Wildlife Management

For those who bring a ghoulish curiosity to their scrutiny of Southern California's environmental decay, I offer the case of the raven. The evolution of the raven to Frankenstein status may not be a major milepost of our decline, but it's a sign of something. You might put the raven in the same league with the solemya clam. Connoisseurs of this sort of thing will recall that the solemya clam was discovered thriving in the sewage sludge at the bottom of Santa Monica Bay.

Coyotes howling into the night are as much a part of Calabasas as the aspiring screenwriters, retired moguls and stay-at-home mothers who crowd the coffee shops in the city's well-manicured mall. But that doesn't mean residents are at ease with the predators that roam this community nestled in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Debbi Gillman remembers the afternoon her daughter came home to find the remains of the family's retriever-mix strewn across the backyard.

They may be cute, but a new report warns that those little red foxes found along the California coast pose a big threat to most ground-nesting birds, including several endangered species. From the Ballona wetlands near Marina del Rey to the rugged Palos Verdes Peninsula to the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Orange County, the list of birds on the red fox's menu includes gnatcatchers, quail, avocets, snowy plovers, and even herons and egrets.

The news had scarcely gotten out that a western Colorado rancher suspected he had wolves on his land when the phone started ringing at state wildlife offices. "Get rid of them, and do it quietly," one caller said. "You need to make sure no one is trying to shoot these wolves," another offered. No one has confirmed yet whether a pack of wolves has taken up residence at the High Lonesome Ranch in De Beque, nearly 200 miles west of Denver, but even the prospect has created a stir in a state that hasn't seen a regular wolf population in 70 years.

It seems the retirees of Laguna Woods will go to great lengths to save the bunnies--including acts of underground resistance. Few involved will talk about it, but over the last several weeks, a loose coalition of senior citizens--call it the Rabbit Resistance League--has resumed a campaign of purloining poison bait boxes set out for the wild rabbits that have been devouring the landscape at the Leisure World retirement complex.

A Lipizzaner horse is born to be proud, to step smartly and hold its head high, which isn't easy in this isolated bastion of hard-line Serbian nationalism. A healthy Lipizzaner is such a mighty charger that when the breed faced extinction in World War II, Gen. George S. Patton ordered the rescue of mares and foals that German troops had stolen.

The bait was set. A small wire cage containing a mouse and a sparrow sat in a field, easily seen by any of the sharp-eyed red-tailed hawks in a nearby grove of eucalyptus trees. Within 20 minutes, one of the large birds swooped in for a late breakfast and was snared. An elated biologist, Pete Bloom, had one more startled young bird to measure, weigh and hold firmly, carefully avoiding its sharp talons while he wrapped an aluminum identification band around its leg.

The Hunt Saboteurs think as Thoreau: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Thoreau left no gray areas. Neither do the Hunt Sabbers. "We just don't believe in man managing animals," says Jonathan Paul, an organizer of Hunt Saboteurs CA. "We believe in animals doing it themselves. "Fish and Game really wants to annihilate all the mountain lions, and there you are destroying a whole ecosystem by getting rid of all the predators.

Skies off Cape Cod are clouded with gulls; ponds around the country teem with troublesome carp, and trees in Florida bustle with Tarzan's monkeys. And it's all humanity's fault. Just as neglect and excessive hunting have wiped out or endangered some species, putting animals into predator-free environments or giving them unlimited food supplies has resulted in animal population explosions.

A mountain lion has taken up residence in Griffith Park, one of the nation's biggest and busiest urban parks eight miles from downtown Los Angeles, park officials said Wednesday, prompting them to begin posting signs that warn visitors of dangerous animals living in the area. After receiving several reports of lion sightings by hikers and horseback riders in the last month, rangers say they found evidence of a lion bedding down in the higher reaches of the park.

The facial cancers that are devastating populations of Tasmanian devils in Australia are a nerve tumor that escaped its original host and became a parasite of the cultural icon, passing from one devil to the next by bites when the animals are fighting or mating, researchers reported Thursday. A genetic analysis of tumors from Tasmanian devils widely separated geographically shows that all the tumors are virtually identical and distinct from the animals' own genomes, researchers in the United States and Australia reported in the journal Science.

A controversial roundup of 2,500 wild horses from public and private lands in Nevada began on Monday amid protests from activists who call it needless and inhumane. Contractors in helicopters and on horseback herded some of the mustangs into corrals in the Black Rock Range, a chain of mountains 100 miles north of Reno, according to a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management. Heather Emmons said she did not know how many horses were captured on the first day of the roundup, which will take two months and stretch across 1,750 square miles in the Calico Mountains Complex.

In March, a couple of plump, 900-pound California sea lions showed up at the Bonneville Dam, which spans the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon, 146 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Their mission: to gorge themselves on a feast of endangered chinook salmon laboring to get over the dam's fish ladder. The two had been caught before and branded as recidivist malefactors by wildlife officials, who have spent decades and billions of dollars trying to protect the salmon.

The wild bull elephant stood menacingly in the clearing, trumpeting in annoyance and anger, its brain racing with a chemical that unleashes a throbbing and unceasing headache. It was the heart of mating season, and the bull was desperately seeking a mate. Was this really a good moment to be sitting on top of another elephant just a few hundred feet away? But Syamsuardi, a native of the wild Sumatran forest, had his strategy ready: He would pit his own elephant against the amorous stranger.

Half a dozen men with walkie-talkies and cattle prods set out on foot at sunrise Thursday to coax a herd of 10 feral bison into a corral a mile away at the bottom of a Santa Catalina Island valley. It wasn't easy. In the final days of the mating season, a massive bull kept one beady eye on his cows, all of them pregnant, and the other on his human pursuers, who followed close behind shouting and waving their arms as the animals lumbered up steep slopes and into plunging ravines.

For years, the water stored by the Savage Rapids Dam has nurtured the green bean fields and grazing pastures of southern Oregon, turning them into a lush region of bounty. But there has been a price -- the death of thousands of fish, which slammed themselves into the concrete wall of the dam in a futile effort to head upstream. Scenes from years past now resemble a faded sepia-tone photograph. Many of the big farms have turned into 10-acre hobby ranches; the salmon are in danger of disappearing; and even the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that harnessed rivers and irrigated the West, began saying a few years ago it would be better to just tear down the dam once and for all. So they did. On Friday, a platoon of bulldozers and earthmovers tore away at the last of the temporary earthen berms holding water behind the dam. The Rogue River rushed free, flowing through its historic channel for the first time since 1921.

The hunter finds a track and sets his dogs on the scent. Sometimes, after an all-day run, they tree their prey. "Then," reads a two-year-old, full-page ad of the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation, "from point-blank range, you fire away, blowing the animal to bloody lint." And that, allowing for the emotional language of those who don't approve, is how mountain lions are hunted.

They are your neighbors, but you rarely see them. They have lived here longer than anyone, but odds are you have never met. They are killers, but they are not after you. They exist as a baleful howl from the hills, a glint of night eyes, or a flicker of fur darting through brush. Lots of big carnivores still prowl their domain of the Santa Monica Mountains and adjoining hill country of east Ventura County, but it is a shrinking wild kingdom.

Thousands of mustangs that roam the West would be moved to preserves in the Midwest and East to protect the wild horses and the rangelands that support them, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday. The plan would not require killing any wild horses, he said. Interior Department officials had warned in recent months that slaughtering some wild horses and burros might be necessary to combat the rising cost of maintaining them. "We have a huge problem -- out-of-control populations of wild horses and burros on our public lands," Salazar said in a conference call with reporters.

Something is about to happen on California's second-longest river that hasn't happened this time of year since Harry Truman was president. Water is going to start flowing down two stretches of the San Joaquin that have been sucked dry since Friant Dam began diverting most of the river into two giant irrigation canals. Today dam managers will crank up releases of water into the San Joaquin as part of an ambitious restoration program intended to return chinook to the once salmon-rich river by late 2012.