animal habitat

The wolf hunt in Montana hasn't gone as planned, with wolves in the state's wilderness area along the northern border of Yellowstone National Park taking the brunt of the hunt.

Nine wolves have been killed there, in a small area of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Four of those wolves were from the park's Cottonwood Pack, including the pack's breeding female. Hunting was suspended last week after state wildlife commissioners became concerned about the heavy killing in the area, Associated Press reporter Matthew Brown reports.

 Wildlife advocate and blogger Matt Scoglund says the wolf hunt was wrongly designed from the start. If the state didn't want to kill wilderness wolves, it shouldn't have opened up the backcountry to hunting more than a month before the other areas of the state, he writes. The result has been the deaths of some of the state's celebrity wolves, including some radio-collared wolves that were part of Yellowstone's important wolf studies, and some that have been featured on PBS and Discovery Channel programs.

 Yes, I'm talking about the Yellowstone wolves that bring people from all over the world to Yellowstone, where wolf-watching tourists annually spend about $35 million in the region.

Bears are acting up all over. First it was the bear breaking into author Susan Orlean's Aspen home, which set the Twitter world, well, a-twitter. Now, black bears in Wyoming are breaking and entering, reports the Casper Star-Tribune. So far, we know of no bears on Twitter.

A bear broke into the Aspen home of New York writer Susan Orlean, and ate stuff out of her fridge. Orlean, author of "The Orchid Thief," posted about the episode on Twitter, reports Colorado Independent reporter John Tomasic, who complains her tweets were "banal," apparently not up to her usual standards. But come on, it's 140 characters. Susan, an inveterate twitterer, wrote: "Our house in Aspen was vandalized last night BY A BEAR. Cleaned out the fridge and freezer and cookie cupboard; ate frozen OJ and waffles." The Twitter traffic continued at a furious rate after the news broke Monday.