Alan Gregory’s Conservation News

The white elephants, also known as hatchery tanker trucks by the put-and-takers catered to by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, take up at least half of the agency’s operating budget. Buying land to protect headwaters streams, the last refugia for wild, native brook trout in the state, is not even on the agency’s radar screen. Why? Because the agency is caught in its own budget fiasco — plant hatchery mongrels to attract put-and-take anglers so that more licenses can be sold.

I’ll stop there and refer you to Lowbagger.org, where the good folks in charge have republished a recent newspaper column I wrote on this subject.

And while you’re at Lowbagger.org, check out “Hunting Without Motors,” a great piece by Howie Wolke. Then recall what it’s like to go fair-chase hunting.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today reported on a Pittsburgh suburb’s problems with deer and a USDA study containing recommendations for Mt. Lebanon’s elected leaders to follow in dealing with their town’s way-overly-abundant herd.

Look for more — many more — municipalities in the Keystone State to follow Mt. Lebanon’s case study closely as Pennsylvania’s whitetails continue to overrun both their (shrinking) habitat while destroying the habitats of hundreds of other critters, big and small. Of particular concern from a nongame management perspective is the current condition of the state’s hardwood forests, private and public. Whitetails, which number in some cases more than 40 per square mile, have decimated these forests through their browsing. In Hickory Run State Park in northeastern Pennsylvania’s Carbon County, nearly every acre of the protected area’s forest has two features: maturing second-growth trees and carpets of hays-scented fern.

Deer don’t like the fern species, of course. And when the fern proliferates under heavy deer browsing, no tree seeds can grow, the saplings shaded out by the ferns.

The USDA’s list of recommendations for Mt. Lebanon strangely includes putting wolves and cougars on the ground. Unrealistic, for sure. But it’s a great discussion topic.

The data from the 2005 and 2006 aerial counts of whitetails in the state have been posted on Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ Web site. The numbers are, in some cases, astounding. Crews from Vision Air Research, based in Boise, Idaho, did the counting.

There’s some lively discussion taking place over at Ralph Maughan’s blog regarding the direction of what many people still refer to as the “conservation community.” The subverting of conservation groups’ agendas by industry by, especially in the East, the resource extraction trade associations and companies and in the West by the livestock outfits and their corporate chamber-of-commerce-clone mouthpieces has and continues to marginalize and sink mainstream conservation groups (as Robert Hoskins so perfectly notes in this series of comments).

The wisdom and words of Aldo Leopold have largely been forsaken by groups and individuals that should, instead, be enshrining the land ethic that the conservation pioneer wrote so eloquently about. Too often, the hunt for foundations’ dollars becomes the objective — at the expense of real conservation.

The conservationist Dave Foreman wrote succintly about the consensus-building approach and “compromise” in this excellent essay from 2005.

Never heard of the butternut tree? Rest easy; most Americans haven’t. Yet this species qualifies easily to be lumped into the group of classic North American trees — right up there with sugar maple, the American chestnut, the American elm, the eastern white pine and the pinon pine.

But like the eastern hemlock, the flowering dogwood, the beech, white pines and a host of other tree species, the butternut is dying out as a viable member of the Northeastern forest. This New York Times article (my good friend Dave provided the link) explains what’s going on.

The culprit? The fungal disease Sirococcus clavigignenti-juglandacearum, causes bark cankers that eventually kill.

The fungus, however, was only recently described as a species and while it shows all the marks of having been introduced to North America, it has not yet been found anywhere but this continent.

Other tree-killing insects and diseases: the gypsy moth, the hemlock wolly adelgid, white pine rust, pine weevils, beech bark disease.

Here’s an overview of a few of what Pennsylvania state foresters call “forest pests.”

And here’s another more comprehensive listing of forest insects, invasive plant species, tree diseases and “other agents.” You can also view some cool images at this site.

One of my keepsakes from life in Idaho is a color photo I took of a grizzly old bull bison grazing on native bunch grass near Glens Ferry, a small town along the Snake River between Boise and Twin Falls. To this day, I remain entranced by this native species. It was heartening to read this Associated Press article (carried by the Journal Star of Lincoln, Neb.).

A holistic approach to managing federal herds — in effect making them one dispersed herd — makes good sense. And one objective of managing the 10 or so herds as one is to preserve — to the max extent possible — the genetic purity of the herd.

The manner in which the Yellowstone bison herd is managed remains troubling. An overriding objective of this new federal bison management strategy should be the establishment of a truly wild, free-roaming herd — one that’s as free of heavy-handed management as possible.

It’s spread to Wyoming, where the Game and Fish Department suggests hunting — sharpshooters in some cases — as a means of dealing with overly abundant ungulates (the white-tailed deer).

One could argue over what happened to allow deer herds to grow so much (as they have in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and other Eastern states, greatly diminishing biodiversity, particularly flora, in the process).

But hunting remains the best and most sensible control method. You can read the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s current deer management plan here. And for an independent, conservation-oriented view of the whole shebang, you know what to do.

What’s so great about “hunting” tame exotic ungulates from inside a tall fence?

I sense an overall ethical tone of “no-fair contest” when reading about these businesses.

And that’s just for starters. In my mind, these places constitute a stain on the tradition of hunting. Oregon’s Supreme Court earlier this month issued a ruling that effectively puts that state’s one and only “canned hunting” facility out of business.

The Oregonian of Portland, Ore., wrote this editorial after the court released its ruling. In part, the commentary says:

At the Madras operation, a visitor typically paid about $800 a day to shoot a water buffalo, yak, ibex or any of a dozen other non-native species. The ranch is a large spread at 2,200 acres, but the animals are enclosed by 16 miles of tall fencing, and guides can show visitors to watering areas where the docile prey can be easily bagged.

This news should hardly be a surprise to anyone who’s been following the trashing of the world’s oceans.

This guy’s a hero, in my estimation. Sure he could’ve (should have?) gone about the whole thing differently, but someone took a stand for piping plovers. A few observations:

1. Anyone who lets their domestic house cat remain outside for untold numbers of hours at a time is doing a disservice both to the cat and those birds exploiting the habitat niche around human places.

2. Domestic cats live longer, healthier lives if kept inside. We have two feline pets ourselves. Both remain inside and live quite nicely.

3. Domestic cats, no matter how well fed, remain hunters. And they will kill because that’s what they do.

4. Perhaps no other migratory bird species has suffered more from humans’ desire to live and play on the ocean waterfront than the piping plover.

5. Biologists and technicians often must erect anti-predator fences around plover nests along the Eastern Seaboard. Why? Because of the great number of non-native predators humans have introduced, including cats.

The big one in Pennsylvania — the firearms, or rifle, deer season — opens Monday. There are 1.7 million or so deer roaming across the state. Many are unhuntable because they’re sitting in suburbia, munching away on Japanese yew bushes and other ornamental plants kindly planted by unassuming gardeners.

A couple of trends are again coming to the fore:

1. There are fewer hunters. License sales in Pennsylvania are down 4 percent for the season. There’ll be some last-minute upward swings, but not enough to offset the long-term decline that began soon after 1981, when more than a million men, women and youths purchased licenses.

2. Fewer places to hunt. The housing development of McMansions that I can just about see from where I sit this morning both destroyed habitat and made what remains unhuntable.

The same trends are evident in other Eastern states and, perhaps, elsewhere in the country. Here’s a story that details what’s happening in Vermont.

These trends portend even more trouble for Eastern forests and, especially, nongame wildlife.