Legislators should vote “no” on House Bill 1698. While it seems a practical approach to reduce wolf-recovery conflict by “providing flexibility for the Department of Fish and Wildlife to collaborate with local governments,” it does so by effectively downlisting wolves prematurely and undermining the scientific and management authority of the department and its commission.
HB 1698 sets a dangerous precedent by giving county officials undue influence over wildlife policy and elevates politics over science. Local governments lack sufficient scientific expertise, and their interests can oppose the concerns of the totality of state residents.
The Wolf Management Plan (2011) was created with strong citizen involvement and it is working. Endangered-species recovery is best ensured when programs remain in place until numbers are reached for the population’s long-term viability and there is sufficient return of animals into suitable habitat across the species’ historic range. This is why the Wolf Management Plan requires that recovered wolves live across three regions of Washington that together reflect the species’ historic state range.
While we remain patient for wolf recovery, the department must fully support those communities learning to coexist with wolves, majestic carnivores that provide ecosystem benefits for people and nature.
Fred W. Koontz, Duvall, wildlife conservation biologist
On February 9, 2023, Karl Tabares-Chevarie was charged with Use a Prohibited Firearm in a Careless Manner and Hunt Without a Licence.
According to areleasefrom RCMP, he was on duty and driving in a fully marked police vehicle on a winter road on March 14, 2022.
He was returning to Bunibonibee Cree Nation in Manitoba when he “encountered a caribou and attempted to hunt the caribou illegally.”
Using his patrol-issued carbine rifle from his police vehicle, he discharged two rounds at the caribou. The two rounds hit the vehicle, and the caribou was unharmed.
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement agents cited two men for alleged hunting violations in St. Bernard Parish on Feb. 7.
Agents cited Ryan Guerra, 47, and Ronald Alveris, 56, both of St. Bernard, for hunting wild quadrupeds during illegal hours and hunting from a moving vehicle. Guerra was also cited for taking over the limit of rabbits.
Agents were responding to complaints of illegal night hunting on the east bank levee in lower St. Bernard Parish when they observed Guerra and Alveris on an all-terrain vehicle at the base of the levee actively hunting around 11:55 p.m.
Agents made contact with the men and found them in possession of 17 rabbits, two lights and a shotgun. During questioning, Alveris told agents he did not shoot any of the rabbits.
Agents seized all 17 rabbits and donated them to a local…
A dangerous and contagious bird flu continues to spread through poultry farms, wild birds, and now mammal populations.There’s still no sign the virus is capable of spreading between humans, but experts are watching the outbreak closely.
“The recent spillover to mammals needs to be monitored closely,” World Health Organization director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing. “For the moment, WHO assesses the risk to humans as low.”
What is causing this bird flu outbreak?
This particular outbreak is caused by the H5N1 bird flu virus, which was first discovered in China in 1996. In 2021, a new variant of that virus emerged and started spreading around the world. The virus started infecting chickens on poultry farms in the United States in February 2022.
The size, range, and number of species affected by this outbreak is unprecedented, says Nichola Hill, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
This is the deadliest bird flu outbreak in U.S. history — nearly 60 million poultry have been affected. Wild birds in all 50 states have the virus. “It’s never really been seen in this number of different wild species before,” Hill says. It’s also infecting mammals: skunks, bears, seals, foxes, dolphins, and animals of other species are showing up with the virus. “That’s not really how bird flu should behave,” she says.MORE: Bird Flu outbreak spreads to 27 states
Most troubling is that the virus appeared on a mink farm where it seems to have spread between minks — not just from birds to individual minks. That type of mammal-to-mammal spread is new. “We hadn’t seen that before,” Hill says.
Is there a risk to people?
Mammal-to-mammal spread is concerning, but it doesn’t automatically mean that the virus is going to significantly affect human populations.
People can get sick from bird flu, but cases are still rare. They’re usually seen in people who work closely with birds. One person in the United States has been infected with the virus during this current outbreak, and that person was responsible for culling sick poultry.
Right now, even though the virus may be evolving to infect more mammals, it hasn’t mutated in a way that would help it infect humans easier.MORE: Is bird flu still a danger?
“It still isn’t hitting on that magic combination of mutations that are necessary to unlock efficient human transmission,” Hill says.
But it’s still important to watch and try to contain H5N1 spread in other animal species, because every time it adapts to a new host, there’s a chance those mutations could happen. “We’re rolling the dice every time,” she says.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people should avoid contact with wild birds, and that people who work with poultry should take precautions like wearing gloves and masks.
Solar shenanigans are not entirely unexpected currently. Our star is ramping up its activity, getting rowdier with sunspot and flare activity. It has flared every day this year so far, and itspat out severalX-class and M-class flares in January…
Bird flu, a virus not known to spread easily among mammals, led to the culling of 50,000 minks in Spain last October. The findings published January 19, 2023 indicated at least one mutation in the virus’ genome, which may make mammal-to-mammal infection easier. Typically, mammals catch the avian influenza directly from infected birds.
The Spanish case study indicates the virus H5N1 is evolving and may be gaining pandemic potential as its mutation is the same mutation that was recorded in the gene of the 2009 pandemic swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus, according to the paper in the journalEurosurveillance.
Of the 12 workers at the farm, 11 had come in contact with the minks. While asymptomatic, they were subjected to a nasopharyngeal test…
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The key to maintaining a healthy weight is not to think of food choices as tools for weight loss but as part of a lifestyle. Cutting back on animal fats can help the body’s insulin functioning, allowing it to burn carbohydrates…
Will Burton, a Weakley County farmer, said the overbearing smell of rotting chicken carcasses is affecting his family: “Just death and rotting carcasses.”(Photo: John Partipilo)
The first sign of something awry was the road closure on the two-lane country road that goes right past Will Burton’s Weakley County farm, his fields, barns and the one-story house he shares with his fiancee and three kids.
White trucks — emblazoned with the seal of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and “fire and burn” stickers — began rolling past around the same time the family began smelling a terrible, new odor. It was distinct from the smell of chicken waste that has been ever-present since a 16-barn industrial chicken operation, a raw meat supplier for Tyson Foods, moved in two years agoover…
The Chacoan peccary is so elusive that scientists believed it was extinct until its “discovery” in 1975. Today, only 3,000 remain in the inhospitable forests and lagoons of the Gran Chaco region, which stretches across northern Argentina, Paraguay and southern Bolivia, and comprises more than 50 different ecosystems.
Micaela Camino, who works with the Indigenous Wichí and Criollo communities to protect the animals and their land rights in Argentina, knows how difficult to find they can be. She has only seen one Chacoan peccary, or quimilero, in 13 years since she set up her NGO, Proyecto Quimilero, but has fallen in love with the critically endangered mammal, which looks like a peculiar cross between a boar and a hedgehog.
Micaela Camino, who won a Whitley award in 2022 for her work in helping to protect the Chacoan peccary. Photograph: Whitley Awards
“I was told that the Chacoan peccary was extinct outside protected areas when I first started,” says Camino. “So when we found it, I thought it was great. We set up monitoring to find more in one of the most isolated parts of the dry Chaco. But then the loggers started to come.”
The Gran Chaco, South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon, is one of the most deforested places on Earth. Every month, more than 133 square miles is lost, cleared for vast soya farms and cattle ranches that export to markets in the US, China and Europe – including UK supermarkets, according to a joint Guardian investigation in 2019. However, the loss is largely ignored on the international stage, receiving little conservation money or celebrity attention in comparison with the Amazon.
In the area where Camino works, the land clearing was turbocharged by Argentina’s 2001 economic collapse. Tree loss highlighted by Global Forest Watch shows the extent of the damage over the past 20 years. The area is home to charismatic species such as the maned wolf, the giant armadillo and the jabiru, many of which are not found anywhere else on Earth.
At current rates of deforestation, the mosaic of life in the Gran Chaco could collapse entirely. The loss of the Chacoan peccary would be guaranteed this time. Unlike the Amazon, there are few academic studies on tipping points and the forest’s waning ability to support itself as the climate changes and land is cleared, but people who live here are seeing the changes.
More than 133 square miles of the Gran Chaco is lost every month to deforestation. Photograph: Nicolás Villalobos/Greenpeace
“The Chacoan peccary cannot survive with such a rapid advance of deforestation. It doesn’t exist anywhere else. Locally, the animal is a good flagship. Jaguars and pumas are charismatic but nobody really likes these animals in the forest,” says Camino.
More than 140 countries, including Argentina and Paraguay, signed an international agreement at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. However, economic realities have complicated the picture. Argentina’s economy is collapsing once again, with the annual inflation rate in 2022 hitting its highest level in 30 years, and the country is desperate for dollars, which can be earned by trading commodities such as soy and beef.
“The Gran Chaco has been at a crossroads for a long time,” says Gastón Gordillo, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. “The 2007 forest law in Argentina did manage to slow some deforestation, but it also created the paradox by establishing legitimate ways of destroying the forest.”
Before the Covid pandemic, civil society organisations teamed up to launch the 2030 initiative to protect what is left of the Gran Chaco in Argentina, the part most affected by land clearing. They called for a change in the economic model of the region, urging local and national governments to move away from extraction, and pushed for greater compliance with forest law. However, a new motorway in Paraguay appears likely to open up more of the region to ranching.
“The agribusiness sector in Argentina is very powerful,” says Gordillo. “We are going through a profound economic crisis. There is a lot of anxiety about what is going to happen. The major concern for the government right now is to get US dollars, and exports from the agribusiness sector are the main source. That means there’s a strong incentive to continue.
“The dichotomy is clear. You either continue destroying forests and the environment or you don’t. But this is an uneven confrontation, unfortunately.”
Camino hopes the Chacoan peccary can become a flagship species to protect the region. Photograph: Andrew Taber/2020 Whitley Awards
For the Chacoan peccary, research indicates there are only 30 years left to save the species, with current deforestation rates meaning all of its habitat outside protected areas will have gone by 2051.
Camino’s conservation efforts, for which she won a 2022 Whitley prize, will focus on priority areas for saving the mammal and helping local people to resist corporate land grabs and stay in their Indigenous lands. She hopes the mammal can become a flagship species to protect the region.
“The only way we can save the Chacoan peccary is by protecting the forest. It represents a unique evolutionary path. It’s an umbrella species for working with the whole ecosystem,” she says.
Hunter Lars Bjork points to fresh tracks in the snow as he lumbers through a whited-out forest in central Sweden, where the biggest wolf hunt in modern times is drawing controversy.
“We have quite a lot of wolves here, we’re actually sitting in a new wolf territory where we are now,” Bjork, a predator expert at the Swedish Hunters’ Association, tells AFP as he settles into a small hunting lodge a few kilometres (miles) outside the town of Vasteras.
This year, Sweden’s hunters are allowed to kill a record 75 wolves — more than twice the number that was allowed to last…
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Footage of the vortex from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
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