Sunday, April 29, 2012 8:25:39 PM
As Bison Return to Prairie, Some Rejoice, Others Worry
Bison released by the American Prairie Reserve, near Malta, Mont., are among two groups set free in the state. Some are descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds.
Lynn Donaldson for The New York Times
Some of the bison were from Yellowstone National Park.
The New York Times
The bison's return has been welcomed by American Indians, but some ranchers are less pleased.
Lynn Donaldson for The New York Times
By NATE SCHWEBER
Published: April 26, 2012
WOLF POINT, Mont. — Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members wailed a welcome song last month as around 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park stormed onto a prairie pasture that had not felt a bison’s hoof for almost 140 years.
That historic homecoming came just 11 days after 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife. Some hunters and conservationists are now calling for bison to be reintroduced to a million-acre wildlife refuge spanning this remote region.
“Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us,” said Robert Magnan, 58, director of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s Fish and Game Department [ http://www.fortpecktribes.org/fgd/ ], who will oversee the transplanted Yellowstone bison program.
But with several groups now navigating a complex and contentious path to return bison to these plains, agribusiness is fighting back. Many farmers and ranchers fear that bison, particularly those from Yellowstone, might be mismanaged and damage private property, and worry that they would compete for grass with their own herds.
“Bison are a romantic notion, but they don’t belong today,” said Curt McCann, 46, a Chinook rancher who this month drove four hours to a public meeting in Jordan to speak against bison reintroduction.
When the explorer Meriwether Lewis followed the Missouri River through this region in 1805, he came across bison herds he described [ http://www.sierraclub.org/lewisandclark/species/bison.asp ] as “innumerable.” Just eight decades later, a young Theodore Roosevelt noted that [ http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/tr%20web%20book/TR_CD_to_HTML95.html ] all that remained were “countless” bleached skulls covering the Montana badlands.
Scientists estimate that tens of millions of bison once roamed America, but by 1902 there were only 23 known survivors in the wild, all hiding from poachers in a remote Yellowstone valley. For decades, attempts to transplant bison from the rebounding Yellowstone herd were thwarted, despite requests from tribes to steward some of the animals.
“I call them my brothers and sisters because they are a genetic link to the same ones my ancestors hunted,” said Tote Gray Hawk, 54, a Sioux who has brought the Fort Peck bison hay and water each day since their arrival. Their meat, lower in cholesterol than beef, will feed elderly tribe members and their skulls will be used in traditional sun dance ceremonies, he said.
The last hunt for indigenous bison on the Fort Peck reservation happened in 1873. In the 1880s, hundreds of tribe members starved to death on the barren land. Around them homesteaders from Europe began wresting an agricultural living from this windswept expanse of rolling amber in northeast Montana. Most of the neighboring farmers and ranchers today are descendants of those pioneers, and they safeguard their traditions with generational grit.
“Bison is a big issue that could really impact our livelihood,” said Brett Dailey, 52, who ranches near Jordan.
Today there are three million cattle in Montana and agribusiness is the state’s biggest industry, but not a single bison roams free. A 2011 survey [ http://www.restoringbison.org/Polling.html ] commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation [ http://www.nwf.org/ ] showed that a majority of state residents support reintroducing huntable bison to the vast Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, similar to a Utah herd created in 1941 from the last few bison allowed out of Yellowstone.
“Within this sea of agriculture there is room for small islands of conservation,” said Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve [ http://www.americanprairie.org/ ], the charity that brought the group of genetically pure bison back to a pasture just north of the refuge.
The arrival of Yellowstone bison was welcome news around the troubled Fort Peck reservation. When the first calf was born on Sunday, a rust-colored baby bull, tribal flags still hung at half-staff for a teenage boy who had committed suicide days earlier. Rates of poverty, unemployment, disease and addiction hover stubbornly above national averages here.
Census data shows that around northeast Montana, a prairie expanse almost the size of Indiana, most county populations peaked in the early 1900s and have since dropped by almost half.
The region’s fastest growing economic engine, oil production, is proving a mixed blessing. In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency reported that toxic chemicals from nearby drilling contaminated drinking water supplies for Poplar, a reservation town of around 3,000. This year a schoolteacher from Sidney, near the North Dakota border, was kidnapped during her morning jog and murdered. The suspects are two Colorado roughnecks.
“These bison represent healing,” said Iris Greybull, 62, of Poplar.
The bison debate has dredged up old tensions between tribes and their neighbors. Before Ms. Greybull, a Sioux, spoke in favor of the animals last fall at a fractious meeting in Glasgow, dozens of farmers and ranchers walked out in protest.
She and other tribe members say they see an ugly double standard in the fact that there are more than 130 private bison ranches in the state, including one belonging to the mogul Ted Turner housing dozens of controversial Yellowstone bison, and yet only the Fort Peck herd has been visited by protesters.
But some say the bison on the ranches do not pose the threat that the wild ones do.
“Unless they have the German wall and a moat with a bunch of crocodiles and piranhas, they’re not going to contain those woolly tanks,” said State Senator John Brenden of nearby Scobey, who has long done battle on the bison issue in the state Legislature.
Around a century ago some Yellowstone bison contracted disease from domestic livestock and in recent decades thousands have been slaughtered in an effort to protect ranchers’ herds. At the direction of Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a few of these bison were quarantined for years and certified healthy. Some may soon go to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, about 170 miles west of Fort Peck, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by opponents.
“I took a lot of arrows for this, but it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “If you want to get into a fistfight in Montana, go into a bar and share your opinion about bison or wolves.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/us/bison-return-to-montana-prairie.html
===
Pacific reef sharks have declined by more than 90 percent, new study says
A reef shark swims in the aquarium of Genova, Italy in this August 11, 2010 file photo.
Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images
By Juliet Eilperin, Published: April 27, 2012
Pacific reef shark populations have plummeted by 90 percent or more over the past several decades, according to a new study [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1523-1739/earlyview ] by a team of American and Canadian researchers, and much of this decline stems from human fishing pressure [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/shark-fin-ban-gathers-steam-in-maryland-and-beyond/2012/04/01/gIQAZVwcpS_story.html ].
Quantifying the decline for the first time, the analysis, published online Friday in the journal Conservation Biology, shows that shark populations fare worse the closer they are to people — even if the nearest population is an atoll with fewer than 100 residents.
The team of eight scientists examined the results of a decade of underwater surveys across 46 Pacific islands and atolls and found densities of reef sharks — gray, whitetip and blacktip reef sharks, as well as Galapagos and tawny nurse sharks — “increased substantially as human population decreased” and the productivity and temperature of the ocean increased.
“Our results suggest humans now exert a stronger influence on the abundance of reef sharks than either habitat quality or oceanographic factors,” the authors wrote.
Near populated places, such as the main Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa, the study found, there were roughly 26 sharks per square mile. Remote reefs, such as in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Johnson Atoll, a U.S. territory west of Hawaii, by contrast, boasted 337 sharks per square mile.
“In short, people and sharks don’t mix,” Marc Nadon, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the University of Hawaii’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, said in a statement.
The scientists relied on more than 1,600 “towed-diver surveys” for their study. This form of underwater survey, aimed at reaching a more accurate count of fast-moving, wide-ranging fish, entails having a pair of scuba divers record the number of sharks they see while being towed behind a boat.
The researchers said previous underwater surveys, which focused on a small transect of the ocean or a stationary point, skewed results by double-counting some sharks that passed through the same area multiple times.
“These types of surveys can vastly overcount numbers of large mobile fishes (such as sharks),” one of the paper’s co-authors, Julia Baum, an assistant professor at British Columbia’s University of Victoria, wrote in an e-mail.
Mahmood Shivji [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/22/AR2007052201405.html ], who directs the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, said the new paper’s “results are consistent with other studies showing a decline in reef shark numbers elsewhere.”
A 2010 study by Australian and British researchers, for example, showed that reef shark populations had declined 90 percent since the 1970s at three remote atolls in the Chagos Archipelago [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/01/AR2010040102894.html ] in the Indian Ocean. “In this case, even though the atolls have few people, the decline is attributed to distant-origin fishing fleets,” Shivji wrote in an e-mail.
The study showed both the potential conservation benefits, and limits, of creating marine reserves in remote areas. Several of the areas the researchers surveyed — including the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, three Mariana Islands and all of the islands in a region known as the Pacific Remote Island Area — enjoy a significant level of federal protection. Enforcement, however, is often absent.
Baum wrote in an e-mail that she regularly sees a large fishing vessel in U.S. waters near Kiritimati atoll in the northern Line Islands while conducting field work, and this operation hires local villagers to cut fins from sharks.
“To me, enforcement of these islands is a major unsung conservation challenge, and I suspect that if this is not effectively addressed [as soon as possible], the reef sharks on these islands will be fished out within the next 10 years,” she wrote.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/pacific-reef-sharks-have-declined-by-more-than-90-percent-new-study-says/2012/04/27/gIQAlc5FlT_story.html [with comments]
Bison released by the American Prairie Reserve, near Malta, Mont., are among two groups set free in the state. Some are descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds.
Lynn Donaldson for The New York Times
Some of the bison were from Yellowstone National Park.
The New York Times
The bison's return has been welcomed by American Indians, but some ranchers are less pleased.
Lynn Donaldson for The New York Times
By NATE SCHWEBER
Published: April 26, 2012
WOLF POINT, Mont. — Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members wailed a welcome song last month as around 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park stormed onto a prairie pasture that had not felt a bison’s hoof for almost 140 years.
That historic homecoming came just 11 days after 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife. Some hunters and conservationists are now calling for bison to be reintroduced to a million-acre wildlife refuge spanning this remote region.
“Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us,” said Robert Magnan, 58, director of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s Fish and Game Department [ http://www.fortpecktribes.org/fgd/ ], who will oversee the transplanted Yellowstone bison program.
But with several groups now navigating a complex and contentious path to return bison to these plains, agribusiness is fighting back. Many farmers and ranchers fear that bison, particularly those from Yellowstone, might be mismanaged and damage private property, and worry that they would compete for grass with their own herds.
“Bison are a romantic notion, but they don’t belong today,” said Curt McCann, 46, a Chinook rancher who this month drove four hours to a public meeting in Jordan to speak against bison reintroduction.
When the explorer Meriwether Lewis followed the Missouri River through this region in 1805, he came across bison herds he described [ http://www.sierraclub.org/lewisandclark/species/bison.asp ] as “innumerable.” Just eight decades later, a young Theodore Roosevelt noted that [ http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/tr%20web%20book/TR_CD_to_HTML95.html ] all that remained were “countless” bleached skulls covering the Montana badlands.
Scientists estimate that tens of millions of bison once roamed America, but by 1902 there were only 23 known survivors in the wild, all hiding from poachers in a remote Yellowstone valley. For decades, attempts to transplant bison from the rebounding Yellowstone herd were thwarted, despite requests from tribes to steward some of the animals.
“I call them my brothers and sisters because they are a genetic link to the same ones my ancestors hunted,” said Tote Gray Hawk, 54, a Sioux who has brought the Fort Peck bison hay and water each day since their arrival. Their meat, lower in cholesterol than beef, will feed elderly tribe members and their skulls will be used in traditional sun dance ceremonies, he said.
The last hunt for indigenous bison on the Fort Peck reservation happened in 1873. In the 1880s, hundreds of tribe members starved to death on the barren land. Around them homesteaders from Europe began wresting an agricultural living from this windswept expanse of rolling amber in northeast Montana. Most of the neighboring farmers and ranchers today are descendants of those pioneers, and they safeguard their traditions with generational grit.
“Bison is a big issue that could really impact our livelihood,” said Brett Dailey, 52, who ranches near Jordan.
Today there are three million cattle in Montana and agribusiness is the state’s biggest industry, but not a single bison roams free. A 2011 survey [ http://www.restoringbison.org/Polling.html ] commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation [ http://www.nwf.org/ ] showed that a majority of state residents support reintroducing huntable bison to the vast Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, similar to a Utah herd created in 1941 from the last few bison allowed out of Yellowstone.
“Within this sea of agriculture there is room for small islands of conservation,” said Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve [ http://www.americanprairie.org/ ], the charity that brought the group of genetically pure bison back to a pasture just north of the refuge.
The arrival of Yellowstone bison was welcome news around the troubled Fort Peck reservation. When the first calf was born on Sunday, a rust-colored baby bull, tribal flags still hung at half-staff for a teenage boy who had committed suicide days earlier. Rates of poverty, unemployment, disease and addiction hover stubbornly above national averages here.
Census data shows that around northeast Montana, a prairie expanse almost the size of Indiana, most county populations peaked in the early 1900s and have since dropped by almost half.
The region’s fastest growing economic engine, oil production, is proving a mixed blessing. In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency reported that toxic chemicals from nearby drilling contaminated drinking water supplies for Poplar, a reservation town of around 3,000. This year a schoolteacher from Sidney, near the North Dakota border, was kidnapped during her morning jog and murdered. The suspects are two Colorado roughnecks.
“These bison represent healing,” said Iris Greybull, 62, of Poplar.
The bison debate has dredged up old tensions between tribes and their neighbors. Before Ms. Greybull, a Sioux, spoke in favor of the animals last fall at a fractious meeting in Glasgow, dozens of farmers and ranchers walked out in protest.
She and other tribe members say they see an ugly double standard in the fact that there are more than 130 private bison ranches in the state, including one belonging to the mogul Ted Turner housing dozens of controversial Yellowstone bison, and yet only the Fort Peck herd has been visited by protesters.
But some say the bison on the ranches do not pose the threat that the wild ones do.
“Unless they have the German wall and a moat with a bunch of crocodiles and piranhas, they’re not going to contain those woolly tanks,” said State Senator John Brenden of nearby Scobey, who has long done battle on the bison issue in the state Legislature.
Around a century ago some Yellowstone bison contracted disease from domestic livestock and in recent decades thousands have been slaughtered in an effort to protect ranchers’ herds. At the direction of Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a few of these bison were quarantined for years and certified healthy. Some may soon go to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, about 170 miles west of Fort Peck, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by opponents.
“I took a lot of arrows for this, but it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “If you want to get into a fistfight in Montana, go into a bar and share your opinion about bison or wolves.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/us/bison-return-to-montana-prairie.html
===
Pacific reef sharks have declined by more than 90 percent, new study says
A reef shark swims in the aquarium of Genova, Italy in this August 11, 2010 file photo.
Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images
By Juliet Eilperin, Published: April 27, 2012
Pacific reef shark populations have plummeted by 90 percent or more over the past several decades, according to a new study [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1523-1739/earlyview ] by a team of American and Canadian researchers, and much of this decline stems from human fishing pressure [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/shark-fin-ban-gathers-steam-in-maryland-and-beyond/2012/04/01/gIQAZVwcpS_story.html ].
Quantifying the decline for the first time, the analysis, published online Friday in the journal Conservation Biology, shows that shark populations fare worse the closer they are to people — even if the nearest population is an atoll with fewer than 100 residents.
The team of eight scientists examined the results of a decade of underwater surveys across 46 Pacific islands and atolls and found densities of reef sharks — gray, whitetip and blacktip reef sharks, as well as Galapagos and tawny nurse sharks — “increased substantially as human population decreased” and the productivity and temperature of the ocean increased.
“Our results suggest humans now exert a stronger influence on the abundance of reef sharks than either habitat quality or oceanographic factors,” the authors wrote.
Near populated places, such as the main Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa, the study found, there were roughly 26 sharks per square mile. Remote reefs, such as in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Johnson Atoll, a U.S. territory west of Hawaii, by contrast, boasted 337 sharks per square mile.
“In short, people and sharks don’t mix,” Marc Nadon, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the University of Hawaii’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, said in a statement.
The scientists relied on more than 1,600 “towed-diver surveys” for their study. This form of underwater survey, aimed at reaching a more accurate count of fast-moving, wide-ranging fish, entails having a pair of scuba divers record the number of sharks they see while being towed behind a boat.
The researchers said previous underwater surveys, which focused on a small transect of the ocean or a stationary point, skewed results by double-counting some sharks that passed through the same area multiple times.
“These types of surveys can vastly overcount numbers of large mobile fishes (such as sharks),” one of the paper’s co-authors, Julia Baum, an assistant professor at British Columbia’s University of Victoria, wrote in an e-mail.
Mahmood Shivji [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/22/AR2007052201405.html ], who directs the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, said the new paper’s “results are consistent with other studies showing a decline in reef shark numbers elsewhere.”
A 2010 study by Australian and British researchers, for example, showed that reef shark populations had declined 90 percent since the 1970s at three remote atolls in the Chagos Archipelago [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/01/AR2010040102894.html ] in the Indian Ocean. “In this case, even though the atolls have few people, the decline is attributed to distant-origin fishing fleets,” Shivji wrote in an e-mail.
The study showed both the potential conservation benefits, and limits, of creating marine reserves in remote areas. Several of the areas the researchers surveyed — including the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, three Mariana Islands and all of the islands in a region known as the Pacific Remote Island Area — enjoy a significant level of federal protection. Enforcement, however, is often absent.
Baum wrote in an e-mail that she regularly sees a large fishing vessel in U.S. waters near Kiritimati atoll in the northern Line Islands while conducting field work, and this operation hires local villagers to cut fins from sharks.
“To me, enforcement of these islands is a major unsung conservation challenge, and I suspect that if this is not effectively addressed [as soon as possible], the reef sharks on these islands will be fished out within the next 10 years,” she wrote.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/pacific-reef-sharks-have-declined-by-more-than-90-percent-new-study-says/2012/04/27/gIQAlc5FlT_story.html [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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