IrishCentral Staff@IrishCentralSep 11, 2019Patsy Gibbons and one of his foxes.FIONA ARYAN/YOUTUBE
Co Kilkenny man Patsy Gibbons rescued foxes and they quickly became some of his most unusual pets.
Three foxes, 28 hens, 12 ducks, two dogs, and two cats may sound like a recipe for disaster but for one Co Kilkenny man, it simply describes the wonderouscollection of petshe’s brought together in his home. Patsy Gibbons rescued foxes and through his love and care, they became his firm friends, turning Gibbons into something of a viral sensation when images of his fox friends made the internet back in 2014.
Gibbons first rescued the eldest fox Gráinne in 2007 when she was found in an old box looking for heat.
In 1987, a farmer near the town of Pouce Coupe, British Columbia, saw four gray wolves on his property and shot one of them. The wolf happened to be radio-collared, and the farmer reported the collar to authorities. The data revealed that the five-year-old female wolf had traveled all the way from Montana’s Glacier National Park—a distance of some 540 miles. This wolf, which was among the first litter of radio-collared wild-born wolves in the western United States, had loped through protected national parks and private ranches, crossed interstate highways, dodged traffic, and, along the way, avoided the rifle crosshairs of ranchers—until it met the last one.
That one wolf’s story is significant because it illustrates the opportunities and challenges that confront any wolf trying to recolonize the species’ former habitats. Before that event, biologists knew, via radio-collar tracking, that wolves traveled as much as 30 miles a day—but they didn’t know how far they would disperse. “This wolf was miles and decades away from the Yellowstone reintroduction,” says Diane Boyd, who is now the wolf and carnivore specialist of Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Region 1. “Wolves were making a strong comeback in Montana on their own, [even though] Yellowstone was in the limelight for their reintroduction efforts.”“This is the most successful conservation story in North America.”
When many people think of wolf restoration, they naturally flash on the historic reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996. Most people aren’t aware that wolves were simultaneously reintroduced in Idaho’s Frank Church Wilderness of No Return, and that, even before those notable events, wolves naturally recolonized Glacier National Park, in far northwestern Montana, in the early 1980s. National parks like Yellowstone and Glacier, it turns out, are only one part of the wolf recovery story.
“Parks and wilderness areas aren’t big enough [for full recovery],” says Michael Jamison of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Today, wolves have successfully recolonized many western states, including Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, while dispersals from those packs have migrated even farther outward to Washington, Oregon, and California and, more recently, to Colorado, Utah, and even Arizona. “This is the most successful conservation story in North America,” Boyd says.
As wolves rebound across the western United States, conservation biologists are looking at ways to connect migration routes that are independent of traditional land conservation models in order to allow the species to disperse and diversify its gene pool. Parks are a good start, but such protected areas are biological islands in a sea of private property, too small to hold on to all of their wildlife. Once wolves leave the safety and security of protected areas, they have to find suitable habitat, navigate roads, and dodge hunters and ranchers intent on killing them. In order to achieve full recovery, biologists and wildlife conservationists say, we need to connect together the isolated refuges of the parks. “We have to connect the dots,” Jamison says.
“Public land holdings are puppy factories,” says Carter Niemeyer, a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service wolf trapper who has studied wolves for 50 years and helped bring wolves down from Canada’s Jasper National Park to Yellowstone and Idaho’s Frank Church Wilderness. “They are essential for pumping out animals.” But if wolves leave their family pack, they have “a one-way ticket” out if they leave the park because “outfitters, hunters, and trappers are on the edge knocking the hell out of them.” Idaho law, for example, allows individual hunters and trappers to kill up to 30 wolves a year. “All the different categories of public lands are central to dispersing animals and migrating species,” Niemeyer says.
Despite the threats from hunters and other obstacles such as roads, gray wolves are thriving in a way they haven’t in generations. There are an estimated 145 wolves in eastern Washington, and now 22 packs and 158 wolves in Oregon. There are at least a thousand wolves in both Idaho and Montana. Wyoming has 311 wolves. Experts estimate that California has 15 to 20 wolves. Voters in Colorado recently approved a ballot measure directing the state’s parks and wildlife agency to reintroduce wolves there—the first time that wolf reintroduction has been initiated via a popular referendum.
“One of the most important keys to wolf recovery is dispersal,” Boyd says. Wolves are dispersing from the epicenters like Glacier, the Frank Church Wilderness, and Yellowstone and moving westwards with ease because there are continuous forest corridors. But if they move south out of Yellowstone into Wyoming, there is an open expanse of land where they are considered varmints and can be shot on site or even aerially gunned down in fracking fields. Lone wolves have trouble making safe passage to distant lands because of the old rancher mentality of “shoot, shovel, and shut up.”
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For the wolves themselves, such dispersals are often arduous; for humans, they can be inspiring. In 2009, a Yellowstone female made it to Colorado. In 2008, a female wolf named B-300 swam the Snake River to cross into northeastern Oregon from Idaho. The following year, she mated and had pups. One of them was the famous OR-7—the first wolf to appear in California in more than a century. That wolf found a mate and is now back in southwestern Oregon.
In 2014, wolf scat was found on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona and later confirmed to belong to a gray wolf from the northern populations. Experts believe dispersals this far south means that the northern gray wolf populations could reintegrate with the Mexican gray wolf populations in the Southwest and help diversify the wolf gene pool. Also, in 2014, a four-year-old male from the Boundary Pack in northern Idaho was identified in Utah’s Uinta Mountains.
A few years later, OR-54, a pup of OR-7, was the 54th wolf to be collared in Oregon. Since January 2018, this female has traveled more than 8,700 miles looking for a mate. She never found one, and in the course of her search, she has crossed back and forth from Oregon to California twice, passing through nine counties. Along the way, the she-wolf also killed some livestock. In December 2019, her radio collar went silent.
If wolves don’t get shot once they leave protected areas, there is a very high chance they will be hit by a car. The 4.18 million miles of roads that crisscross the United States carve up and fragment important habitat. In an early sign of wolf expansion, eight years after the Yellowstone reintroduction, a two-year-old female from Yellowstone’s Swan Lake pack was hit on Interstate 70 near Idaho Springs, Colorado. And once a road is constructed, it opens up former wildlands to the disturbance of human development and more habitat loss.
So, have wolves fully recovered?
Not exactly. The only truly healthy wolf populations that remain are in Alaska and Canada, where 90 percent of the wolves in North America live. This is mostly a function of viable habitat: Most of Alaska and Canada are undeveloped, and so there are simply fewer people, fewer hunters, fewer antagonistic ranchers, fewer vehicles, and fewer roads. In the Lower 48, wolf recovery—for all of its successes—remains precarious. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, there are no more than 6,000 wolves in the continental United States, and they occupy less than 10 percent of their historic range.
Boyd says she was midway through her career before she realized “people were going to make or break wolf recovery.” She smiles and reflects about how she loved wildlife but dreaded people. “Basically, the first 10 to 15 years of my career, I was kind of a misanthrope living in the North Fork Valley and running crews of dedicated volunteers. All we did was live and breathe wolves.” Now she spends most of her time creating “wolf tolerance zones” by mitigating problems with farmers and ranchers and correcting information. “Only through education can conservation be implemented.” “The old methods of conservation need to evolve into more complementary land-use models that include private lands held in conservancies and agricultural lands featuring a matrix of working acreage and wildlands.”
Boyd and Niemeyer agree that a lot of wildlife management is spent at the kitchen table in a ranch house, drinking coffee and getting acquainted. “Talking about the issues as well as forming relationships of trust,” Niemeyer says.
But even if conservationists succeed in cultivating human tolerance of wolves, the animals will remain isolated in protected areas unless we can construct migration corridors. Wolves and other animals don’t, of course, understand borders and boundaries as lines drawn on the maps. “The flipsides of boundaries are connections,” Jamison says. “Critters are going to go where critters have always gone, and sometimes that is inconvenient for us to figure out.”
That means that the old methods of conservation need to evolve into more complementary land-use models that include private lands held in conservancies and agricultural lands featuring a matrix of working acreage and wildlands. “Conservation has to wrangle with a pretty colonialist past of just putting lines on a map around pretty places that happened to be other people’s homes for thousands and thousands of years,” Jamison says.
One example of a new land-use designation is the proposed 130,000-acre Cultural Heritage Area in the Badger-Two Medicine portion of Montana’s Lewis and Clark National Forest. If established as envisioned, roughly half of the area will be set aside for conservation and the other half for cultural heritage preservation. “We have to work and heal our relations because all of the easy stuff has been done,” Jamison says. “New designations will deal with the fact that humans live here. But that is what connectivity is: linking up migrations and corridors by connecting the islands through existing land ownership and connecting people.”
In other places, wildlife migration corridors can be established through relatively simple methods such as building wildlife overpasses or underpasses to allow safe access across highways and interstates—a measure that also cuts down on vehicle collisions with wildlife and saves both animal and human lives. Another strategy is to create wildlife-friendly ranches that, among other measures, commit to removing the lowest strand from barbed-wire fences to allow pronghorn antelope to move through, or removing fences and opening fence gates at certain times of the year to allow elk or other game to move through. “Wolves can get around most obstacles, but the fewer the fences, the more receptive the land is to dispersal and migration of wildlife the better,” Niemeyer says.
“Nature’s a nomad, and she needs to move now more than ever because of a rapidly changing climate, compounded by the rapid development of landscapes, whether it is for industry or for highways or subdivisions,” Jamison says. “Critters are forced to move in ways they’ve never been forced to move before.”
BIDEN TAKES DAY ONE ACTION TO PROTECT ARCTIC LANDS AND WATERS
The Hulahula River runs from Alaska’s Brooks Range to the cArctic Refuge’s coastal plain, which is the calving ground of the Porcupine Caribou Herd.EDWARD BENNETT/BENNETT IMAGES LLC
After Trump’s sell off, the Arctic Refuge gets a reprieve
Just hours after being sworn into office, President Biden took a number of monumental actions to protect public lands, address the climate crisis and combat systemic racism, including an executive order that places a moratorium on all oil and gas activity in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
This occurred only one day after the previous administration issued leases for drilling in the refuge’s coastal plain in a rushed, flawed and likely illegal process.
Biden’s action was met with great enthusiasm, particularly by many Gwich’in and Iñupiat peoples who have depended on and protected the refuge for thousands of years and rely on the caribou and other resources in the refuge to sustain their communities and cultures.
“Mashi’ choo, President Biden,” said Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee. “The Gwich’in Nation is grateful to the president for his commitment to protecting sacred lands and the Gwich’in way of life.”
The executive order also reinstated President Obama’s withdrawal of most of the Arctic Ocean and parts of the Bering Sea from oil and gas drilling—an order that had been reversed by the Trump administration. Protecting offshore areas from the threat of a major oil spill benefits not only marine species such as fish, seals and bowhead whales, but the coastlines of sensitive lands like the Arctic Refuge, too.
We are grateful to President Biden for his commitment to protect the refuge, address the climate crisis and respect the human rights of Indigenous peoples. We are also grateful to the millions of people who made today’s announcement possible by putting the climate and social justice first. This action is a result of years of advocacy from people across the United States, including members and supporters of The Wilderness Society, who refused to stay silent as oil corporations and their friends sought to put drilling rigs in the Arctic Refuge.
This action is a result of years of advocacy from people across the United States, including members and supporters of The Wilderness Society.
This does not mean the fight to protect the Arctic Refuge and the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou Herd is over. The moratorium is temporary. But it’s a huge first step in Biden’s plan to review the legality of the Jan. 6 Arctic Refuge lease sale and the issuance of leases to the winning bidders.
We will continue to work with our Gwich’in and Iñupiat partners—as well as the Biden administration and our allies in the Congress and the conservation community—as we explore all options for ensuring that drilling never occurs on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. We’ll also keep putting pressure on corporations like banks and insurers.
But today we rest, raise a glass and celebrate a new day for the Arctic.
HB224 Snaring Wolvesin Montana. An indiscriminate cruel death sentence, for wolves and any other innocent unfortunate creature, HB224 will have a public hearing soon in the Montana House Fish Wildlife & Parks committee.
Traps and snares are baited, secreted, and left unattended in the tens of thousands across our public lands. Snares for wolves will add a whole new level to these weapons of mass destruction for these empowered trappers’ lenient and inhumane recreation.
As we continue to hear from owners of trapped dogs in Montana, two bird dogs out hunting were recently snared in our state. Just after one dog was saved from the snare,they found the other dog was killed by anothersnare. They are not the first or the last of our beloved companion animalsto be trapped, injured, or killed. It is amongour worst nightmares, in our dreams and in realty.
This 2020 photo provided by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department shows the worn, mostly toothless jaw of Grizzly 168. The grizzly was the oldest documented in the Yellowstone region. Bear biologists euthanized the 34-year-old grizzly due to its poor health. (Zach Turnbull/Wyoming Game and Fish Department)
By ASSOCIATED PRESS |PUBLISHED: January 24, 2021 at 10:51 a.m. | UPDATED: January 25, 2021 at 3:29 a.m.
JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — A 34-year-old grizzly bear captured in southwestern Wyoming has been confirmed as the oldest on record in the Yellowstone region, Wyoming wildlife officials said.
Grizzly bear 168 was captured last summer after it preyed on calves in the Upper Green River Basin area.
The male had just a few teeth left and weighed 170 pounds (77 kilograms), just a fraction of the 450 pounds (204 kilograms) the bear weighed as a 5-year-old when he was captured in…
It took evolution 3 or 4 billion years to produce Homo sapiens. If the climate had completely failed just once in that time then evolution would have come to a crashing halt and we would not be here now. So to understand how we came to exist on planet Earth, we’ll need to know how Earth managed to stay fit for life for billions of years.
This is not a trivial problem. Current global warming shows us that the climate can change considerably over the course of even a few centuries. Over geological timescales, it is even easier to change climate. Calculations show that there is the potential for Earth’s climate to deteriorate to temperatures below freezing or above boiling in just a few million years.
We also know that the Sun has become 30% more luminous since life first evolved. In theory, this should have caused the oceans to boil away by now, given that they were not generally frozen on the early Earth – this is known as the “faint young Sun paradox”. Yet, somehow, this habitability puzzle was solved.
Scientists have come up with two main theories. The first is that the Earth could possess something like a thermostat – a feedback mechanism (or mechanisms) that prevents the climate ever wandering to fatal temperatures.
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The second is that, out of a large number of planets, perhaps some just make it through by luck, and Earth is one of those. This second scenario is made more plausible by the discoveries in recent decades of many planets outside our solar system – so-called exoplanets. Astronomical observations of distant stars tell us that many have planets orbiting them, and that some are of a size and density and orbital distance such that temperatures suitable for life are theoretically possible. It has been estimated that there are at least 2 billion such candidate planets in our galaxy alone.
There are many exoplanets…but how many have a stable climate? Jurik Peter / shutterstock
Scientists would love to travel to these exoplanets to investigate whether any of them have matched Earth’s billion years of climate stability. But even the nearest exoplanets, those orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, are more than four light-years away. Observational or experimental evidence is hard to come by.
Instead, I explored the same question through modelling. Using a computer program designed to simulate climate evolution on planets in general (not just Earth), I first generated 100,000 planets, each with a randomly different set of climate feedbacks. Climate feedbacks are processes that can amplify or diminish climate change – think for instance of sea-ice melting in the Arctic, which replaces sunlight-reflecting ice with sunlight-absorbing open sea, which in turn causes more warming and more melting.
In order to investigate how likely each of these diverse planets was to stay habitable over enormous (geological) timescales, I simulated each 100 times. Each time the planet started from a different initial temperature and was exposed to a randomly different set of climate events. These events represent climate-altering factors such as supervolcano eruptions (like Mount Pinatubo but much much larger) and asteroid impacts (like the one that killed the dinosaurs). On each of the 100 runs, the planet’s temperature was tracked until it became too hot or too cold or else had survived for 3 billion years, at which point it was deemed to have been a possible crucible for intelligent life.
Climate-altering: the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blasted so much ash into the atmosphere that global temperatures temporarily dropped by 0.6˚C. SRA Blaze Lipowski / picryl
The simulation results give a definite answer to this habitability problem, at least in terms of the importance of feedbacks and luck. It was very rare (in fact, just one time out of 100,000) for a planet to have such strong stabilising feedbacks that it stayed habitable all 100 times, irrespective of the random climate events. In fact, most planets that stayed habitable at least once, did so fewer than ten times out of 100. On nearly every occasion in the simulation when a planet remained habitable for 3 billion years, it was partly down to luck. At the same time, luck by itself was shown to be insufficient. Planets that were specially designed to have no feedbacks at all, never stayed habitable; random walks, buffeted around by climate events, never lasted the course.
Repeat runs in the simulation were not identical: 1,000 different planets were generated randomly and each run twice. (a) results on first run, (b) results on second run. Green circles show success (stayed habitable for 3 billion years) and black failure. Toby Tyrrell, Author provided
This overall result, that outcomes depend partly on feedbacks and partly on luck, is robust. All sorts of changes to the modelling did not affect it. By implication, Earth must therefore possess some climate-stabilising feedbacks but at the same time good fortune must also have been involved in it staying habitable. If, for instance, an asteroid or solar flare had been slightly larger than it was, or had occurred at a slightly different (more critical) time, we would probably not be here on Earth today. It gives a different perspective on why we are able to look back on Earth’s remarkable, enormously extended, history of life evolving and diversifying and becoming ever more complex to the point that it gave rise to us.https://www.youtube.com/embed/K7hCh6v7HNs?wmode=transparent&start=0Professor Toby Tyrrell discusses his research.
TheModernaCovid-19vaccine created antibodies that neutralizedcoronavirusvariants first found in the United Kingdom and South Africa, the company said in a news release on Monday.
Two doses of the vaccine “is expected to be protective against emerging strains detected to date,” according to the release.
The company’s study showed that the variantfirstfound in the UK had “no significant impact” onthe vaccine’s effectiveness.
The results for the variant first spotted in South Africa, however, werenot asoptimistic —and some early studies havesuggestedvaccines may be somewhat less effective against this strain.
In the press release,Modernanotedthat“a six-fold reduction in neutralizing titers was observed with(the variantdiscovered in South Africa)relative to prior variants.”
The companysaid the vaccine was still expected to be effective.
“Despite this reduction, neutralizing titer levels with(the variant discovered in South Africa)remain above levels that are expected to be protective,” according to…
Dr. Fauci Said We Have to Assume the COVID-19 Mutation Can Cause More Death
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said yesterday at a news briefing: “We’ve been informed today that in addition to spreading more quickly, it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant—the variant that was first discovered in London and the southeast [of England]—may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.”
Dr. Fauci, who had previously said there was no evidence of it being more deadly, now says it may be. “The data that came out was after they had been saying all along that it did not appear to be more deadly,” he told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. “So that’s where we got that information. But when the British investigators look more closely at the death rate of a certain age group, they found that it was one, two per thousand, we’ll say, and then it went up to 1.3 per thousand in a certain group. So that’s a significant increase. So their most recent data is in accord with the Brits are saying, we want to look at the data ourselves, but we have every reason to believe them. They’re a very competent group. So we need to assume now that what has been circulating dominantly in the U.K. does have a certain degree of increase in what we call virulence, namely the power of the virus to cause more damage, including death.“
The U.K. mutation has been discovered in the following U.S. states:
I really enjoy getting feedback from any of my 93 regular readers. And the feedback I have been getting recently is, with the exception of the flying squirrels column, overwhelmingly in favor of more dumb outdoor crook stories.
So, since I try to remain on the cutting edge of journalistic excellence, here are some more dummies to chuckle over.
Robert Miller lives in the town of Mexico not too far from Oswego. And he sure must enjoy the taste of venison. It seems he spotted a deer grazing in a field, so he shot it.
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We think of mass extinctions as brief moments of havoc — profoundly devastating but over within a geologic instant. The Devonian, the second of the so-called “Big Five,” defies this notion. If the other great die-offs are short stories of death and destruction, this one is an epic akin toWar and Peace. Even that paradoxical title seems fitting: The Devonian extinction ravaged Earth on and off for 25 million years, and although it ultimately killed three-quarters of all species, it also cleared the way for a new balance of animal life that endures to this day.
Patsy Gibbons and one of his foxes.FIONA ARYAN/YOUTUBE
© Provided by Eat This, Not That! Doctor Anthony Fauci
