habitat

Read the Oct. 5 High Country News for Peter Beland's tale of a researcher pushing for the re-introduction of the California condor into the Pacific Northwest. The condor was last seen in central Oregon in 1904, but Oregon Zoo biologist David Moen has spoken with a Warm Springs Tribal Elder who says he spotted condors near Oregon's Mount Hood as recent as the 1960s.

Moen also studied Native languages and basketry for clues and learned that condors probably lived near the Columbia River in the Dalles area and on the Oregon coast, among other places. Then, in the summer of 2006, he consulted Steve Emslie, a paleoecology and avian ecology specialist at the University of North Carolina, on the most likely nesting sites.

Condors prefer fairly inaccessible caves near water and plenty of food, Emslie explained. Gridding out potential nesting spots and sifting meticulously through the dirt, Emslie managed to find prehistoric shell fragments and condor bones in the Grand Canyon in the '80s, decisively proving that the birds had nested in the area and helping justify their re-release in Arizona.

Now Moen is waiting for tests being conducted in Denmark that will show whether the birds lived in Oregon as recently as 50 to 100 years ago. If so, researchers know the bird is more likely to do so again.

-- Rita Hibbard

So ends the life of the 'Old Man Lake female,' a troublesome grizzly who for 10 years had been growing increasingly, disturbingly friendly to campers in West Glacier National Park. Monday, she was shot and killed.   Protesters said humans should leave, not the bears. But in the end, the bears are gone.

"They shot her at dinnertime, and by dark only one cub was still alive, trapped and sedated and headed for a zoo in the Bronx. The other succumbed to the tranquilizer.

"This was it," said Jack Potter, chief of science and natural resources at Glacier, of the bears' final beeline for the Old Man Lake campground. "This was exactly the type of situation we've been worried about, the type of situation we've been warning about. It had to end."

No zoo wanted the 17-year-old grizzly mom. The only solution, it seemed, was a bullet. Read more in the Missoulian.

Joshua McNichols just produced an interesting story for Oregon Public Broadcasting about how scientists in Seattle, and business owners and others in Portland, are trying to lure salmon back to the city.

In Seattle, researchers are experimenting with roughening the surface of seawalls, creating nooks and crannies to encourage the growth of plants that help shelter tiny critters that feed young salmon. Those salmon pause at Seattle's waterfront while making the transition from fresh water to the Pacific Ocean.

In Portland, Mayor Sam Adams is pushing for a lower-tech solution: Planting trees and other vegetation at the waterfront. It's a strategy that's been tried with success in Seattle.

Making the transition zone through cities like Portland and Seattle safe for salmon is  important work, says salmon expert Jim Lichatowich. He points out that the fish must pass through a series of well-functioning habitats to optimize the number that ultimately make it to the Pacific, and then return:

If you have three of those habitats that are degraded, and if through heroic efforts you fix two of those links, the chain's still broken. And it's really an important metaphor because it helps explain how we could spend so much money on salmon recovery efforts and get so little out of it.

(If you haven't read Lichatowich's Salmon Without Rivers, I suggest you do yourself the favor. Fascinating stuff.)

Out in the countryside, meanwhile, the Bonneville Power Administration is using one of its helicopters to fly over streams and measure their temperature by way of a thermal imaging camera, Tom Banse reports for KUOW.

The words "food safety" conjure images of mouldering ground beef and bags of contaminated spinach. But in California -- and, if proposed federal regulations are approved, nationwide -- "food safety" should summon another set of images: bulldozed ponds and trees, bare dirt acreage, and dead owls poisoned along with the farmers' unwanted rodents in their bellies.

The federal campaign to reduce food safety scares is leading to farming practices that reduce biological diversity, destroy crops and ponds, poison aquifers, threaten habitat and defy known science. Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle reports that industrial agriculture supporters and large produce buyers are using the push for food safety to squelch biologically diverse farming methods.