water 2: the gila river near gila hot springs
Research Blog | June 13, 2012
Nuff said? I know these posts are lame. Too much to process. I was in heaven today walking along the Gila. Yes I was close to a campground and road. But no I didn’t care. Maybe one car drove by. And why is that the defining factor anyway? The defining factors: a pair of hawks’…
water 1
Research Blog | June 13, 2012
My view of the Gila is skewed by the season. It’s almost the pinnacle of dry season, and the last couple of years have been at drought-level. The rains should come in July, but meanwhile, I drive around seeing as many kinds of dry as their are snow. As I’ve been driving around seeing so…
Telemetry
Research Blog | June 12, 2012
Kim McCreery, the biologist for NMWA in Silver City showed me he telemetry equipment she uses in her wild dog studies in Africa.
wolf-proof shelter
Research Blog | June 12, 2012
Near Reserve, Catron County (Gila) Two Views, from Bowhunting,net Living with Mexican Wolves and Liberal Press THE EDITORIAL: Afraid of the big, bad wolf By Walter Rubel wrubel@lcsun-news.com It appears as if members of the New Mexico State Game Commission based their decision on the Mexican Wolf Reintroduction Program on what was in the best…
3 days in the Gila ecosystem
Research Blog | June 12, 2012
I wrote this late last week, and thought I’d clean it up, but I’m clearly not going to. I have since met more people and read more documents, accounts, and heard more anecodotes, and I am not an expert nor beholden to fact checking this “research.” The more I know, of course, the…
Mexican wolf is torn apart in political imbroglio
Research Blog | June 11, 2012
This is from the Denver Post, June 8: Group alleges political meddling in wolf program ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The effort to return the Mexican gray wolf to the American Southwest has been fraught with legal disputes, illegal shootings, livestock deaths and emotion. Now a watchdog group is questioning the integrity of key scientific findings related to the…
“ranches with wolves” mother jones
Research Blog | June 8, 2012
There is a good article by Kiera Butler from April 2011 in Mother Jones, on the incompatibility of current dominant ranching practices in the SW with the wolves, and what ranchers might do to actually live in proximity to them. Arizona rancher Carey Dobson – his ranch is in the same contiguous Blue Range Wolf…
Climate change in the southwest
Research Blog | June 8, 2012
The Southwest, with its delicate desert ecology is even more susceptible to strain than other regions of the West. There are particular issues to the West that I am focused on: the intersections of ranching, wide open spaces, cowboy and freedom myths, concepts of wilderness, phenomena that encompass both acreage and lifestyle and are foundation…
Very funny. kind of.
Research Blog | June 4, 2012
“What is the world’s shortest book? The environmentalist’s book of jokes.” – from writer Sharman Apt Russell’s blog, Love of Place. She continues in her post “The Lighter Side of Global Warming:” “For myself, I also feel an intangible loss. Humans are wired for continuity. We believe in culture, tradition, grandkids. We believe we are…
Forest fire
Research Blog | June 4, 2012
I’m going up this way tomorrow (not in it). Burn’s a good thing.
Against eliminating species
Research Blog | June 3, 2012
I just read this passage written by Harley Shaw, in the 2002 introduction for The Wolf in the Southwest, the Making of an Endangered Species (1983) by David E. Brown. Shaw is a research biologist specializing in mountain lions in SW NM: “Eliminating species leads to intellectual dead ends. Once a creature is gone, we…
Silver City
Research Blog | June 3, 2012
The air smells like campfire. But it’s not trivial like that. A truck speeds by and picks the scent up from where it settled, or brings the smoke along from where it came. I met some smoke jumpers in the coffee shop at 7 am. I also met a man from Kansas in Silver City:…
Gila Fire
Research Blog | June 3, 2012
Record NM blaze will test forest management By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN, Associated Press From the air, the smoke stretches as far as the eye can see. On the ground, firefighters talk about the steep canyons that keep them from directly attacking what has become the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history and the…
Not in Kansas (or NY) any more
Research Blog | June 2, 2012
I flew from LGA to Denver. I found the tornado shelter sign in the women’s bathroom disarming. Then flew from Denver to Albuquerque, and then drove 5 hours south and west. First scorched earth – 98 degrees soft hills and naked rock rising like a dead sea, 140 miles to Truth or Consequences (the town…