US Fish & Wildlife Service In Lawsuit Over Wilderness Management

From the Courthouse News Service:

(CN) - Two rainwater collectors in an Arizona desert refuge built to help an ailing bighorn sheep population may have to be dismantled, the 9th Circuit ruled Tuesday. The federal appeals panel in San Francisco revived a lawsuit brought by several environmental groups against the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which in 2007 built the Yaqui and McPherson water structures in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness, a 600,000-acre desert refuge.

Wilderness Watch, the Arizona Wilderness Coalition and three other groups say the 13,000-gallon tanks violate the federal Wilderness Act, which prohibits, with a few exceptions, the building of structures in a designated wilderness area. The groups claimed in a lawsuit filed just after the collectors were built that the agency had failed to meet the requirements for an exception.

Congress designated most of the Kofa Wildlife Refuge as a wilderness area in 1990, while only 18 percent of the land is a wildlife refuge subject to the "arguably less restrictive" federal Wildlife Act, the ruling states.

The area is in a sparsely populated, isolated and extremely rugged corner of the Sonoran Desert in southwestern Arizona, and it has been a recognized haven for bighorn sheep since at least 1939.

The sheep population in the area remained fairly stable at around 700 sheep since the early 1990s, but there was a marked decline in the estimated population in 2003. Three years later, a survey estimated that there were only about 390 sheep in the area - a population loss of 30 percent to 50 percent in about 20 years.

Fish and Wildlife found that the water scarcity, mountain-lion predation, translocation, hunting and disturbances by hikers could have all contributed to the population drop.

Ultimately, it decided to build the two water catchments to more evenly distribute the scant 7 inches of rainfall that falls in the area annually, and to avoid moving Kofa sheep to other areas.

Read full article here: http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/12/21/32787.htm

Pine Beetle Wars

The Black Hills of South Dakota, the Black Elk Wilderness in particular, is just one of any number of areas in the western US that has a significant pine beetle infestation. The issue of how to manage damage from beetle kill is no small task, especially when federally designated wilderness is brought into the discussion. Land managers across the western US are wrestling with the pine beetle and what do about it, in addition to other threats to wilderness.

The mountain pine beetle (MPB), Dendroctonus ponderosae, is a species of bark beetle native to the forests of western North America from Mexico to central British Columbia. It has a hard black exoskeleton and measures about 5 millimeters, about the size of a grain of rice. Mountain pine beetles inhabit ponderosa, lodgepole, Scotch and limber pine trees. During early stages of an outbreak, attacks are limited largely to trees under stress from injury, poor site conditions, fire damage, overcrowding, root disease, or old age. As beetle populations increase, the beetles attack the largest trees in the outbreak area.

A recent article in the South Dakota Rapid City Journal explores the issues surrounding the pine beetle both inside and outside of wilderness.

From the Rapid City Journal:

The fight is over in the Black Elk Wilderness. The beetles won.

And they’re winning all through the Norbeck Wildlife Preserve, a 35,000-acre tract of relative isolation that includes the 13,000-acre Black Elk and the state’s highest point at Harney Peak.

That ravaged piece of high-country landscape is the epicenter of a plague of mountain pine beetles that is eating its way across the Black Hills. It is a biological version of a wildfire that could for generations change the face of this island of forest rising up from the surrounding plains.

The patches of rusty-brown pine trees that mark the destructive path of the beetles are appearing everywhere. Once limited to a few patches of dead or dying trees in the high country, they are now apparent from the highway near Crazy Horse, along the road to Rochford and on the ridges of Spearfish Mountain.

“Just about anywhere you go in the forest these days you can throw a rock and hit a beetle tree sooner or later,” said Kurt Allen, an entomologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Rapid City. “In my travels around the Hills, I’ve seen it just about everywhere.”

Read the full article here: http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_aeb883cc-0034-11e0-a6a5-001cc4c03286.html