Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Fracking Away the Wildlife

August 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Pronghorn

The population of Wamsutter, Wyoming may have grown four times over in the last three years, but the town on the southeastern edges of some of the largest natural gas fields on the continent is still a dusty pit stop off Interstate 80. The augmented volume of trucks flowing through this isolated interchange only affirms the energy boom of the Intermountain West—and the fracturing of the habitat of the American pronghorn. Once ubiquitous on the Great Plains and high deserts of the American West, these antelope rely on thousands of miles of unspoiled ranges to avoid their predators, and to ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Alligator River Refuge Rolls Back From Rising Sea

November 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Standing on a beach on the Albemarle Peninsula in North Carolina, Brian Boutin, a Nature Conservancy biologist, points to a rusted piece of rebar with a green tag a few inches from the water’s edge. “That was our original marker to show what was happening here three years ago,” he says. “It was 20 meters from the shoreline. Now, it is the shoreline.” To the south, waves hit the shore and explode into the air, little eruptions of erosion. To the north, the waves break, but more gently. Offshore, Boutin and his Nature Conservancy colleagues have built 500 feet of reefs designed to ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Magazine Feature Story, November-December 2011
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New Zealand Imports Foreign Workers: Dung Beetles

October 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

New Zealand farmers Dean and Marjorie Blythen are poised for an unlikely spot in the history books — early next year their property, about 30 miles north of Auckland, will become home to the country's first officially imported dung beetles. In what will be the start of a nationwide rollout of the industrious little insects, Blythen expects his 200 Hereford cattle and between 500 and 600 sheep to be joined by perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 beetles at an initial release site on the farm. Those beetles, among 11 species being imported from South Africa, Australia, France, and Spain, are currently ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Long Slog for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

September 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Long Slog for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Against all odds, the critically endangered ivory-billed woodpecker may still be hanging on in a desolate handful of bottomland swamps in the American Southeast. Depending on who's asked, the last putative sighting of the large black-and-white bird occurred in early 2007 in the Florida Panhandle or the spring of 2008 in a Louisiana bayou. And there hasn't been an undisputed report of ivory-bills for nearly 70 years, more than twice the bird's maximum lifespan. The putative rediscovery of the bird in 2005, announced with much fanfare at a Washington, D.C., press conference that included ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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CSI: Wildlife — Solving Mysterious Animal Deaths

June 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Carol Meteyer unfurled the Sandhill crane's gray wings across the steel examination table, and for a moment, the 4-foot-tall bird regained its former majesty. In that instant, the laboratory's windowless cinderblock walls, cement floor and fluorescent lights disappeared. It was easy to imagine the crane's wings cupping the prairie air as it landed in an Oklahoma field, its long gray neck stretched, its red crown the only bright spot in a dun landscape. FedEx had delivered the crane, along with three others, that morning. The day before, it had stood in a farm field in Oklahoma, its head ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Environment, July-August 2011, Profile, Science
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Endangered Species Act Candidates Getting Prioritized

May 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The bureaucratic process involved in moving plants and wildlife onto the Endangered Species Act list has devolved over the decades into an acrimonious court feud between champions of the country's imperiled species and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service administrators charged with protecting them. Candidate species have lingered for years on the government's docket. Concerned citizens' groups have sued to get them attention. Then, in the course of responding to those lawsuits, the service has spent more time on litigation than biology. As a result, delays lengthened and more lawsuits were ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Save the Birds — With Doppler Radar

April 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Toothache Tree

After slogging through knee-deep water, past palmetto thickets and trumpet vines dangling from the treetops, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Mike Lange stops short. He signals toward a gnarled live oak, straight out of the magical charm of The Shire, its trunk the width of a car. Crumpled resurrection ferns line its branches, waiting to sprout in green abandon with the next rains. Nearby, the trunks of an elm and a water hickory wrap around each other like a sculpture of intertwined lovers. Lange is rightly proud of these woods. Over the past 20 years, he has been largely ... Read More

More like this: Environment, May-June 2011, News and Options, Science & Environment
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When Bird Watching Means Dog Watching

March 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When Bird Watching Means Dog Watching

Jennifer Stroh hasn’t forgotten the day 10 years ago when two western snowy plover chicks were spotted on the beach at Coal Oil Point, a popular surfing spot near the University of California campus in Santa Barbara. Nobody had seen a plover chick at the point for 30 years. The entire Pacific coast snowy plover population was on the federal list of threatened species. In California, the birds had stopped nesting at 33 out of 53 coastal breeding locations, driven away by human footprints, mechanized beach raking, dredging and mining operations, and the construction of seawalls and ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Trumpeter Swans Try to Dodge a Bullet

January 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

At first glance, Crescent Lake, a shallow body abutting a cornfield in upper Snohomish County, Wash., would appear to be perfectly pristine. Mallard and pintail ducks skirt the edges of its banks on waters that — in this contaminated age at least — would seem to be as untouched as anyone could hope. But as wildlife biologist Martha Jordan explained on a recent rain-sodden Northwest afternoon, the lake has become lethal to the celebrated trumpeter swan, the world's largest waterfowl. The trumpeter swan, or cygnus buccinators, winters along hundreds of miles of the Pacific Northwest. ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Recovery of the Island Fox

January 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One of the most dramatic and successful recovery efforts for an endangered species can be found in the Channel Islands, just offshore of Southern California. Even though the islands are currently almost unpopulated, they haven't been spared from the impacts of human actions. A combination of over a century of ranching and of the effects of the pesticide DDT had left many of the unique species on the islands teetering on the brink of extinction. In particular, the Island Fox, the most prominent unique species on the the Channel Islands, had quickly declined to under a hundred less than 10 years ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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