Hunting and angling groups said Trump would represent their interests — but they were wrong.
Ted Williams
Posted inOctober 3, 2016: Purple Rain
What it takes to save an imperiled fish
The impressive effort to restore the Arctic grayling in a Yellowstone National Park stream.
Posted inArticles
Federal wildlife refuges are not up for grabs
Alaska’s attempt to intrude on federal wildlife refuges has incensed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for good reason.
Posted inArticles
The folly of “taking back” the West
Do 700 million acres of national parks, national monuments, national forests, national wildlife refuges and Bureau of Land Management units belong to you and your fellow Americans? No, according to the increasingly popular notion in the West that it’s time for states to “take back” federal land. “Taking back” property that belongs to Alaskans and […]
Posted inArticles
The fight for dirty water
On May 27, the Obama administration published a rule that restores the Clean Water Act’s intent and most of its teeth. Both had been extracted by the previous administration. This rule comes after meticulous vetting by lawyers, scientists and interested parties. Eighty-seven percent of the 1 million public comments were in favor of it. Nonetheless, […]
Posted inArticles
The Pleistocene and the present don’t compute
March 15, 2025, For Immediate Release: “Rest assured, Pleistocene Parks Inc. is doing everything possible to recapture our escaped ice age megafauna. Please back away slowly from any African lion you encounter. Keep pets and children away from cheetahs. Do not approach camels, as they may kick, spit and bite. Unless you are in a […]
Posted inArticles
Two flat tires on the sage grouse express
Some interests potentially inconvenienced by the Endangered Species Act are so terrified of the law that it often succeeds best when threatened but not invoked. So it may be with ongoing efforts to save the greater sage grouse. In 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gave states, private landowners, the Forest Service and the […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Suckers for gold
Suction dredging for gold is basically a recreational activity. Required equipment: gasoline-powered dredge, sluice box, wetsuit and scuba gear. With a 4-inch-diameter hose, you vacuum up what’s on the bottom of rivers – stuff like gravel, woody debris, plants, mussels, snails, insect larvae, crayfish, frogs, salamanders, fish eggs, fish fry and, occasionally, gold. I have […]
Posted inWotr
Suckers for gold: recreational dredgers can wreck stream beds
Suction dredging for gold is basically a recreational activity. Required equipment: gasoline-powered dredge, sluice box, wetsuit and scuba gear. With a 4-inch-diameter hose you vacuum up what’s on the bottom of rivers — stuff like gravel, woody debris, plants, mussels, snails, insect larvae, crayfish, frogs, salamanders, fish eggs, fish fry and, occasionally, gold. I have […]
Posted inWotr
When poisoning is the solution
A victory for an endangered fish, though some environmentalists fought hard to prevent it.
Posted inWotr
Wild, free and out of control
“In my world, everyone’s a pony, and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies.” So proclaims cat-like creature Katie in the movie version of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. Sharing Katie’s world are feral-horse support groups — whose members number in the millions — and NBC, which regularly recycles their fantasies. For example, on May […]
Posted inWotr
Citing religious freedom is no excuse
Among the “cool facts” about golden eagles listed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is this: “Members of the Hopi tribe remove nestlings, raise them in captivity, and sacrifice them.” “Cool” is not a word the Eagle Defense Network and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) would use. For the last 12 years, they’ve frightened […]
Posted inWotr
Extreme Green
It has taken me decades to be recognized as an environmental extremist. My “attack” on Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young, a National Rifle Association board member, in Sierra magazine fomented a mass exodus from the Outdoor Writers Association of America, including 79 members and 22 supporting organizations. I serve on two foundations that award major […]
Posted inWotr
Wildlife fauxtography
Ever wonder how photographers get those stunning action shots of wildlife? Cougars, lynxes, lions, tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, foxes, wolverines, leaping and snarling, fur coifed, every whisker in focus? If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Nature fakery in photography is older than flash powder, but no one goosed it along […]
Posted inWotr
When some ranchers use poison — just like the old days
“Biocides” was Rachel Carson’s term for pesticides that kill indiscriminately. They haven’t been much talked about since the banning of DDT and relatives in the 1970s – until now. As Pete Gober, who heads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s effort to save the black-footed ferret, America’s most endangered mammal, put it recently: “The incredibly […]
Posted inWotr
Let them eat copper
I am sitting on the sun-blasted South Rim of the Grand Canyon, tracking condors through binoculars and trying to read the numbers on their wing tags as they dip and wobble above and below me. Next to me is Elaine Leslie, the heroic National Park Service biologist who never gave up on condors, even when […]
Posted inWotr
On second thought, Mr. Cheney
On the last day of 2008, a little bird told me that the venerable American Museum of Fly Fishing in Manchester, Vt., a beacon for the nation’s fly-fishers and a keeper of their rich tradition, had landed Vice President Dick Cheney as the guest of honor and speaker at its spring 2009 meeting. So I […]
Posted inWotr
How not to save salmon
For centuries, killing predators was to fish and wildlife management what leeches were to medicine. By the mid-20th century, even the dullest minds in government had figured this out. But duller minds were yet to come. Enter the administration of George W. Bush. In 2008, it is hawking control of salmon-eating birds, fish and mammals […]
Posted inWotr
A political fish-kill is in the making
Grayling are artifacts from the Pleistocene, little fish of big country with flanks of pink and silver and sail-like dorsal fins trimmed with orange and splashed with red, white, turquoise, green and neon blue. Fluvial grayling, the race that dwells in rivers, are common in the Arctic and sub-arctic, but in the Rocky Mountain West, […]
Posted inWotr
Fees have become a public-lands shakedown
Scarcely anyone objected in 1996, when Congress authorized the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to charge the public new or increased fees for accessing its own land to fish, hunt, boat, drive, park, camp or walk. After all, it was going to be an experiment […]