Mountain Lion Kills, Eats NM Man
Searchers find body of missing man
Eyewitness News 4, 06/20/2008 [here]
State police have found the body of a missing Grant County man and say he was eaten by a mountain lion.
Robert Nawojski was reported missing Thursday by his brother. Friday, authorities found a mountain lion eating his remains near a Piños Altos Cemetary.
At this time, Game and Fish is tracking the animal, but they do not know if the mountain lion actually killed Nawojski.
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Mountain lion sought after man’s body found
The Associated Press, 06/20/2008
PINOS ALTOS, N.M.—Searchers on Friday were looking for a mountain lion that is believed to have fed on the body of a 55-year-old man who’d been reported missing earlier in the week.
The lion was wounded by a game officer Thursday night, and searchers with dogs were looking for it near this mountainous southwestern New Mexico town, state police Lt. Rick Anglada said.
Authorities don’t know if the lion is responsible for the death of Robert Nowojski, whose body was found Friday morning about 80 yards from his home, Anglada said.“It’s going to take an autopsy to actually determine how he died,” he said.
However, it appeared something had been feeding on the body, and authorities believe it was the lion, Anglada said.Searchers called the state Game and Fish Department Thursday night after encountering a mountain lion while searching for Nowojski, whose brother reported him missing earlier that day. The brother said he had last been seen on Tuesday, Anglada said.
A game officer who spotted the lion shot and wounded it, said Anglada and Dan Williams, a spokesman for Game and Fish. State police, the game department and federal Wildlife Services, augmented by trappers and hunting dogs, were still searching for the wounded animal Friday afternoon around the rural community, Williams said.
“We’re out there working real hard to find that lion,” he said.
It’s rare for a mountain lion to kill a human. The last reported human killing by a lion in New Mexico was in 1974, when a lion killed an 8-year-old boy near Arroyo Seco.
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Got your Prairie Dog Permit?
By Vin Suprynowicz [here]
Prairie dogs are considered pests not just by farmers and ranchers — their burrowing can render vast acreages unsuitable for cattle grazing — but by golf course operators and even agencies of the federal government. (Threatened with fines of a $100,000 a day fine from the Federal Aviation Administration, the City of Albuquerque, N.M. reluctantly agreed to exterminate an infestation of prairie dogs at the airport in March of 2007.)
The animals are cute, though they can carry a disease known in animal populations as the sylvatic plague — among humans as the “Bubonic Plague.”
Like most rodents, prairie dogs reproduce, well … like rodents. Each female bears four to six pups per year. Since most of their natural predators other than man have been eliminated or greatly thinned out, we’re not likely to run out of prairie dogs any time soon.
There are two kinds: black-tailed and white-tailed prairie dogs. In 1905, one group of white-tailed prairie dogs isolated in southern Utah was identified as the Utah Prairie Dog (Cynomys parvidens).
Some biologists believe two of the white-tailed subspecies, C. parvidens and C. leucurus, were once a single interbreeding population, and have suggested the three white-tailed “species,” C. leucurus (identified 1890), C. gunnisoni (identified 1855), and C. parvidens should be grouped together under the name Cynomys gunnisoni.
Can the different “species” interbreed and bear fertile offspring, which would indicate they’re not really separate “species,” at all? No one seems to know. And “preservationists,” of course, don’t want to find out — any more than they want to acknowledge the polar bear can’t be a “threatened species” if it can breed and produce fertile offspring with regular brown bears.
These days, those who wish to block all human development on the land find it real handy to have even rodent pests broken down into as many “species” as possible.
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Federal Courts Ensure Junk Science Governs Salmon Harvest Decisions
News from the Front #94, by James Buchal [here]
For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved. John 3:20.
Sportfishing interests, more precisely the Salmon Spawning & Recovery Alliance, Wild Fish Conservancy, the Native Fish Society, and Clark-Skamania Flyfishers, recently lost a big one when Judge Lasnik in Seattle rejected their challenge to National Marine Fisheries Service decisions sanctioning continuing overfishing on threatened Puget Sound chinook salmon. The Alliance sued under two federal statutes that require NMFS to use the best available science in decision making. It has been years since the Service did that, and it is increasingly clear that the Federal courts are the most powerful force making sure that NMFS can deem any particular science it wants as the best science—at least when it comes to harvest science.
Back in 2001, NMFS invited a blue-ribbon panel of outside academics to review its harvest policies. Called the Recovery Science Review Panel, they issued a blistering report [here](.pdf, 2.3 Mb) concluding that “NMFS should develop a rational [harvest] policy that does not demean scientific common sense” (p. 13). Commercial harvest interests (more precisely, their state and tribal mouthpieces), demanded that NMFS repudiate the Panel report. NMFS bureaucrats scurried about like bugs after their rock was overturned, ultimately commissioning a thirty-eight page review of the Panel’s wide-ranging critiques from the elite science wing of NMFS at its Northwest Fishery Science Center facility [here](.pdf, 1.5 Mb (redacted version)).
NMFS bureaucrat Frank Lockhart testified that the Science Center’s review “affected NMFS’ adoption of recovery plans and biological opinions pertaining to the listed salmonids” throughout the Northwest. Presumably these included the very decisions Judge Lasnik approved. But NMFS made sure Judge Lasnik never saw the thirty-eight page Science Center report, or the Panel’s “common sense” report that triggered Science Center’s involvement.
Federal judges taught NMFS long ago that it need fear no discovery in litigation with mere citizens. When citizens complain about government decisions, federal judges declare that citizens don’t get to put on evidence. Only the federal agencies do. They go into their files, and bring out a set of documents and present them to the Court as the “administrative record” against which the decisions must be judged. Congress required the Courts to consider the “whole record” in the Administrative Procedure Act, including all documents considered by the agency, but most of the time, no one can ever tell if the agencies have presented the “whole record” or not.
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Head for the Hills! Wildlife Biologists Gone Mad!
Here is an amusing example of junk politicized science that you paid for. Your money was shoved down a rat hole in the name of Algore’s hoax. Fortunately, the junk was debunked for free, although you will not be getting your money back.
Head for the Hills! Creatures Flee Global Warming
By LiveScience Staff
Global warming is forcing 30 species of reptiles and amphibians to move uphill as habitats shift upward, but they may soon run out of room to run.
The shift could cause at least two toad species and one species of gecko in Madagascar to go extinct by the end of this century, a biologist says.
Uphill movement is a predicted response to increased temperatures, researcher Christopher Raxworthy of the American Museum of Natural History says. Earlier studies in Costa Rica have provided evidence of how tropical animals respond to climate change. …
“Obviously, more warming will put more species at risk,” Raxworthy told LiveScience.
The results are detailed in a recent online issue of the journal Global Change Biology.
“Two things together — highly localized distribution close to the very highest summits, and the magnitude of these upslope shifts in response to ongoing warming — make a poisonous cocktail for extinction,” Raxworthy said. … [more]
But is any of this true in the scientific sense, as in a factually correct hypothesis supported by real data?
From Joseph D’Aleo, CCM of ICECAP [here]
Icecap reality check: here is the NASA annual temperature plot since the 1880s for Antananarivo, a large city in Madagascar with a population of 452,000. See if you spot any signs of global warming. I always thought for there to be warming, temperatures actually had to rise. The creatures can’t read IPCC reports or model forecasts. Maybe they are moving because of the loss of habitat to population growth or trying to escape those crazy scientists with cameras and probes.
Wolves prove very costly for ranchers
By KIM BAKER, vice president of the Montana Cattlemen’s Association, 6/06/08
There have been heated debates about wolf recovery in our state for the last 11 years. Ranchers and sportsmen have grudgingly accepted the fact that wolves are now part of the landscape in Montana. However, to what extent do we have to tolerate them?
Officials have stated a pack of wolves exist in every 16-square-mile area. One pack will kill at least one large animal, such as a moose, elk, deer or livestock, every three days. There were 60 known packs inhabiting the western part of the state in 2006. To survive, these wolves must consume up to 7,300 head of large animals per year. As these packs increase in size, that consumption number will also increase.
When Lewis and Clark traveled through the Bitterroot, long before the settlers started limiting the number of wolves, they were close to starvation and were forced to eat their horses due to the lack of wild game. During the time when wolves were prominent, many homestead histories tell of deer and elk being very scarce. In an effort to increase the elk population, elk were transported from Yellowstone National Park by train and released throughout the valley.
There is now an abundance of game in most western areas. But like any predator, a wolf is most likely to make a meal from easy prey, such as the slow, weak, young or sick, as well as livestock in a fenced pasture on private ground where their meal cannot easily escape.
Most livestock producers are not fortunate enough to have public land-grazing leases, which are only used about four months out of the year. Most ranchers have private leases and their own high mountain pastures, where they graze their livestock during the summer. These grazing practices help reduce fuels during the fire season and also provide ranchers the time needed to harvest their crops in the valleys.
Since the reintroduction of wolves, ranchers have incurred many livestock losses. In some cases, there is not enough left of the livestock carcass to prove a confirmed wolf kill, thus preventing financial remuneration for the loss. We regularly hear of conflicts with wolves, either with livestock kills or other confrontations with the public.
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