And my thanks to Doug for sharing with us once again from his work a glimpse of wildlife most of us don’t get to see.  While tracking a pack of about 50 wolves in Hayden Valley recently, Doug snapped this mesmerizing photo of a remarkable scene: a grizzly bear standing over a fresh bison carcass.

Wolf researcher Doug Smith took this recent photo of a grizzly bear on a bison carcass in Yellowstone. (Photo Doug Smith/NPS)

For more information, read my interview with Doug Smith in National Parks Traveler on his research, or my Eulogy for a Wolf: A Happy Ending for Yellowstone’s 495M on Wildlife Promise.

This grizzly bear kicks back for a much needed rest on a tree trunk. Photo by Joan Saba.
2011 National Wildlife Photo Contest entry.

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TAKE ACTION BY JULY 23rd: Tell the Environmental Protection Agency to protect Bristol Bay’s grizzlies from Pebble mine. Photo: USFWS.

A: The Pebble gold and copper mine would be both an underground and open pit mine (click here to see amazing images of open pit mines from space)–about two miles wide and several thousand feet deep. Most of the rock removed from the pit will be waste rock, which often contains acid-generating sulfides, arsenic, lead, mercury, and cyanide. Once the minerals are processed and recovered, the remaining rock becomes another form of mining waste called tailings, which also can contain up to three dozen dangerous chemicals.

The Pebble mine will discharge up to 10 billion tons of these toxic tailings that will need to be stored forever behind massive earthen dams. The largest of the dams containing these toxic slurry lakes would be over 700 feet tall and 4 miles long.

Q: What makes Pebble mine so much more dangerous than other mines?

A: The Bristol Bay region in southwest Alaska–the proposed location of Pebble mine–is one of the worst places on earth for a mine (see some spectacular photos of Bristol Bay here). Remaining virtually undeveloped for thousands of years, this wildlife paradise is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, as well as healthy populations of grizzly bears, wolves, moose, caribou and waterfowl.

Large copper mines are notorious for polluting waters while they are in operation, leaving the area toxic long after they are gone. If Pebble mine is built, toxic wastes will inevitably leak into surface and groundwater, causing serious pollution that threatens salmon and other wildlife. Plus, because Pebble mine would be built in one of the most active earthquake zones on earth, there’s a serious risk of the dams breaking and funneling massive amounts of mining pollution directly into the river systems.

Q: The mining industry may have gotten away with polluting our waters 20 to 30 years ago, but don’t they face stiffer penalties now?

A:  Mining practices have improved, but are far from perfect. Unfortunately,  two “loopholes” in the Clean Water Act  have allowed mine developers to circumvent the purpose of this critical law, making it common industry practice over the last 30 years for mines to dam up the nearest river valley and treat wetlands and streams impounded by the dam as a toxic waste dump. According to the EPA, the hard rock mining industry is the single largest source of toxic waste and one of the most destructive industries in the country.

One recent example is the Kensington mine in southeast Alaska, which was recently allowed to completely drain a beautiful alpine lake in the Tongass National Forest and fill it with mining waste–killing all fish and destroying the aquatic habitat.

Q: In these difficult economic times, shouldn’t we be careful about stopping mining projects?

A:  While discharging wastes into wetlands, streams and lakes may be convenient for mining companies, it is not a necessary way of doing business. By stopping mines from dumping their toxic wastes in our lakes, rivers, and wetlands, it’s possible to reduce some of the negative environmental impacts of hard rock mines without prohibiting all hard rock mining.

Controversial projects such as the proposed Pebble mine in Alaska, Montanore mine in Montana, PolyMet mine in northern Minnesota, Mt. Emmons mine in Colorado, Haile mine in South Carolina, and numerous existing mines in the West and Appalachia are relying on the Clean Water Act loopholes to cut costs and justify extensive environmental damage. What’s more, the public is generally on the hook for the clean-up of abandoned mines. It is estimated that there are a half million abandoned mines across the country and that taxpayers will have to pay $32 – $72 billion to clean up the sites.

Q: How can the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) affect development of the Pebble mine?

A: Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA can veto permits if the agency determines the discharge will have “unacceptable adverse impacts on water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas, wildlife, or recreational areas.”

Right now, the EPA is taking public comment on their assessment of impacts from large-scale mining on Bristol Bay–which highlights the significant threats from a project like Pebble mine–and they need to hear from you by July 23rd.  If we don’t speak up now, Pebble mine could devastate this wilderness paradise and the rich community of wildlife that calls it home.

Urge the EPA to protect grizzlies from Pebble mine!

A lone grizzly bear rests along the Battle River in Alaska as the morning sun starts to breach the mountains and light up the hill side. Photo by Jenny Grimm.

Speak Up for Montana Grizzlies

A proposed silver and copper mine in northwest Montana could mean a death sentence for the grizzly bears that live in the nearby Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. There’s at least 10 reasons to stop the Montanore Mine, and you can help by speaking up to protect our nation’s waters and wildlife from the toxic pollution of hard rock mines!
 
 

This Photo of the Day was donated by a participant in the annual National Wildlife Photo Contest. See more photos or sign up for the 42nd Annual National Wildlife Photo Contest.

Three-pawed grizzly bear at Alaska's Denali National Park (Courtesy National Park Service)

The bear doesn’t seem to have any problem getting around on three feet, and the wound appears to have healed completely since Owen first saw the bear last July.

“He showed up two weeks ago along the (Parks) highway,” Owen said. “He’s been very visible. A lot of people have seen him already.”

One of the first people to see the bear this spring said the bear ran across the Parks Highway and jumped a guardrail. “They said he looked very agile,” Owen said. “I don’t think he has any trouble getting around.”

It’s a mystery as to how the bear lost its paw. Owen says the bear looks even healthier now than he did last summer, when staff feared for his survival:

Owen contacted bear biologists around the country and world to inquire about bears with missing limbs or parts of limbs and how they fare. “I found out they’re a lot more common than you’d think,” Owen said. “Pretty much everyone said they had experience with bears missing all or parts of limbs and they get along pretty well.” [...]

Last week, the bear claimed a dead caribou that park officials found along the highway near the park entrance a week earlier and dragged farther off the road.

“It took him the better part of a week but he finally showed up on that carcass,” Owen said. “He spent all last week camped out on that carcass, burying it, sleeping on it and eating on it.”

And what better sign of good health than sleeping on a caribou carcass, am I right?

In all seriousness, I’d have thought a three-legged grizzly would be a goner. But as National Wildlife Federation Senior Scientist Doug Inkley told me, “Given a chance, some animals are remarkable in their ability to survive injury.”

Did you know there’s a proposed mine that threatens the food supply of Alaskan grizzly bears? Learn more about the Pebble Mine proposal and how you can stop it.

"Wu" the WuShock Mascot

Wichita State Wushock

What is a WuShock you ask? Wichita State describes their mascot, the WuShock as big, bad, muscle-bound, bundle of wheat. Fitting, as back in the early 1900′s many of the Fairmont College (later became Wichita State) football players earned tuition by harvesting or “shocking” wheat during the summer. Unfortunately, this wheat bundle isn’t as invincible as he seems. Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen global yields for wheat decrease by 5.5%, and scientists predict that this trend will continue as temperatures rise. A recent study from Stanford University found that a two degree increase in temperature could reduce the growing season by nine days, resulting in 20% less yield.

ISU Cyclone

Iowa State Cyclones

You won’t see a college student donning a twister costume on the court of ISU athletic events–rather, you’ll see “Cy” the cardinal wearing red and gold. Story goes, that the cardinal was ISU’s mascot until 1895 when damaging tornadoes wrecked havoc on central Iowa. When ISU stomped Northwestern 35-0 in a football match up that year, the headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read “Struck by a Cyclone: It Comes From Iowa and Devastates Evanston Town”. The name stuck. Destructive storms and tornadoes continue to occur in the heartland, and as our air warms and moisture in the atmosphere increases due to climate change, we can expect even more dangerous storms. Warming winters and springs may cause some twisters to happen earlier as well–for example, Nebraska recorded their first February tornado on record this year.

Credit: Robert Postma

Michigan Wolverines

There are varying theories of why Michigan’s mascot is the wolverine. No wild wolverines exist in the state as far as we know. My favorite theory goes back to the Ohio-Michigan rivalry: Michiganders were called ‘wolverines’ in 1803 when the two sides argued over where to place the state line. What is unclear, however, is if Michiganders called themselves wolverines due to their tenacity and strength, or if Ohioans coined the term due to the gluttonous habits of their neighbors to the north. Either way, wolverines today are extremely threatened by climate change. As few as 250 wolverines may be left in the contiguous United States, of which only 35 individuals are thought to be successfully breeding.  Snow is melting earlier, putting the wolverine, who requires snowy habitat to find mates, reproduce, and survive in danger.

Credit: OSU

Ohio State Buckeyes

Brutus Buckeye is the famous mascot of the Ohio State University and is named after Ohio’s state tree, the buckeye. Contrary to popular belief, squirrels (thanks Jon Stewart!) are not the only threat to Brutus Buckeye. Climate change is moving the Ohio buckeye north into–dare I say it–Michigan. The Forest Service recently published a Climate Change Tree Atlas that predicts northward movement of the Ohio buckeye tree with a warming climate. Ohio State University student Kristen Arnold said in a 2008 press conference, “As a die-hard Buckeyes fan, the only thing worse than losing to Michigan would be giving them our mascot. This is one thing Buckeye and Wolverine fans should team up on: work together on global warming so they keep their wolverines and we save our buckeyes.”

Monte from Montana

Montana Grizzlies

Montanans have long recognized the grizzly as a symbol of the state’s wild heritage. The famous mascot, Monte the Grizzly hails from the University of Montana. The University’s basketball team officially became the Grizzlies in 1923 when they joined the Pacific Coast Conference–this was the same year Montana became the first state the in the nation to designate grizzlies as a protected game animal. Grizzly bears are slowly expanding their habitat range higher into the Arctic, to areas once thought to too chilly for the bear. This more northern habitat has been traditionally dominated by polar bears, leading many scientists to wonder about the ecological impacts of this habitat clash. I wonder if any team will adopt the Grolar bear as a mascot in the future?

Albert & Alberta

Florida Gators

Albert and Alberta Gator (one of the few male and female mascot pairings in the NCAA) call the University of Florida home. Appropriately suited since over 1 million alligators live in Florida and in 1987 the state of Florida declared the American Alligator their official state reptile. Climate change threatens alligators as sea levels rise, causing an influx of saltwater to the gator’s freshwater and brackish habitat. What’s worse, we may be seeing fewer ‘Albertas’ in the future. Eggs incubated at warmer temperatures tend to be born as males–altering the male to female sex ratio.

Which mascot will fend off extinction elimination in the tourney? My guess is a more climate resilient mascot will win this year…

A Bristol Bay cub shares some good polling news. Photo courtesy of Larry Burke

Now the opposition has gone nationwide.  A new nationwide poll released by the Renewable Resources Coalition (which is National Wildlife Federation’s Alaska Affiliate), Nunamta Aulukestai, and NRDC shows extremely strong opposition across the board to the proposed Pebble Mine, slated to be built in the headwaters of the Bristol Bay region of Alaska.  77% of Americans in the “lower 48″ think the mine is a bad idea, while 68% of Alaskans think the same.  Those are huge numbers, particularly in a state like Alaska where resource development is a tradition and mining projects get an immense amount of benefit of the doubt.

Our job now is to translate that national, statewide and local opposition into stopping the mine and that takes boots on the ground.  Please click here to put your money directly into NWF’s Pebble Mine work–it is a great holiday gift to the world.  Visit us here for more information about the campaign.

A brown bear cub from Bristol Bay shadowboxes in preparation for his showdown with foreign mining companies. Photo courtesy of Larry Burke.

The vote was aimed directly at a proposal by two foreign mining companies–Anglo American from the United Kingdom and Northern Dynasty Minerals from Canada–to dig the largest gold and copper mine in North America in Bristol Bay and dump its toxic mining waste into a 10 square mile lake in the headwaters of the largest sockeye salmon run in the world.  A run that supports a great range of wildlife, including the bears of Katmai National Park.

As Anglo American and Northern Dynasty (known together as “the Pebble Partnership”) have put together their proposal for the mine, Anglo American President Cynthia Carroll has repeatedly assured Alaskans that ”We will not go where communities are against us.”  But the Partnership sued to stop the borough vote even before it took place and has vowed to continue working on the mine despite the vote.  How does that square with Anglo American’s promise?  It doesn’t.

Protect Alaska’s Grizzlies from Toxic Mining >>

Photo by Brent McWhirter

For the past 30 years, the state of Alaska has worked to reduce bear and wolf populations in the hope it will lead to more moose and caribou to hunt.

The war on wolves has gotten the most attention, but the state has quietly taken steps to reduce grizzly bear populations too. Now, a National Wildlife Federation biologist and three other authors, all of whom are retired Alaska Department of Fish and Game bear experts, have published an article in the Wildlife Management Journal that details this hidden effort.

The article documents the extent to which state biologists have used liberalization of hunting regulations in an effort to  reduce bears.  Officially, this isn’t defined by the state as “predator control” but the effect is largely the same. As just one example, in the last 40 years, the state raised the “take” limit on grizzly bears, or how many animals an individual can kill, from one bear every four years to at least one bear a year in 76% of the state.  Similar regulation liberalizations occurred for season lengths and waivers of tag fees for resident hunters.

The state’s sneaky bear reduction policy has resulted in a lot more bear kills. The authors show that in the more than three-quarters of the state evaluated, the average take of grizzlies has increased from 387 per year in 1980 to 827 per year in 2008.

National Wildlife Federation is working to protect the  bears of Alaska. In Bristol Bay, for example, bears are threatened by a proposal to build the largest open pit mine in North America in the headwaters of the largest sockeye salmon ecosystem in the world.

Help us protect the brown bears of Bristol Bay! And if you have a good story about seeing a grizzly in Alaska, let us know.

Pronghorn like this one in New Mexico are among species that need wide open spaces over which they can wander. The elk shown in the cover photo for this blog belongs to a species that migrates been high and low altitudes and needs habitat corridors for travel in between.

Beginning in the early 1900s and continuing for much of the 20th century, conservationists focused on protecting core areas for wildlife—biologically diverse habitats designated as wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, parks and other units.

But since the 1970s, scientists have learned that protecting habitat “islands” is insufficient for wildlife survival.

“Isolated populations suffer a variety of threats,” Kevin Crooks, associate professor of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University, says. “For example, isolation prevents animals from traveling to important foraging or breeding sites. It also heightens genetic risks, such as inbreeding and loss of evolutionary potential to adapt to changing environmental conditions.”

Biologists now recognize that protected areas, even seemingly vast places such as Yellowstone National Park, need to be connected to one another if wildlife is to survive much beyond the next century. These connections often are called corridors.

Here are five things you should know about wildlife corridors:

1. Many wildlife species need to move far and wide to survive.

Each summer, elk leave river valleys to graze on nutritious grasses and forbs in high mountain meadows. Some grizzly bears ramble over an area of 800 square miles yearly. Young gray wolves may travel scores of miles in search of new home ranges. During spring 2009, researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society tracked a young wolverine that traveled more than 500 miles, from Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park down to north-central Colorado, the first confirmed record of the species in that state since 1919.

2. Long-distance journeys are getting harder for wildlife to undertake.

Roads, fences, rail lines, exurban housing and other developments increasingly chop large parcels of habitat into isolated pieces. This fragmentation lessens what conservation biologists call “connectivity”—the degree to which the landscape allows animals to move from one place to another. Steve Torbit, NWF Rocky Mountain Regional Center executive director: “Every time you put down a road, drill a gas well, erect a transmission line, whatever, it has an impact on connectivity. Wildilfe can’t just move over to the other side of the mountain anymore. It’s all developed. There is no other side of the mountain anymore.”

3. Protected wildlife corridors help wildlife survive.

Also known as greenways, linkages and passageways, these tracts of habitat link two or more larger core areas. Some corridors are naturally occurring, such as woodlands along streams, but others are made by humans, like the 42 culverts recently installed under stretches of U.S. Highway 93 on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana to make the roadway permeable to wildlife. Another example is the fencing in 2001 of a forested tract running through the golf course of Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge in Alberta’s Jasper National Park—the 1,100-foot-wide corridor allows wolves to use a historical route through the golf course and gain access to low-elevation habitat containing elk and other prey.

4. Protecting strips of land between core habitats can help populations remain viable, but they’re no guarantee.

Some narrow greenways make prey species more vulnerable to edge-hunting predators such as coyotes, skunks, red foxes and domestic cats. In other cases, animals refuse to use their appointed corridors. Consequently, conservationists have broadened their scope to encompass entire ecological regions. Jodi Hilty, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s North American programs: “Wildlife don’t recognize country, state or international borders, and neither can we if we want to maintain wildlife connectivity.”

5. National Wildlife Federation is working on corridors.

NWF’s Northeastern Regional Center in Montpelier, Vermont, is working with The Nature Conservancy and some 20 other private and public entities to create a vast habitat corridor that will connect six wildlife-rich landscapes in the Northern Appalachians and span a total of 80 million acres across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and two Canadian provinces. Wildlife in the area—which harbors alpine vegetation, old-growth forest and large blocks of unfragmented forest—includes such locally at-risk creatures as lynx, moose, black bear, pine marten and fisher. Funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Staying Connected Initiative seeks to protect habitat from fragmentation and climate change and to restore landscape connections. George Gay, NWF senior manager: “We want to empower local groups and citizens through education and outreach.”

You too can help protect wildlife corridors.

Adapted from the National Wildlife magazine story “Freedom of Movement” by Tom Dickson.

The photos associated with this blog were donated by a competitor in the annual National Wildlife Photo Contest. If you are a nature photographer, you may want to participate this year in the 41st annual National Wildlife Photo Contest. In addition to cash awards, winning photos will appear in National Wildlife magazine and on the NWF website.

Help support National Wildlife Federation’s work to provide corridors for wildlife. >>