Published:Jul. 20, 2022 at 5:20 PM PDT|Updated:23 hours ago
OAKLAND COUNTY, Mich. (Gray News) – Deputies with a Michigan sheriff’s office carried out an unusual rescue mission last week when they recovered a man’s prosthetic leg from a lake bottom.
The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office made aFacebook postdetailing the recovery efforts made by its dive team.
The sheriff’s office said the leg belonged to Brandon Smith, who was out floating on Sunrise Lake in Milford Township with his 6-year-old son.
Smith had badly injured his leg six years before in a hunting accident and received 17 surgeries in an effort to repair it. Authorities say he had been using the prosthetic for about a month.
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July 21 (Reuters) – A unrelenting heat wave on Thursday was expected to scorch the U.S. East Coast and South for the third day as dangerously high temperatures had forecasters warning about the dangers of dehydration and exposure.
Heat warnings and advisories were in effect from South Carolina up into parts of New England as heat index values were expected to reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit (41 C) in Washington D.C. and near 100 degrees in New York City on Thursday, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
The U.S. heat wave follows conditions in Europe this week that have touched off wildfires and set record temperatures in the kind of weather event that scientists say will become more frequent…
The water off the coast of northwestGreenlandis a glass-like calm, but the puddles accumulating on the region’s icebergs are a sign that atransformationis underway higher on the ice sheet.
Several days ofunusually warm weatherin northern Greenland have triggered rapid melting, made visible by the rivers of meltwater rushing into the ocean. Temperatures have been running around 60 degrees Fahrenheit – 10 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year, scientists told CNN.
The amount of ice that melted in Greenland between July 15 and 17 alone – 6 billion tons of water per day – would be enough to fill 7.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Barb Sweet | Posted: a day ago | Updated: 23 hours ago | 9 Min Read
Newfoundland and Labrador will implement the lethal removal of double-crested cormorants from important fish habitats, water supplies, or aquaculture operations, starting June 15.
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — The double-crested cormorant has been causing mass dissension when it comes to how to handle the increasing population of the bird.
A response to an access to information request to the provincial Department of Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture revealed the controversy that hunts — or whispers of a hunt — have caused across the country.
Newfoundland and Labrador announced a new permit program to kill double-crested cormorants on June 15. Wildlife regulations allow for the killing of cormorants under a permit when they are deemed to be a nuisance.
Before it announced the cormorant population management measures, however, the province consulted other Canadian jurisdictions in 2021 with a questionnaire as it was then considering a cormorant hunting season.
The provincial government is accepting requests for permits to kill double crested cormorants. — Photo by Max Gotts on Unsplash – Photo by Max Gotts on Unsplash
Eventually, the department distanced itself from using the terms ‘hunt’ and ‘cull’, preferring to go with permit and “shoot.”
The way the birds are treated in law is an oddity, one official noted in an email — they fall under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act between Canada and the U.S. but are provincially-managed.
P.E.I tried a hunt in the 1990s, and apparently it was disastrous, officials in that province told N.L.
“P.E.I. had an open season for double-crested cormorants in the early ‘90s. Because they look very similar, many great cormorants were mistakenly shot, which contributed to a sharp decline in the great cormorant abundance,” P.E.I.’s response to the questionnaire from N.L. noted.
Both those species reside in this province.
P.E.I.’s hunt also affected tourism, as the hunters didn’t pick up the dead birds, which apparently aren’t really edible.
MUN biology professor Ian Jones cautioned the department in August 2021, saying the cormorants tend to prey on forage fish and low-value species such as perch and suckers rather than there being any evidence they have an effect on sport fish populations elsewhere in North America.
In an email, he said the expanding population might actually be beneficial to the quality of inland fishing by resulting in larger trout.
The department noted in a backgrounder that might be achieved as it would thin out weaker and smaller fish, but more scientific study was needed.
“There are lots of fish-eating bird species — one wonders why the double-crested cormorant is being singled out,” Jones wrote, while commenting on the situation in Ontario being politically-driven.
On Wednesday, July 19, Jones told The Telegram via email that the province’s approach is “very much a solution looking for a problem (that based on scientific criteria, doesn’t exist).”
Jones insists there is no evidence that the cormorants are negatively affecting native fish populations, as the issue has been widely investigated by scientists, and said government is wrong in inferring their guano (accumulated excrement) is especially harmful and causes water polution.
He said some assertions have been falsely spread widely through social media in Labrador, including that cormorants depredate eggs and nestlings and prey on other birds..
Another is “the ‘Waterford River cormorant panic’ — apparently manufactured and disseminated by the news media,” Jones said.
“A few cormorants have been seen roosting at Bowring Park, delighting birdwatchers (not at all considered to be problematic by these folks). Introduced invasive brown trout in the Waterford River have a lot of predators, including otters, mink, people, belted kingfishers, merganser ducks, etc. — it is not clear why double-crested cormorants are being singled out and they don’t have a nesting colony anywhere nearby. This item is pure fantasy,” Jones said.
He said handing out permits to private citizens to fire off guns outside hunting season is likely to be “extremely problematic” for public safety, peace and security, and will “undermine efforts to rigorously regulate waterfowl hunting and manage wildlife populations.
“A fact-free meme has been spreading widely and has apparently infected the Wildlife Division — there is no rational support for any kind of cormorant hunt, cull or harvest, and the recent announcement of a hunt/cull/harvest is extremely discouraging for scientists because we don’t feel we are being listened to, or that facts matter,” he added.
Learning lessons
When Ontario proposed its cormorant hunting season, the federal Environment and Climate Change Canada wrote to express its worries.
“We recognize that double-crested cormorants are managed under provincial jurisdiction; however, it is important to be aware that most cormorants nest in mixed colonies that contain other colonial-nesting birds, including: herring and ring-billed gulls, Caspian and common terns, great egrets, great blue herons and black-crowned night herons, among others,” wrote assistant deputy minister of the Canadian Wildlife Service Sue Milburn-Hopwood.
N.L. perhaps took heed of the lesson of Ontario’s haste to hunt.
On July 31, 2020, Ontario announced a fall hunt on the cormorants. A group of ecologists, fisheries scientists and natural resource managers expressed outrage over the lack of scientific examination associated with the announcement.
“Public discussion of cormorants and cormorant management has been contentious,” Ontario officials noted in its questionnaire response.
Most Canadian jurisdictions do not permit an open hunt, instead going the localized permit route as N.L. has done, if at all. New Brunswick has a seasonal hunt.
In a decision/direction note on a proposed hunt for 2021 that didn’t come to be, the N.L. Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture department warned that opening a hunting season on the double-crested cormorants should be a last resort, as it would likely lead to public scrutiny by the scientific community.
“To date, there is no documented impacts that cormorants negatively effect local fish populations or undermine recreational, commercial or aquaculture gains,” a departmental analysis in the decision/direction note said.
How the permits work
In June, Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture said the department received complaints from the public about large numbers of the birds in specific areas, such as around water supplies or near important salmon rivers.
Wildlife regulations allow for the killing of cormorants under a permit when they are deemed to be a nuisance.
The permit is designed to be used only in those situations, not as a general permit for someone who wants to hunt cormorants. People can apply for the permit, and the wildlife division will evaluate the problem outlined in the application. If the department thinks killing the birds will help the situation, a permit will be issued.
Cormorant populations were reduced by pesticides such as DDT but have rebounded since those pesticides were banned in the 1970s.
The birds could be expanding beyond their historical range due to climate change and anthropogenic habitat alteration, the department’s analysis said.
That’s what the conservation group Pacific Wild says after the Supreme Court of British Columbia denied its application to end the wolf cull.
The BC government began the cull in 2015 to save endangered woodland caribou, and has seen at least 1,400 wolves killed through the aerial wolf reduction program since then, according to FOI documents obtained by Pacific Wild.
Environmentalists and animal advocates have long argued that critical caribou habitat loss has caused the decline in population, not wolves.
The province previously told Daily Hive that habitat protection, habitat restoration, and maternity penning were also being used in concert with the wolf management program to recover caribou populations.
Daylight was fading over the Northern Range of Yellowstone National Park. It was late January, and a cold front had just moved in. Nearing the park’s boundary, the young wolf would have been unfazed by the plunging temperatures. He was not quite3 years old, with thick black fur and a GPS collar fitted around his neck. Standing among the rest of his pack, he was, up to that moment, a survivor.
The Junction Butte pack photographed from a fixed-wing aircraft on March 21, 2019.
Photo: NPS/Dan Stahler
It had been a long and bloody winter for wolves living on the park’s northern border, and…
A formal declaration would open up new possibilities for unilateral action by the executive branch to combat climate change, including halting U.S. exports of crude oil andhalting offshore drilling. Biden could even redirect military funding to the construction of renewable energy projects — much as former President Donald Trump diverted more than $18 billion in Pentagon funding to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico — and impose trade penalties…
In September 2020, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office published ahypothetical weather forecastfor a mid-July day in the year 2050. Forty degrees Celsius in London. (That’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit.) Thirty-eight in Hull (100 degrees F). Thirty-nine in Birmingham (102 degrees F). These were preposterous numbers, never before seen in U.K. weather forecasts, much less felt in reality—until last week. On Friday, the Met Office published anactual forecastfor Tuesday that, as several observersnoted, looked scarily similar to its 2050 projections. And today, as predicted, the U.K. smashed its previous heat record,registeringa provisional reading of 40.3 degrees C, or 104.5 degrees F, in a small village near the eastern coast. From speculative fiction to nonfiction in less than two years.
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Exposing the Big Game 