Marty Durlin

Online Editor

‘Tis Spring, and that means the owl babies are hatching. Great horned owls nest early, usually in January or February, and both male and female tend the 2-3 white eggs, which incubate for about a month. Great horned owls use other birds’ nests, generally those built by hawks, herons or crows, but they also nest in alcoves, tree hollows, abandoned buildings or even on the ground. The babies fledge from the nest at 45-55 days old.

Adult great horned owls weigh 3-4 pounds, standing as high as two feet tall with a wingspan of more than a yard. The owls’ diet consists of pretty much anything they can get their talons into, including prairie dogs, rabbits, squirrels, mice, weasels, skunks, snakes, cats, bats, beetles, scorpions, frogs, grasshoppers and other birds. They upchuck pellets of the indigestible stuff — fur, feathers, exoskeletons and bones — several hours after they’ve eaten, often at a favorite roost. Both parents feed the young.

Check out the live owl cam at Boulder’s NCAR, where “Maude” and “Harold” have a brood of two. Whooo.

Evelyn Schlatter

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign recently announced it was hiring a liaison either in or around Delta County to “get out the vote” in this “under-repped” and “under-served” part of Colorado.

“Dang right we want to tap every vote we possibly can on the West-Side Slope,” said Noah Waye, a spokesman for the Obama campaign. “We want to demonstrate that our guy is familiar with issues important to Colorado and Western voters and that’s why we’re looking for a super-rep to take the reins and lead us out of the corral.”

(Read on …)

Francisco Tharp

When I was a kid, Saint Patrick’s Day meant searching out and pinching the green-less, followed by going to the local Catholic school with my parents to eat corned beef and cabbage. Throughout college I found new false idols: a shot of whiskey and Bailey’s dropped into a Guinness, cheap green Budweiser, and glittery “Kiss Me” shamrocks.

Yesterday, however, I did little more to celebrate the Americanized holiday than wear a green plaid shirt to work (for fear of being pinched), and say things like “Ay, luck o’ th’ Irish to ye’!” (and I probably sounded more like a Hollywood pirate than an Irishman). But throughout the day I did get to wondering–myths and false idols aside–what’s Irish about the West?

Many of the West’s mining towns–like Leadville, Colorado, for example–have a rich Irish heritage as copper miners from Ireland’s County Cork crossed the Atlantic looking for places where a working class could put down roots. But Butte, Montana, a place some call “Ireland’s fifth province” or “The Ireland of the West,” probably saw the greatest number of Irish immigrants west of the Mississippi. The gold, silver and copper mines that have culminated in the nation’s burliest superfund site attracted Irish settlers by the thousands. Yesterday, folks in Butte went all out at their annual Saint Patty’s Day parade (click the Montana Standard’s video link for footage).

(Read on …)

Francisco Tharp

Neon pink bubble letters. Rainbow-colored text. Flaming buzz words. Awkwardly placed parenthetical phrases. A hits ticker numbering in the mere thousands. And it all adds up to one long, raving block of righteously amassed “evidence.”

Most of us who hang ten online on a regular basis have stumbled across it at some point: that’s right, I’m talking about the conspiracy theory website.

So when I happened upon “AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?” a website claiming to prove that John McCain is guilty of “brutal genocide” of the Navajo people of the Black Mesa area, the attention-deficit format made me immediately suspicious.

The site, maintained by the Canaanite Independent Political Committee (sorry, no website that I could find) said,

John McCain (a/k/a “Saddam McCain”) introduced and arranged for the enforcement of unethical and Constitutionally unlawful legislations which brutally displaced thousands of Navajo farmers onto a Nuclear Waste Dump to live after brutalizing them for two decades in peaceful resistance…Using a phony tribal counsel composed of paid stooges, McCain and Peabody Western Coal Company have been progressively stealing and exploiting their lands for mutual personal gain, brutalizing the natives to leave, bulldozing their sacred sites and sweat lodges, beating their members and abusing their elders to the point of terrorizing them and causing health failure and heart failures.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This is pretty funny as well as interesting.

Someone stole a bronze statue from a park in Los Angeles, apparently intending to melt the art into raw metal, to sell it to China or somesuch.

The LA Times has a series of stories about the caper and its broad context, in order, here in depth and here with a photo of the statue.

Among the revelations:

Nationwide, bronze, brass and copper artworks are vanishing into scrap yards, destined for the foundry furnace.

The theft of public art — as well as the stripping of homes and streetlights of copper wire and plumbing — can be bold. Late last month in Brea, thieves used a cutting torch to remove a 6-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide bronze sculpture from its concrete stand in front of a business. The work, “Faceless Crowd,” had been featured on a tour of the city’s public art. It was the third theft of a statue in Brea in nine months, where fire hydrants, commercial plumbing fittings and trucks’ catalytic converters have also gone missing.

“This has been going on for as long as metal existed,” said Brea police Lt. Jack Conklin. “But only recently has the price of metal gone through the roof.”

… Many thieves in Los Angeles are targeting the wiring used for street lighting. In December, police announced that 370,000 feet of copper wire had been stolen in four months, disabling 700 street lights. The thieves open boxes at the bases of adjacent poles, snip the wire that runs between them and pull it out one end. Police say they often they work in industrial areas at night.

Among the funny angles:

The statue whose disappearance caused these stories portrayed a gold miner. Gold miners are all about turning mountains into raw material. The gold miner statue seemed to be headed toward same fate.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Guess I’ve always wanted to write a headline like that.

Anyway, the Idaho Statesman has a series of wildlife photos that offer relief from the onslaught of usual news. Here’s one of a bird on a deer amid snow … and it’s an entry point into the photo series.

You know the saying that goes: What were they thinking?

Wonder what the magpie and deer were thinking.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

This is really funny and worth a few minutes of online listening.

First the setup:

Gazillionaire Duane Hagadone calls most of the shots in the resort town of Couer d’Alene, Idaho, and the surrounding territory. He owns the skyscraper resort hotel and marina that dominate downtown, and the daily newspaper and other nearby newspapers, mansions, luxury cars etc etc etc. Thus, he pulls a lot of political strings.

Now Hagadone is building a new mansion on the shore of Lake Couer d’Alene. And he wants it equipped with a huge dock, suitable for at least two cruise ships, and a floating helipad, so he can fly in and out easily.

In a rare display of backbone, Idaho’s state lands department, which has authority over the lake’s surface, told Hagadone that he can’t have the helipad and huge dock because they would take up too much of the public’s water. The standard news story is here.

In the Very Unstandard Department, Doug Clark, a columnist for Spokane’s Spokesman-Review, has written a couple of funny columns about it, here and here, and a song, “The Duane B. Hagadone Blues.”

As Clark writes:

There’s only one thing for a fellow to do when faced with the bitter disappointment of not getting a helipad.

Sing the blues.

That’s right. Singing the blues has long been a way for the downtrodden and oppressed super-rich to shake off their petty inconveniences.

(By the way, if you want more background, High Country News had a cover story on Hagadone back in 1996, here.)

Anyway if you do nothing else that’s amusing today, at least do this: To listen to the columnist singing the rich-guy’s blues, click here.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

They’re all the rage, because:

They use less energy. They save you money on your electricity bill. And they kind of save the planet, or at least, they reduce the upward trend of global warming.

So we’re all installing compact fluorescent bulbs in all the light fixtures in our houses.

Turns out, “there’s a catch.”

That’s the warning from the new Santa Barbara-based Miller-McCune think tank:

Low-energy bulbs — also known as compact fluorescent lamps — contain small amounts of mercury. … (And) when you break a bulb with mercury in it, the mercury instantly vaporizes in the air and poses a health risk to people who inhale it. The U.S. National Institutes of Health warns: “Exposures to very small amounts of mercury can result in devastating neurological damage and death.”

One country — the United Kingdom — has begun alerting the public:

So this month, as stores throughout the United Kingdom began pulling traditional tungsten bulbs from their shelves as part of a government mandate to completely replace them by 2011, ministers at the Environment Agency were simultaneously calling for more public education — including warnings printed on bulb labels — about the health and environment risks presented by low-energy lights.

As a sober BBC report put it: “Official advice from the Department of the Environment states that if a low-energy bulb is smashed, the room needs to be vacated for at least 15 minutes. A vacuum cleaner should not be used to clear up the debris, and care should be taken not to inhale the dust. Instead, rubber gloves should be used, and the broken bulb put into a sealed plastic bag, which should be taken to the local council for disposal.”

Sheesh. The Miller-McCune story is here. Is no type of progress completely safe?

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Guess this is inevitable. With a half-million-dollar federal grant, an “educational software developer” now encourages us to pretend to howl at the moon. And run after elk. And, I presume — if it’s really realistic — chew into elk and sire pups.

As Steve Karnowski of the AP reports:

The new video game “WolfQuest” allows players to follow the call of the wild in the role of a wolf in Yellowstone National Park.

Players learn quickly, with help from realistic graphics, that wolves do a lot of running — across plains, through forests and up and down steep slopes.

“You have to learn how to hunt, survive, defend your territory and ultimately find a mate and establish your own pack,” said project director Grant Spickelmier …

The first episode, “Amethyst Mountain,” was officially released Dec. 20 as a free download at www.wolfquest.org …

In the first episode, as a solitary wolf roaming Amethyst Mountain in Yellowstone, players chase down elk and hares, relying on their eyes and sense of smell. When the “scent vision” screen toggles on, the background goes black and white and scent trails light up. The screen also shows how old the trails are.

To howl like a wolf, players just hit the “H” key, which in future episodes will help draw in their pack.

(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

A survey by a coalition of retired federal and state law enforcement professionals reveals that off-road vehicle abuse is rampant across federal lands, and worsening. Rangers for Responsible Recreation received 69 responses from a mailing to 300 BLM and Forest Service rangers and supervisors, and more than 90 percent agreed that “off-road vehicles present a significant law enforcement problem” in their jurisdictions.

One BLM ranger wrote, “User attitudes are atrocious. They are the single biggest destruction on public lands these days, far worse than grazing or energy development.”

Jim Furnish, former deputy chief of the Forest Service, called the ORV situation a “runaway crisis.”

Another BLM ranger wrote that “Ninety percent of ORV users cause resource damage every day they ride. Most will violate a rule, regulation or law daily.”

Sixty-five percent of respondents thought current penalties are not tough enough. Some of the suggestions for stiffer consequences included: “Confiscate vehicles of repeat violators or in cases of blatant destruction of resources. Ban minors from riding on forest unless with a parent or other responsible adult” (USFS); “Move/set fines/ citations to at least $1000” (BLM); and “Revoke public land use to multi-violators” (BLM).

Most respondents agreed that federal agencies “need money, staff and implementation” to ensure better enforcement.

Other concerns included damage to habitat and resources, and safety issues, particularly for children. See an article by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility here, including links to the survey.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The Los Angeles Times begins its update on squatters’ rights:

BOULDER, COLO. — For more than 20 years, a retired judge and his lawyer wife trespassed on a vacant lot next door to their home.

They planted a garden there and stacked their firewood (and) held parties there and walked the land so often they wore a path in the grass.

Last year (they) claimed the land as their own under Colorado’s adverse possession law, once known as squatters’ rights.

In October, a district judge awarded them one-third of the lot, which its owner values at $1 million.

Of course it’s an outrageous story. It also suggests that maybe you shouldn’t live next door to lawyers, and if you do, better keep a close eye on them.

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Two tourists from Michigan were driving Highway 150 in Washington state, when suddenly it happened … and then, the NewsBiz clicked into warp drive, reporting it — via TV, newspapers, websites, you name it — to people as far away as Australia, and the Drudge Report. The original stories are here (with photos) and here.

Pretty funny for everyone — except the cow, which, by the way, was reported to be a “600-pound heifer named Michelle.”

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Not to condemn the whole industry: There are some responsible drillers, and some who insistently behave like toddlers who make messes.