Elk poaching an ongoing problem

YAKIMA, Wash. — The latest of a series of elk-poaching incidents near the Clover Springs elk feeding site has WDFW enforcement officials looking for assistance.

Do you know someone who has recently come home with, begun showing around or bragging about a fresh new set of what are probably some pretty big elk antlers?

Last Sunday, someone shot and killed a large bull elk near the Clover Springs site, which is along the Clover Springs (1600) Road off the Nile Loop Road. It’s one of a half-dozen places in which volunteers with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife provide winter feed to help the animals through the coldest months of the year.

The bull must have been a pretty impressive rack of antlers, too, because that’s all the scofflaws took — the antlers. They just chain-sawed those suckers right off, and left the body lying there.

WDFW enforcement Capt. Rich Mann said the poaching must have taken place sometime after 4:30 p.m. because there were WDFW staffers or volunteers at the site until then. “We don’t know if (the elk) was spotlighted,” he said. “We do know there were no tracks, because the snow had covered everything.”

Typically, poaching around any feed site is reported by people in the area, Mann said. “The locals kind of watch the area, but nobody happened to see that one. We’ve had really good support, but on this one we don’t have anything on it.”

Anyone with any information is asked to call the state’s confidential poaching hotline at 1-877-WDFW-TIP (877-933-9847), or the regional WDFW enforcement office at 509-457-9315.

In two different poaching incidents on Jan. 16 and a third on Jan. 23, nearby residents or passersby reported the violations, and WDFW enforcement Capt. Rich Mann expects the county to file charges in each case.

In another case in December, a Yakima man killed a large, 7-by-7 branch-antlered bull in the Cowiche Mountain area, and prosecutors are expected to file charges on that one as well.

The Clover Springs site has endured a higher incidence of poaching, Mann said, because it’s more remote than some of the other feed-site areas around which elk congregate during the winter months.

“If you compare it to our other feeding sites, it’s out of the way. It doesn’t have a lot of public around it,” Mann said. “(The main feed lot at) Oak Creek is extremely visible. If somebody went in and shot an animal there, the public would probably mob them.”

– Scott Sandsberry

 

License tab donations barely enough

YAKIMA, Wash. — That little donation on your vehicle license tab renewal isn’t turning out to be quite the panacea for the state parks’ money problems. It simply isn’t bringing in as much as those financial planners had expected, much less what they’d hoped for.

To meet the donation projection the Legislature laid out in its 2009-11 budget, Washington State Parks needs to average $1.2 million per month in state-parks donations made by individuals renewing their license tabs. Through December, the cumulative average has been $1.1 million.

Still, unless there are no further general fund reductions beyond those already identified in Gov. Chris Gregoire’s 2010 supplemental budget, the income will be enough to keep state parks open, according to a Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission report.

The legislation that directed the Department of Licensing to collect a donation for state parks unless the vehicle owner specifically chose not to provide it, Bill 2339, was a response to proposed budget reductions that would have resulted in the closure of 40 state parks.

– Scott Sandsberry

 

A coyote with an identity crisis

YAKIMA, Wash. — I don’t know about you, but the thought of a coyote being at all scary or dangerous just seems ludicrous. Every coyote I’ve ever seen in the wild bolted at my slightest move, and I’m not sure I could have tossed one a hunk of sausage without it disappearing even before the tasty morsel hit the ground.

(Not that I would toss that sausage in the first place. For one thing, I’m too greedy; I’d want the sausage for myself. But more importantly, feeding wild animals is patently stupid and ultimately bad for the animals. We’ll return to that in a bit.)

But there are obviously coyotes with which I have not become acquainted, and two of them — well, one in particular — have become so scary to folks in Seattle’s Discovery Park and the nearby Magnolia neighborhood that one of them was actually trapped and euthanized today.

I’m probably a little jaded and maybe just a little too willing to share the world with wild things, but my first reaction is kind of … seriously? A big bad coyote was scaring people? What, this little dude had an identity crisis and thought it was a cougar?

OK, I wasn’t there. And according to a report released by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the 40-pound male coyote that was euthanized this morning had become “increasingly aggressive” over the last couple of months. WDFW officials believe a second coyote, believed to be the female of the pair, will be less of a problem now with the more aggressive, larger male gone.

Here’s part of the report:

One local man reported being cornered against a fence by one of the coyotes. In another recent incident, a woman reported opening her front door with her dog at her side and encountering one of the coyotes, which lunged at her and her pet. She had to fend off the animal with an umbrella. Another man and woman walking their dog, reported one of the coyotes followed them and attempted to snatch their pet from their arms.

Well, having had dogs a lot bigger than 40 pounds come after me quite aggressively while I’ve been out running, I can tell you emphatically a good swift kick will always make the animal reconsider its actions. Problem solved. (If you think that makes me a big meanie, well, too bad.)

But while I have a hard time getting worked up about how terrifying these coyotes might be for somebody whose outdoor adventures are confined to the local park, I have no problem taking vocal (or, in this case, written) aim at what or who was almost certainly the cause of this coyote’s death: the idiots who have fed it along the way.

When wild animals lose their fear of humans or begin approaching them, it’s almost always because the animals have come to associate those two-legged things with easy food — because some idiot has tossed them scraps from a picnic, or used food to lure the animals close enough for a photograph they can show their friends. If you’ve seen coyotes, you know they always look emaciated anyway — even when they’re not starving — and so feeding them might seem like a humane thing to do.

Well, it isn’t.

It almost always leads to the animal’s death, and I’m certain that’s what led to this coyote being trapped and killed. I’d be willing to be dollars to donuts somebody along the way either offered food to this coyote, and maybe a second person did the same thing, and the coyote got to thinking, “Well, I’ll have to visit some more of those two-legged things. Sure beats hunting.” Then, when the next human tried to shoo it away, the coyote got to thinking, “Hey, what’s YOUR problem? The other two-legged things didn’t act that way. Groowwwllll …”

OK, coyotes probably don’t think that way. I don’t know. I never asked one.

And I’ll never feed one either.

Neither should you.

You can go to the WDFW information for more information on living with coyotes.

– Scott Sandsberry

A rock for the ages …

YAKIMA, Wash. — I was just sent a link to a Department of Transportation photo series that blew my mind, so I thought I’d pass it along. You may have read about the closure of Highway 2 in Tumwater Canyon west of Leavenworth on Friday, when a large rock tumbled onto the highway and blocked traffic.

Large? That word doesn’t begin to describe this beast, which was big enough to block both lanes — 15 feet wide, 15 feet high and 25 feet long. It wasn’t until Sunday the DOT was able to remove it, because it was too gargantuan to haul off. The DOT engineers had to do it in pieces

That’s right: They actually had to drill holes into this enormous rock and blow it up, a bit at a time.  They actually used 245 pounds of explosives to get the pieces small enough to remove, and here’s how much they ultimately hauled away: a total of 12 dump truck loads, roughly 120 cubic yards of rock debris. If you’ve ever had one cubic yard of gravel or dirt dropped into the bed of your pickup truck and had to shovel that mass into some landscaping job in your back yard, you know how big one cubic yard is.

Now, 120 cubic yards of rock … that’s hard to fathom.

Gotta hand it to those DOT folks for only having to close that road (and reroute traffic back to Leavenworth and through the town of Plain back to Highway 2) for 44 1/2 hours. Could have been a lot worse.

And thank goodness no one happened to be right there when that rock came crashing down.
That thought makes me recall an early-’70s animated film, “Bambi Meets Godzilla.”

Not a pretty thought.

– Scott Sandsberry

 

Elk feeding? Check out the bighorns

YAKIMA, Wash. — The unseasonably warm weather and the unusually persistent rain has resulted in a mild winter for the Yakima elk herds, leaving hundreds of the animals still able to forage in some areas of the the high country when they might otherwise be congregating at the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s six Yakima-area elk-feeding sites.

“Right now we’re probably feeding about 2,500 elk at all our feed sites, and we’re usually up around the 4,000 mark,” said Bruce Berry, the assistant manager of the Oak Creek Wildlife Area (and the area’s de facto acting manager since the retirement of longtime manager John McGowan).

The main feed site at the Oak Creek headquarters just off Highway 12, where the daily early-afternoon feedings typically attract dozens of onlookers anxious to see the big animals up close, has been averaging about 750 elk during the feedings. That’s barely more than half the number that would be expected in a more-normal snowpack year.

On the other hand, the bighorn sheep have been showing up in big numbers at the often-overlooked feed site on the northeast side of the “Y” of Highway 12 and State Route 410. More than 150 have been lingering near the site for several weeks, typically within easy viewing from the parking lot.

“The bighorns’ winter range is a lot smaller than the elk,” Berry explained. “The Cleman herd is pretty restricted to a small area. They don’t really like to go over the top of Cleman because of the timber on the other side; they don’t really do the cover thing. (Open hillside) is kind of a defense mechanism for them. They can see what predators might be coming in and get on a steep rock face to get away from anything.”

– Scott Sandsberry

Suit filed over Whisky Dick grazing

YAKIMA, Wash. — And the beat goes on.

Every time the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife announces its intention to graze the Whisky Dick and Quilomene state wildlife areas, or comes out with another analysis justifying the project, a Idaho-based conservation outfit called Western Watersheds Project takes them to court.

On Tuesday, Western Watersheds did it again, filing a complaint in Thurston County Superior Court to challenge the state’s recently-released Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on commercial livestock grazing in those two wildlife areas in eastern Kittitas County.

Among other things, the suit seeks a reversal of the state’s action and asks the court to determine “that WDFW acted unlawfully” in approving the FEIS, asks for a ruling that would prohibit “WDFW from allowing an increase in acres grazed on its lands pursuant to that FEIS.”

Even before the suit, the WDFW’s hopes to graze the wildlife lands as part of its role in the Wild Horse Coordinated Resource Management (CRM) Plan was considered a long shot because of a lack of funding. There’s no money currently budgeted to facilitate the grazing.

– Scott Sandsberry

Skamania Winterfest postponed

YAKIMA, Wash. –  There’s just not enough winter for a Winterfest.

Winterfest 2010, which Skamania County Facilities and Recreation had been planning for weeks to hold this Saturday at Oldman Pass Sno-Park, is being postponed until Saturday, Feb. 13. The reason? After weeks of warm temperatures and rain, there simply isn’t enough snow at the Sno-Park to do the activities the organizers had planned — snowman-building contests, snowshoeing, snow-cave building and snow safety demonstrations, snow skating … basically, lots of activities with the word “snow” in them.

Meaning you gotta have snow.

So erase that from your calendar and put it — in pencil — for 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Feb. 13, still at Oldman Pass, and then hope for more snow.

– Scott Sandsberry

 

Rescue efforts touch rescuers, too

YAKIMA, Wash. — After years as a recreational climber, I tend to follow search-and-rescue efforts with great interest, partly in a there-by-the-grace-of-God-go-I realization and partly because, well, those are people out there who are missing.

And, lest we forget, people out there searching.

Last month’s ultimately unsuccessful search for the three climbers who had gone missing on Mount Hood took an emotional toll not just on the family members of the missing individuals but also on the search-and-rescue volunteers who willingly put their own safety at risk every time they get the call. Search operations such as this happen so frequently that it’s easy for us to overlook the humanity of the people involved, and the extent to which the searchers themselves become personally involved.

The following was written by Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts. Just as I admire anyone who takes the step to become involved in search-and-rescue, I admire Roberts for sharing his thoughts on that S&R effort , and for putting his emotions out there in print for the rest of us to see.

Making the decision to suspend a search and rescue mission is among the most difficult that I am required to make as Clackamas County Sheriff.

Unfortunately, that was how our rescue efforts for Katie Nolan and Anthony Vietti ended on December 16. The mission received national media attention, so you might think that by now everybody knows everything that happened up on the mountain but I want to tell you about some of the things you didn’t see on television.

On the last day of the search, it was clear that all of the elements had turned against us. The avalanche danger was so severe that even stable slopes had started to slide, making it impossible for climbers to head up the mountain. Also, a storm system had covered the mountain with clouds, posing a serious challenge to the Army National Guard helicopters that were helping us search from the air.

In spite of that, a helicopter took off from Salem that morning and flew north. They didn’t show this on TV, because there was nothing to see, but all of us on the ground heard the sound of its rotors as it circled overhead, hoping for a break in the clouds over Timberline Lodge. On the ground, a pair of pararescue jumpers from the 304th Rescue Squadron waited in their orange parkas for their chance to climb on board and take one last look for the missing climbers.

One of their commanders described the plan to me: the helicopter would fly towards the mountain between cloud layers, fighting 60-mile-an-hour winds. If they spotted something, one of the rescuers would be lowered using a winch. Then, the helicopter would deliberately rock from side to side, swinging the man on the end of the line like a pendulum so that he could try to hook the side of the mountain with his ice axe.

He looked me in the eye and told me that they would do all of this, even though the best medical advice we were getting was that there was less than a one percent chance that Katie and Anthony were still alive.

That’s just one example of the enormous courage and dedication I saw on the side of that mountain. The members of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office who coordinated the search worked for days on end and refused to be relieved. They wanted to finish what they had started, for the missing climbers and for their families.

Likely one of the greatest acts of bravery during the entire rescue effort was made by Katie and Anthony’s climbing companion, Luke Gullberg. Although we do not yet understand exactly what happened, it’s likely that Luke set out to get help after there was an accident high On the mountain. Apparently, he left most of his own gear behind with his friends to increase their chances for survival — then succumbed to exhaustion and hypothermia during the descent.

Luke’s body was recovered early in the search by volunteers, who took time off from work and away from loved ones to climb the mountain — putting their own lives at risk to rescue people they had never met. It isn’t widely recognized, but unpaid volunteers account for most search and rescue efforts in Oregon. Of the 107,000 hours spent performing search and rescue missions in 2008, 85 percent were provided by volunteers.

More than anything else I personally witnessed during the mission, I was affected the patience, the gratitude and the enduring faith of the missing climbers’ families. From the start, they were worried about the safety of the searchers on the mountain, and their concerns only grew as conditions got worse. Yet, when Katie’s mother, Darla, hugged me, she whispered how grateful she was that I had made that one last attempt.

I was almost overcome by emotion myself, knowing that it was increasingly unlikely that we would find them alive — but in a strange way, her hug and support gave me the strength to face the family later with the sad news that the rescue effort was over.

This tragedy has changed the lives of the climbers’ families forever. Their time on the mountain — hoping to see their son, or their daughter, or their brother, or their sister or their cousin climb out of a helicopter — will always be a vivid memory for them.

Like their families, the members of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office and everyone else who fought to save Luke, Katie and Anthony, will always remember them. By the time I stepped up to the microphones to announce that the rescue phase of the search had ended, I felt like part of their family, and so did everyone else. That takes a personal toll on all of us. Over the course of a career, these experiences have lasting emotional impacts.

Knowing this, we take care of ourselves and we take care of each other. We have to, because there are more people out there who need our help, and more families waiting anxiously for news about a missing loved one.

Each year, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office conducts an average of 120 search and rescue missions — that means we launch one every two or three days. Most will never get the kind of attention that this one received from the public and the media, but they are all just as important to me.

If your mother has Alzheimer’s disease and she wanders away from home, Or your brother gets lost while he’s out hunting, or your child is missing, you will want me to deploy every resource available to find them — and I will. It doesn’t matter whether or not anybody ever sees it on television or reads about it in the newspapers, we do it because we care.

Craig Roberts

Clackamas County Sheriff

Chances are you’re acquainted with somebody involved in search-and-rescue. Knowing that one day that somebody may be out looking for someone you love, or even for you, feel free to give them a little gratitude. A simple “Thanks for what you do.”

Because just as these gallant individuals get to share in the joy when they are successful, they also share in the sorrow when they aren’t. And either way, they’ll be ready to answer the call the next time.

– Scott Sandsberry

Hunter-ed classes coming up

YAKIMA, Wash. — A pair of hunter education classes will be held in February and March at the Wakuwa Archers clubhouse in Selah.

The first class will have sessions on Sept. 6, 9, 11 and 13, with the second running March 13, 16, 18 and 20. Students in each class must attend all four sessions, and must register in advance by calling Lance at 965-0691. Class size for each series is limited to 30 students, and the classes tend to fill up quickly.

All new hunters must pass a state-sanctioned hunter-education class before purchasing a hunting license.

– Scott Sandsberry

Follow outdoors news on Twitter

YAKIMA, Wash. — Now you can get your fix of outdoors news as soon as it’s posted by following us on Twitter.

Head over to twitter.com/yhroutdoors, sign up for Twitter and click follow. All of our headlines, including Scott Sandsberry’s blog posts and Rob Phillips’ columns are automatically updated as soon as they are posted.

No matter where you are, keep in touch with the Yakima Herald-Republic outdoors section.

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