via A Vast Canadian Wilderness Poised for a Uranium Boom by Ed Struzik: Yale Environment 360.

SAN FRANCISCO — On the Chinese calendar, this week ushers in the year of the dragon. But here, it feels a lot more like the year of the wolf.

Richard Cockle/The Oregonian, via Associated Press

John Stephenson, a biologist, measured the stride of the gray wolf known as OR7 in Crater Lake National Forest, Ore., in December. More Photos »

On Dec. 28, a 2 1/2 -year-old gray wolf crossed the state line from Oregon, becoming the first of his species to run wild here in 88 years.

His arrival has prompted news articles, attracted feverish fans and sent wildlife officials scrambling to prepare for a new and unfamiliar predator.

“California has more people with more opinions than other states,” said Mark Stopher, senior policy adviser for the California Department of Fish and Game. “We have people calling, saying we should find him a girlfriend as soon as possible and let them settle down. Some people say we should clear humans out of parts of the state and make a wolf sanctuary.”

The wolf, known to biologists as OR7, owes his fame to the GPS collar around his neck, which has allowed scientists and fans alike to use maps to follow his 1,000-mile, lovelorn trek south from his birthplace in northeastern Oregon.

Along the way, OR7 has accrued an almost cultlike status.

“People are going to get wolf tattoos, wolf sweaters, wolf key chains, wolf hats,” said Patrick Valentino, a board member with the California Wolf Center, a nonprofit advocacy and education organization.

In Oregon, students participated in art contests to draw OR7’s likeness and a competition to rename him (the winner: “Journey”). This month, people across the country attended full-moon, candlelight wolf vigils organized by groups with names like Howl Across America and Wolf Warriors.

As with seemingly all wayward and famous animals these days, the wolf has a lively virtual existence on social networking sites like Twitter, where at least two Twitter accounts have been posting from the wolf’s perspective.

“Left family to find wife & new home. eHarmony just wasn’t working for me,” read one Twitter profile. Another account, which describes the wolf’s hobbies as “wandering, ungulates,” recently had in a post: “Why is everyone so worried about my love life?”

The wolf’s presence has also set off more practical responses from state wildlife officials, who are hustling to prepare for what they now see as the inevitability of wild gray wolves here.

In mid-January, the California Department of Fish and Game put up a gray wolf Web site that includes a map of OR7’s trek and a 36-page explainer on the species. The department has already begun a series of public meetings with local governments in the state’s northern counties, where wolves are most likely to take up residence first.

Biologists say that OR7 is unlikely to survive long hunting alone without a pack and that it could be as many as 10 years before wild wolf packs roam northern California. Still, state and federal wildlife officials met Friday to discuss a strategy for wolves.

Next month, state biologists will get training by the Agriculture Department to identify livestock killed by wolves.

Once widespread across much of the country, gray wolves were nearly extinct in the contiguous United States by the early 20th century, killed by government trappers, ranchers and hunters. In 1974, the gray wolf was listed as endangered under the newly established Endangered Species Act. Then in 1995 and 1996 wildlife officials released 66 Canadian wolves into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, an area that is now home to nearly 1,700 wolves.

Wolves have been remarkably successful in reinhabiting their old terrain. In recent years regulators removed wolves from the endangered list for much of the northern Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes regions. In Idaho and Montana, they can be legally hunted.

In California, gray wolves remain protected under federal law, and the recent appearance of one has flared up large predator agita among ranchers.

“I’m afraid somebody will step up and take this wolf’s life in their own hands,” said Darrell Wood, a cattle rancher. “There are huge state and federal penalties for killing a wolf.”

Mr. Wood’s family has been raising cattle in Lassen County — where OR7 is now and where the state’s last wolf was shot in 1924 — for six generations. “I just hope it wasn’t a relative of mine who shot him,” said Mr. Wood, 56.

Other area residents seemed more interested in the wolf’s place in the mythological pantheon. “What’s next, sparkly vampires?” asked a commenter on a Lassen County Times article about the wolf, an apparent reference to “Twilight,” the vampire and werewolf series.

Ardent wolf fandom and ire do not surprise Ed Bangs, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service’s recently retired wolf recovery coordinator. “When wolves come back, one side says it’s the end of civilization, our children will be dragged down at the bus stop,” he said. “The other side thinks nature is finally back in balance and can we all have a group hug now.”

California will see the same divisions, said Mr. Bangs, who in his 30 years in gray wolf management attended hundreds of contentious meetings with residents, ranchers and environmentalists.

“I like to say wolves are boring,” he said, “but people are fascinating.”

Conservationists and Native American tribes are suing over the Navy’s expanded use of sonar in training exercises off the Washington, Oregon and California coasts, saying the noise can harass and kill whales and other marine life.

The environmental law firm Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups filed the lawsuit Thursday against the National Marine Fisheries Service, saying it was wrong to approve the Navy’s plan for the expanded training.

They said the regulators should have considered the effects repeated sonar use can have on those species over many years and also required certain restrictions on where the Navy could conduct sonar and other loud activities to protect orcas, humpbacks and other whales, as well as seals, sea lions and dolphins.

Instead, the Navy is required to look around and see if sea mammals are present before they conduct the training.

Kristen Boyles, a Seattle-based attorney with Earthjustice, said it’s the job of the fisheries service to balance the needs of the Navy with measures to protect marine life.

“Nobody’s saying they shouldn’t train,” she said. “But it can’t be possible that it’s no-holds-barred, that there’s no place where this can’t happen.”

AP

FILE – A beached pilot whale is seen in this… View Full Caption

In 2010, the fisheries service approved the Navy’s five-year plan for operations in the Northwest Training Range Complex, an area roughly the size of California, about 126,000 nautical square miles, that stretches from the waters off Mendocino County in California to the Canadian border. The Navy has conducted exercises in the training range for 60 years, but in recent years proposed increased weapons testing and submarine training.

The groups want the permit granted to the Navy to be invalidated. They are asking the court to order the fisheries service to study the long-term effects of sonar on marine mammals, in accordance with the Endangered Species Act and other laws.

Regulators determined that while sonar use by navies has been associated with the deaths of whales around the world, including the beaching of 37 whales on North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 2005, there was little chance of that happening in the Northwest. The short duration of the sonar use, typically 90 minutes at a time by a single surface vessel, and reduced intensity would help prevent whale deaths, they said. Regulators required the Navy to shut down sonar operations if whales, sea lions, dolphins or other marine mammals were spotted nearby.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claims that the Navy’s sonar use in the Northwest might be strong enough to kill the animals outright. But even if it doesn’t, the repeated use of sonar in certain critical habitats, such as breeding or feeding grounds, over many years could drive those species away, making it more difficult for them to eat or reproduce, it claims. The fisheries service should have ordered the Navy to keep out of such areas, at least seasonally, the environmental groups said.

A spokeswoman for the Navy declined to comment on Wednesday, saying she had not seen the lawsuit, and a spokesman for the fisheries service said the agency’s lawyers had not yet reviewed it.

The plaintiffs include People for Puget Sound, a Seattle-based nonprofit, and the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, which represents ten Northern California American Indian tribes.

The release is on the front page of the San Luis Obispo Tribune: I posted my own photos on my blog.

Rascal, a rare Guadalupe fur seal yearling, and Beige, a California sea lion juvenile, headed for the sea Wednesday at Leffingwell Landing in Cambria after being treated at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito.

Beige had been spotted Jan. 7 by equestrians riding in Montaña de Oro State Park. Rascal was rescued a day later from Coleman Beach in Bodega Bay.

The strict new federal standards limiting pollution from power plants are meant to safeguard human health. But they should have an important side benefit, according to a study being released on Tuesday: protecting a broad array of wildlife that has been harmed by mercury emissions. Songbirds and bats suffer some of the same types of neurological disorders from mercury as humans and especially children do, says the study, “Hidden Risk,” by the Biodiversity Research Institute, a nonprofit organization in Gorham, Me., that investigates emerging environmental threats.

via Study Finds Mercury in More Northeastern Bird Species – NYTimes.com.

Anyone who’s been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 cropsthey pollinate — from almonds to apples to blueberries — in peril.

Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.

“We are inching our way toward a critical tipping point,” said Steve Ellis, secretary of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board (NHBAB) and a beekeeper for 35 years. Last year he had so many abnormal bee die-offs that he’ll qualify for disaster relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In addition to continued reports of CCD — a still somewhat mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee colonies literally disappear, alien-abduction style, leaving not even their dead bodies behind — bee populations are suffering poor health in general, and experiencing shorter life spans and diminished vitality. And while parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss can deal blows to bee health, research increasingly points to pesticides as the primary culprit.

“In the industry we believe pesticides play an important role in what’s going on,” said Dave Hackenberg, co-chair of the NHBAB and a beekeeper in Pennsylvania.

Of particular concern is a group of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine, called neonicotinoids (neonics for short), and one in particular called clothianidin. Instead of being sprayed, neonics are used to treat seeds, so that they’re absorbed by the plant’s vascular system, and then end up attacking the central nervous systems of bees that come to collect pollen. Virtually all of today’s genetically engineered Bt corn is treated with neonics. The chemical industry alleges that bees don’t like to collect corn pollen, but new research shows that not only do bees indeed forage in corn, but they also have multiple other routes of exposure to neonics.

The Purdue University study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, found high levels of clothianidin in planter exhaust spewed during the spring sowing of treated maize seed. It also found neonics in the soil of unplanted fields nearby those planted with Bt corn, on dandelions growing near those fields, in dead bees found near hive entrances, and in pollen stored in the hives.

Evidence already pointed to the presence of neonic-contaminated pollen as a factor in CCD. As Hackenberg explained, “The insects start taking [the pesticide] home, and it contaminates everywhere the insect came from.” These new revelations about the pervasiveness of neonics in bees’ habitats only strengthen the case against using the insecticides.

The irony, of course, is that farmers use these chemicals to protect their crops from destructive insects, but in so doing, they harm other insects essential to their crops’ production — a catch-22 that Hackenberg said speaks to the fact that “we have become a nation driven by the chemical industry.” In addition to beekeeping, he owns two farms, and even when crop analysts recommend spraying pesticides on his crops to kill an aphid population, for example, he knows that “if I spray, I’m going to kill all the beneficial insects.” But most farmers, lacking Hackenberg’s awareness of bee populations, follow the advice of the crop adviser — who, these days, is likely to be paid by the chemical industry, rather than by a state university or another independent entity.

Beekeepers have already teamed up with groups representing the almond and blueberry industries — both of which depend on honey bee pollination — to tackle the need for education among farmers. “A lot of [farm groups] are recognizing that we need more resources devoted to pollinator protection,” Ellis said. “We need that same level of commitment on a national basis, from our USDA and EPA and the agricultural chemical industry.”

Unfortunately, it was the EPA itself that green-lit clothianidin and other neonics for commercial use, despite its own scientists’ clear warnings about the chemicals’ effects on bees and other pollinators. That doesn’t bode well for the chances of getting neonics off the market now, even in light of the Purdue study’s findings.

“The agency has, in most cases, sided with pesticide manufacturers and worked to fast-track the approval of new products, and failed in cases when there’s clear evidence of harm to take those products off the market,” Towers said.

Since this is an election year — a time when no one wants to make Big Ag (and its money) mad — beekeepers may have to suffer another season of losses before there’s any hope of action on the EPA’s part. But when one out of every three bites of food on Americans’ plates results directly from honey bee pollination, there’s no question that the fate of these insects will determine our own as eaters.

Ellis, for his part, thinks that figuring out a way to solve the bee crisis could be a catalyst for larger reform within our agriculture system. “If we can protect that pollinator base, it’s going to have ripple effects … for wildlife, for human health,” he said. “It will bring up subjects that need to be looked at, of groundwater and surface water — all the connected subjects associated [with] chemical use and agriculture.”

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

If you are of a certain age, you will remember the 1980’s anti-drug advertisement where they fry the egg and opine “This is your brain on drugs”.  Well folks this yolk is your body on drugs.  It comes from a chicken that eats sub-standard food and a pharmaceutical soup of antibiotics and other chemicals.  Now, I don’t blame the chicken.  I do believe though. that it is time we collectively “Just say NO!”  I guess Nancy Reagan had something right.

Factory farms that produce eggs see chickens as machines.  It is all rather Orwellian.  To them hens are a mechanism of economic output.  They are fed the cheapest food possibe and live in ‘Third World’ conditions compared to their organic sisters.  Why?  These ‘farms’, factories really,  want to maximize their profit.  Not your health.

When we purchase most commercially produced eggs we unknowingly support practices like de-beaking, grinding up male chicks alive, forced molting, and other widespread practices of inherent cruelty.  I don’t know about you, but I just can’t bring myself to support these practices, which is what we do when we buy commercially produced eggs.

You lived with wild turkeys in rural Florida for over a year. How did it all begin?
I had been experimenting with the imprinting phenomenon – in which young animals become attached to the first moving object they encounter – for years, with many types of birds and mammals. Wild turkeys are difficult to come by, so when I lucked upon some wild turkey eggs I decided: OK, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

These turkeys regarded you as their mother. Was that a lot of responsibility?
It was, because wild turkeys are precocial – they are born fully alert and ambulatory and don’t stay in the nest. They have to imprint at birth so they know who mum is, and they can’t be left alone at all. I realised that if I was going to do this project then it was going to be a 24-hour-a-day commitment, which I was willing to do.

What did being their mother mean in practice?
I had to be with them before daylight so that when they flew down from the roost their mother was there waiting, and I had to remain with them until after dark. If I tried to leave before it was completely dark they would fly down and try to follow me, and then they were left on the ground, where they were vulnerable to snakes or weasels.

Was your research scientific?
It started out as a science project but it became more than that to me. I found it impossible to avoid a very personal involvement, so a certain scientific empiricism and detachment was immediately lost in the process.

Were there any specific skills you had to teach the turkey poults?
Not at all. Their innate understanding of ecology was complete. They knew everything from birth, and the knowledge is very specific. That was one of the most surprising things about the study. From birth they knew exactly which insect they could eat and which was dangerous. I didn’t have to intervene and say: “No, no, don’t try to eat that wasp.” They knew not to eat the wasp.

Did you learn to talk “turkey”?
They sort of taught me their language. Researchers had identified 25 to 30 calls in wild turkeys that I was familiar with. But I learned that wild turkey vocabulary was much more complex than I had realised – within each of their calls were different inflexions that had specific meanings. For example, they had an alarm call for dangerous reptiles, but what I learned was that in that call there were specific inflexions that would identify a species of snake. Eventually when I heard a certain vocalisation I knew without question they had found a rattlesnake.

So turkeys are not as stupid as their reputation suggests?
No. But I think the first thing we do when we domesticate an animal is breed the fine evolutionary edge out of them. They lose that well-honed razor’s edge of survival that causes them to be clever, independent and a survivor. In some sense we breed the brains out of them.