Cougar attacks a Montana hunter

Lion pounces on hunter. By Jim Mann. Daily Inter Lake. Backpack saves man from more serious injuries.

This is said to be the first mountain lion attack in many years in Montana.

80 mph winds drive rare November wildfire in Montana

Winds whip Montana wildfire into a November inferno. By Lance Benzel of the Billings Gazette.

The fire is north of Big Timber, burning on the plains in grass, juniper, and pine.

Update Nov. 14, 2007. Wind-whipped Chichi fire leaves erratic trail of destruction. By Mike Stark and Linda Halstead-Acharfy. Billings Gazette. It burned 30,000 acres, 3 homes and other structures before snow calmed its advance. Gusts from 80 to 100 mph made this both unusual and very dangerous to fire fighters and others in the area.

Note that a gust of 127 mph from this cold front was recorded in northern Wyoming near the Montana border!

Although the Great Lakes gray wolf is officially recovered, new genetic analysis indicates it is not a pure wolf

~I think this is the most important wolf story in quite a while~

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Perhaps the greatest success story in terms of numbers is the recovery of the wolf in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Recovery began, however, before genetic analysis had advanced. Far more is known today, and the recovered wolf in the Great Lakes area is a mixture of the orginal wolves of the Great Lakes area, the Eastern Timber wolf (which seems to be a separate species very closely related to the red wolf) and coyotes.

Nevertheless, I think the restoration is a successful and important program because these large canids are on the ground fulfilling the same ecological function as the wolves of 200 years ago.

Genetic purity is important, nonetheless, and the only restored wolf population that clearly is all wolf are the wolves of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming which came down from Western Canada beginning in the 1980s on their own accord and were also captured and reintroduced to Yellowstone Park and central Idaho in 1995-6.

The story below does not mention this, but what it means is that the most vital wolf population from the standpoint of conserving and restoring endangered speices is the wolves in these three states — the very states which are going to be given a nearlly free hand to kill them once they are delisted as long as each state maintains a token population of about 10-15 packs (how these will be counted is a matter of controversy).

Off Endangered List, but What Animal Is It Now? By Mark Derr. New York Times.