in 2000 and serves as the project's principal investigator. Using radio collars and infrared cameras, Gehrt and his team track coyotes across the entire Chicago metropolitan area and analyze how these predators are surviving on city turf.
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What's Next in the Fight Over the Nation's Public Land
By John Haughey/Outdoor Life
Photo by nakashi/flickr
Public outcry may have forced Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) to
withdraw
his "Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act," but public-lands advocates must keep the pressure on Congress to defeat other transfer proposals still circulating on Capitol Hill.
Chaffetz's
HR 621
called for selling 3.3 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 10 states. He submitted the bill on Jan. 24 and pulled it on Feb. 2 in the face of heated opposition from a coalescence of constituencies, ranging from hunters to the U.S. Humane Society.
The bill was an attempt to "grease the skids" and Chaffetz "got hammered for it," said Sierra Club's Western Public Lands Protection Campaign Director Matthew Kirby. "The light bulb went off for a lot of people."
But the battle has just begun, Center for Western Priorities' (CWP) Aaron Weiss warned, calling HR 621 a trial balloon, of sorts. Filing a proposal to "dispose" of millions of BLM acres to the highest "non-federal" bidder was "a good start" for transfer proponents who "are calling for much more than that."
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6 Maps that Show How Americans Think About Climate Change
Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/flickr
Americans overwhelmingly believe that global warming is happening, and that carbon emissions should be scaled back. But fewer are sure that the changes will harm them personally. New data
released by Yale researchers
gives the most detailed view yet of public opinion on global warming.
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Wanted: Burmese Python Hunters in Florida. Will Pay.
By Darryl Fears/The Washington Post
Photo by Florida Fish and Wildlife/flickr
When a Florida water agency announced a plan to hire 25 people to catch Burmese pythons, I immediately thought of two of the wildest guys I've ever met.
Ruben Ramirez and George Brana basically applied for this job during Florida's first great snake hunt, the Python Challenge, four years ago but didn't get it. They thrashed through the swamp outside Everglades National Park to prove to the state wildlife agency that sponsored the hunt that their skills were worth paying for.
I ventured out with them on the final day of the hunt. By that time, they had already caught 18 pythons and bragged about it. "You're looking at the winners right here. We're kicking butt," Brana said. They told me things that made my head spin. Other hunters carried machetes and guns, but Ramirez and Brana insisted on catching pythons by hand. The rules called on hunters to behead the giants, but Ramirez, a snake lover, said, "We don't like to kill them," as Brana nodded in agreement.
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Antarctic Ice is Shrinking, and Scientists Don't Know Why
By Chris Mooney/The Washington Post
Photo by tak/flickr
There's no mistaking it now. Even though we don't have the final numbers, it is abundantly clear that the sea ice ringing the Antarctic continent has fallen precipitously - reaching a record low just a few short years after it reached a record high.
In
38 years of records
dating back to 1979, the sea ice lows seen as of the end of February 2017 - a time of year when ice in the Antarctic is at its annual minimum - are unprecedented. The area of ocean covered by sea ice still appears to be shrinking, but as of Feb. 28, there were just 2.131 million square kilometers of floating ice surrounding Antarctica, according to near-real time
data
provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
That's much less than the prior low of 2.29 million square kilometers on Feb. 27, 1997. The difference - about 159,000 square kilometers, or 61,390 square miles - amounts to an area
nearly as large as Florida
.
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