Endangered Species

In a move that could usher in even tighter restrictions on water exports to Southern California, state wildlife regulators have decided to protect another fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The California Fish and Game Commission voted 3 to 0 to adopt protection for longfin smelt. The tiny fish makes its home in the delta, which serves as headwaters for the state and federal canals that send water to Southern California.

It has taken sweat, serendipity and five hours for Matthew Schwartz to find a single paw print of a Florida panther stamped in the swamp muck. He has bushwhacked through knee-high saw grass and saffron-colored love vine in search of the predator's milieu. But winds across the fields must be easterly, or planes headed to the Fort Lauderdale airport will chase the big cats into the remotest corners of the preserve. "There it is!"

Gray wolves will be fair game for hunters in parts of the northern Rocky Mountains after federal officials announced Thursday that they would be taken off the endangered species list. The decision, which is expected to face lengthy litigation, comes after a 20-year effort to reestablish gray wolf populations in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Hidden by the darkness of a half-moon sky, nine students and their biologist mentor waded through waist-high brush one night last week, hunting for yellow-flowering deer weed to shelter one of the rarest butterflies in America. One student hugged a big, red cylindrical cooler. "I come bearing endangered species," she said. It was no joke. Inside the cooler fluttered dozens of Palos Verdes blues, thumbnail-sized butterflies, all bred in captivity, most just a few days old.

A federal judge Wednesday invalidated a plan that justified boosted water exports from Northern California, ruling that it failed to account for the effects on endangered salmon and steelhead. U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger of Fresno found that a 2004 study by the National Marine Fisheries Service didn't adequately address global warming, the loss of habitat and other factors that could hurt the fish.

The Interior Department wants 10 more weeks to decide whether polar bears should be listed as threatened or endangered, a delay that conservation groups condemned as tied to the transfer of offshore petroleum leases in the animal's habitat. On Jan. 9 the department missed a deadline for a final decision and three conservation groups sued. In the government response Thursday, Assistant Interior Secretary Lyle Laverty said the department needed until June 30 to complete a legal and policy review.

. -- The fate of basic industries across the Intermountain West -- grazing, mining, energy -- soon could be at least partially tied to that of a bird about the size of a chicken. The federal government is under a judge's order to reconsider a decision against listing the sage grouse as endangered, and wildlife biologists are scouring the species' customary mating grounds to see how many are left.

From the earliest days of exploration, mariners in Chile's cool southern waters marveled at the abundance of whales. A Jesuit naturalist wrote of the sea "boiling" with the spouts of the leviathans. Among 19th century Nantucket boatmen, the island of Mocha was notorious as the stamping grounds of "Mocha Dick," an ill-tempered sperm whale riddled with harpoons.

. -- A federal judge in Montana has rejected a request by the government to delay a lawsuit seeking to place the gray wolf back on the endangered species list, saying he's "unwilling to risk more deaths." At least 39 of the Northern Rockies' 1,500 gray wolves have been killed since they lost federal protection in March. That action placed wolves under the authority of state wildlife agencies in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

The photos of the South China tiger taken by a farmer seemed too good to be true. After all, no member of the endangered big cat family had been seen in the wild since the 1960s. This weekend, local authorities revealed after months of delay that the pictures had been staged using a poster cutout. Police also produced a paw made of wood they said had been used to make prints in the snow.