Bold bruins bedevil hunters

Bold bruins bedevil hunters. By Mark Henckel. Billings Gazette (reprinted in Helena Independent Record).

One critical point Henkel makes is to be sure you hang your carcass well away from the gut pile. Bears actually prefer the organs. Their tastes are not the same as ours.

I don’t buy the notion that the grizzly bears are bold because they haven’t been hunted. The bears are hungrier because their traditional food sources have slowly disappeared just as predicted by those who protested their delisting.

Just as future Montana summers are almost always going to be filled with forest fire smoke, the bears are going to be hungry, and you will have to worry about West Nile virus from the mosquitoes. . . . just a few changes in the exciting world of the warming climate.

Bighorn Sheep Threaten Western Way of Life ?

Over at the Western Watersheds blog, there is an important story how sheep growers are organizing to hit back at the slow recovery of bighorn sheep. Oh! Not to speed it up, but to stop it and reverse it.

Domestic sheep are lethal to bighorns because domestic sheep are full of diseases. Bighorn are also worth a lot more economically than domestic sheep are on these marginal rugged rangelands.
This summer Western Watersheds Project and Advocates for the West probably saved all of the bighorn in Hells Canyon from incursions of sheep bands by making sure the US Forest Service lived up to the orders of the courts and kept them apart.

Bighorn Sheep Threaten Western Way of Life? WWP blog

As a sidenote, I think ranchers are gearing up for a major assault on Western Wildlife, not just wolves, but many other species too.

For those hunters who say wolves have decimated the Yellowstone elk herds, did you notice the Montana Stockgrowers Assn. has slipped back into their pre-wolf stance that Yellowstone Park has TOO MANY ELK!