Slowly I learned the details of the assignment as I packed my bags. Nine polar bears had been sighted swimming in the Chukchi Sea many miles off Alaska’s Arctic coast. Now there was a rare opportunity to fly with the Coast Guard and polar bear biologists on a survey to see firsthand the polar bears plight as the sea ice they depend on melts away beneath them.
Humans are hard-wired to avoid dark places, especially the forest. “We are daytime mammals, after all,” Ms. Winn writes, “and evolution has programmed us to respond to failing light by crawling into a safe, snug place and going to sleep.”
Except for New Yorkers.
Tuesday, snapping turtles joined the list as "Jawless" — after being weighed and measured by a team of researchers who are studying the animal's eating, mating and nesting habits — was outfitted with the cylindrical camera glued to his shell and sent back into the cove. Once the glue wears off, the camera is supposed to float to the surface, where researchers track it down with ultrasonic signalers and radio transmitters.
"As soon as you let the animal go is when I start getting nervous," said Kyler Abernathy, director of resources for National Geographic's mission programs. "When they're out of your hands they're out of your control."
Beyond providing a setting of uncommon natural beauty, however, all this mingling of humankind and the wilderness seems to have produced something almost taxonomically unique: Wild bears so habituated to the presence of people that the biologists who have come here to study them say they’ve never seen anything like it — bears that lift the door handles of trucks to take possession of the cabs; bears that manage to snag the bait from a trap with one foot while holding the steel gate open with the other; bears that stroll munificently through the crowds at the Canada Day parade; bears in the pubs, the hotels, the day-care centers, the landfills, meat lockers, grease vents, underground parking garages. In Whistler, if a bear doesn’t get into something humans are guarding, it’s usually because too many other bears got there first.People and nature collide hard. What to do?
George Will is far from the only middle-aged Boomer pundit who spends his time shadowboxing Dirty Hippies on the Washington Post editorial page, but his Thursday column is a doozy even by that genre’s dubious standards. Seems the Communist Greens, with their “hostility to markets” and contempt for individual freedom, have teamed up with Activist Judges yet again. They’re after America’s vital fluids!
No. 399 and her triplets became a highly visible attraction along park roadsides and developed areas during the 2006 and 2007 seasons with hundreds of visitors stopping to photograph and observe them at close range. Over her lifetime, No. 399 has become comfortable using habitat in close proximity to roads and other developments, and is now habituated to humans. Nonetheless, she and her cubs remain wild, naturally foraging bears that are potentially dangerous.
More here.Screaming bugles, high whistles and sounds mimicking a child screaming through a plastic tube blared through the Reno-Sparks Convention Center as callers competed for cash and prizes in the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation's World Elk Calling Championships.
The location of this year's national convention gave several Reno children an opportunity to give it a try.
"It was most thrilling," said Maddie Smith, 9, a fourth-grader at Jessie Beck Elementary.
The sound of a large mammal breathing outside the tent interrupted my sleep. It was well after midnight. Snow was falling thick in the high foothills on the eastern slopes of the Mission Mountains. Every now and then a drift would slide from the tent roof with a gentle sound of snow on nylon. I just knew an animal was outside, nosing in the soft powder.
