WC was raised on salmon. Canned salmon, frozen salmon, fresh salmon, smoked salmon, dried salmon; growing up in Alaska, it was the most abundant, least expensive food and WC ate a lot of it. Based on nearly 70 years of eating all five Pacific species of salmon, there’s no question in WC’s mind that king…
WC is a member of the Board of Directors of Idaho Conservation League, which has strongly held, public views on this issue. In fact, WC will quote ICL’s position later. WC wants to be very clear that the views expressed in this blog post are WC’s, not ICL’s, and that ICL bears no responsibility for…
In 2014-2015, when large areas of the North Pacific were warmer than at any time in recorded history, there was a massive die off of Common Murres across the North Pacific region. Some 62,000 dead Common Murres were found, projecting to a total die off of as many as a million birds. Almost all of…
Sometimes it seems to WC he has been fighting Pebble Mine forever. But it’s only been 21 years. As has been reported here before, it’s the wrong mine, in the wrong kind of ore in the wrong place. It also seems to WC that the mine project has been “killed” at least ten times, but…
You know, we really shouldn’t need to have a Save the Eagles Day. We ought to do it without any special reminder or ceremonial day. To borrow a Robert Heinlein phrase, eagles are like pretty girls and butterflies: sufficient unto themselves and need no excuse. But in this modern world, today two-thirds of the eagle…
Today is the 50th Anniversary of the creation of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. It coulda shoulda woulda been a national park, and enjoy better protection that the limited benefits of being a national recreation area, but at the time half a loaf was all that was possible in Idaho’s perennially weird politics. If it…
Imagine running one of the great American marathons. Or, if you are in the kind of shape I am in, imagine jogging, then walking, and in the end possibly crawling to the finish line of an American marathon. Whatever your condition, by the time you reach the finish line you’d be in dire need of…
It’s been a while since WC wrote about a BUCIP – a Big, Ugly, Complicated and Intractable Problem. The typical BUCIP is complicated, with multiple sides, entrenched stakeholders and packed with emotional positions. The problem of wild horses in the West is a classic BUCIP. Wild horses1 are an introduced species, not native to North…
DEIJ, for anyone show has been living under a rock, is “diversity, equity, inclusion and justice,” and it is a powerful and developing theme in many national and international current events. In the context of conservation, DEIJ raises issues of environmental justice, acknowledgement of historic treatment and mistreatment of races and people of color, recognition…
A gold mining dredge operated along 5.5 miles of the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River from 1940-1942 and 1946-1952. Effectively, the valley floor was turned upside down chasing gold. The dredge is an historic monument now, open for tours during the summer. The heirs of the men who ran the dredge are weirdly proud;…
In a weird, ritualized exercise, a kind of would-be attempted magic, each year the Idaho state legislature adopts a Joint Resolution condemning the very idea of breaching the four Lower Snake River Dams. The resolution is packed with lies, half-lies and distortions. It also simply ignores the proposal from their fellow Republican Rep. Mike Simpson…
There’s a place just a few hours drive from Boise where the old magic still works. You want to get there on an early spring morning while it’s still dark. Park, stay in your vehicle, but roll the windows down. It will be cold in the pre-dawn darkness, but the reward is hearing that strange…
In summer 2004, WC was fortunate enough to particpate in a Wilderness Birding Adventures trip to the heart of Alaska’s Brooks Range. A primary purpose of that trip was to get a glimpse of one of North America’s rarest birds, the Gray-headed Chickadee. The effort involved travel by small plane to a remote valley, some…
WC has participated in a fair number of Christmas Bird Counts. For non-birders, the Christmas Bird Count is an annual census of birds, a citizen science project that has been held during the Christmas holidays for some 120 years now. It provides one of the longest baseline studies of populations of bird species across North…
U.S. District Judge David Barlow – a Trump-appointed federal judge – killed the Bureau of Land Management’s plan to lease 59 parcels in Utah’s Uinta Basin for oil and gas development. His December 10 decision was a very near thing, and serves as a lesson in both the consequences of greed and the serious deficiencies…
WC has written before about what Prof. Marc Urban called Climate Change and the Escalator to Extinction. But always in the context of birds. The problem is even worse for plants, who can’t very well pick up their roots and move to a higher, cooler location as climate change alters the habitats for which they…
Okay, the good guys won. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that determines whether a permit for a mine should be issued, denied such a mining permit to Pebble Limited Partnership. The Corps determined that Pebble Mine “would not comply with the 404(b)(1) Guidelines” – the Clean Water regulations – “and would…
Mark Hamilton, past president of the University of Alaska and a man WC formerly respected, gave a presentation on behalf of Pebble Mine in late September. He told his audience to “trust the process.” Seriously? Anyone interested in the Pebble Mine project has seen Environmental Investigation Agency’s secret videos and read the reports where the…
The California Condor captive breeding program is a qualified success. From a low of 22 birds, all in captivity, there are now more than 500 birds, some 200 in the wild. That’s a very impressive recovery, and a credit to a lot of hard-working folks at The Peregrine Fund, San Diego Zoo and Los Angeles…
Silver Creek, in southcentral Idaho, is one of the state’s great conservation success stories. Managed – rescued, in fact – by The Nature Conservancy, it is a highly successful model of what can be done when collaboration is successful. It started in 1976 when the local community urged The Nature Conservancy to purchase 479 acres…
The Cassia Crossbill, Idaho’s sole endemic species, is found only in the South Hills and Albion Mountains, south of Twin Falls, Idaho. Its range is limited to about 70 square kilometers – a little over 170,000 acres, all in the Rocky Mountains Lodgepole Pine forests. As WC writes this post, more than 100,000 acres of…
WC rarely asks his readers for a favor. It’s happened a couple of times, and each time readers have come through. This doesn’t involve any of your money, it will benefit you and your families, and it will make you feel good besides. WC wants you to contact your Representatives and Senators and ask them…
As WC has written before, the Hawai’ian Islands are ground zero for extinction of species. Introduced species, invasive species, habitat loss, climate change and human folly have combined to make the 50th state a killing ground for Hawai’i’s native species, especially birds. Since the arrival of Europeans in 1778,1 28 bird species and at least 10% of the…
It’s hardly news that water in the West, especially the intermountain west, is scarce. Whether it is the seriously over-allocated Colorado River, the freshwater streams flowing in to the Great Salt Lake, or the salmon wars of the Klamath Basin, water is scarce, a limit on most kinds of western development and, in the face…
The Northern Idaho Ground Squirrel is an Idaho endemic; Spermophilus brunneus is found only in west-central Idaho. This area consists of five counties which have an elevation between 1,150 and 1,550 meters. It requires forest meadows for habitat. Intensive forestry management – some would say mis-management – and extreme wildfire events have destroyed much of that…
WC attended Wild Idaho recently. Among the many excellent speakers was Connie Myers, the founding director of the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center. The Center is an inter-agency training facility for the four federal agencies with a stake in wilderness: the Forestry Service in the Department of Agriculture; the National Park Service and the…
WC watched thousands of migrating Snow, White-fronted and Canada Geese along the Snake River last weekend. They are on their way to the northern edge of North America to breed. They stop in southwest Idaho to rest and forage. Those Geese are exactly the kind of bird the Migratory Bird Treaty is intended to protect:…
Americans, and international visitors, love federal lands. Idahoans pack the federal parks, national forests, national recreation areas and other federal lands all summer. Everything from dirt bike racing in the Owyhee Mountains to rafting Wild and Scenic Rivers to backpacking Forest Service trails to filling up all the campgrounds in the state on weekends. Hunting…
Last night, WC had a very pleasant dream. Donald Trump was stranded on the Chukchi Sea pack ice in mid-March, being stalked by a hungry polar bear. It was simple wish fulfillment, of course, a combination of the president-elects further denials of man-caused climate change and the very lame Polar Bear Conservation Management Plan released…
The Peregrine Fund is an unusual conservation organization. It’s a hero: The Peregrine Fund led and continues to lead the successful fight to save is namesake bird and other raptors from extinction. But it’s also strongly rooted in falconry, the 4,000 year old of capturing and training raptors. The Peregrine Fund has a long list…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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