Decision time for bull trout

Lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) are not evil. Lake trout are weeds, a pelagic version of spotted knapweed. Weeds do fine in their native habitat, they have predators and natural controls that keep them in control. Outside their natural range, weeds and lake trout alike tend to decimate local populations. Lake trout out-compete, outlive and consume [...]

Dear Mr. Muir,

The work in the field is at an end for the present season, and I am now busy preparing my report. Two alternatives present themselves for the treatment of the reserved public timber lands. One is to reserve all such lands at one blow by refusing to allow any forest lands of the United [...]

Book Report: The Big Burn

Many years ago I was working for the Forest Service in the upper St. Joe River drainage in Northern Idaho. All around the valley were reminders of the largest forest fire ever to hit the United States. The black skeletons of monster white pines and cedars still stood sentinel 100 feet above thick even-aged stands [...]

Beetle Battle

Coming soon, to a pine tree near you! He’s a tiny little feller, about the size of a grain of rice, but boy is he hungry. The Mountain Pine Beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae is a Rocky Mountain native and we had learned to live with occasional outbreaks. We are now in the middle of a full [...]

Coal ash conundrum

Last week, the Bugle published an article concerning a recent National Research Council study on the hidden health and environmental consequences of power production in the U.S. The study found that we pay, as a nation, about $120 billion per year, mostly in increased health problems and early deaths for our reliance on fossil fuels.
Along [...]

Thanks for the help

Just what’s up with all those out of state tourists catching all my fish and killing all my elk? Why don’t we just tell them all to go home so we can have Paradise all to ourselves? Well, as you might expect, there are folks studying just those questions. The Institute for Tourism and Recreation [...]

$3 Billion Hose Pipe

About a month ago, we talked about a fantastical idea by Colorado developer, Aaron Million, (apt name) to build a ten-foot diameter hose pipe to suck water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir and shoot it 600 miles down to Denver so the Rocky Mountain Front could continue to grow at current unsustainable rates.
Well, it seems that [...]

“Nearly Flawless Effort”

In 1998 folks began catching invasive lake trout in Swan Lake and the Swan River. Lake trout are large top-tier predators who have a tendency to out-compete existing fish populations when they become established. In Flathead Lake, lake trout have added to the myriad threats to native populations of Bull Trout. As threatened Bull Trout [...]

I’ll Have The Chicken

A recent USGS study found mercury contamination in every fish sampled in 291 streams nationwide. Mercury concentrations in fish at more than two-thirds of the sites exceeded the value of 0.1 micrograms per gram (μg/g) of mercury  that is of concern for the protection of fish-eating mammals. 27% of the sites exceeded 0.3 μg/g, which [...]

Major Conceptual and Factual Errors

Amid all the hoopla and invective of the current health care debate, the Bugle failed to report on an important report recently released on the Otter Creek coal tracts near Ashland. The report; “The Value of the Otter Creek Coal Tracts to the State of Montana: The Dangers of Relying on the Norwest Corporation Appraisal” [...]