Daily Archives: March 12, 2019

Whether it’s the full hide of a fallen bear, an empty tortoise shell, antlers shed onto the forest floor or a found eagle feather, wildlife binds Arizona’s Native American tribes to the world around them. In recognition of that rich cultural history, the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AZGFD) formalized a repository program that allows wildlife managers and staff to collect, inventory and properly store items found in the field that can be donated to and used by the state’s tribes. “Wildlife plays a critical role in Native American culture and the Arizona Game and Fish Department is pleased to honor these multi-generational traditions by forming the Non-Bird Wildlife Repository,” said Jim deVos, AZGFD assistant director for wildlife management. “This program allows the department to honor our state’s Native American traditions and further the appreciation for Arizona’s wildlife.”

Gary Blanchard

Gary Blanchard could have retired a long time ago. But he’s still on the job at Starker Forests, providing a living link between the company’s past and its future.Blanchard went to work part-time for Starker as a 19-year-old in 1958. Three years later, after earning his degree in forest management at Oregon State University, he became the Philomath timber company’s first full-time employee — and he’s been working there ever since.Now 80, he still goes into the office pretty much every day, although he hasn’t been a full-time employee since 2007. “I really didn’t want to retire, and they didn’t want me to retire, so we came up with a half-time arrangement,” Blanchard said. Founded by OSU forestry professor T. J. Starker in 1936, Starker Forests now holds more than 87,000 acres of timberland in five Western Oregon counties, and Blanchard has lived through much of the company’s history.

Fire-scarred forests like the Sapphire Range of the Bitterroot Valley may become grasslands because the growing seasons have become too hot and dry, according to new research from the University of Montana. “The drier aspects aren’t coming back, especially on north-facing slopes,” said Kim Davis, a UM landscape ecologist and lead investigator on the study. “It’s not soil sterilization. Other vegetation like grasses are re-sprouting. It’s too warm. There’s not enough moisture for the trees.” Davis worked with landscape ecologist Solomon Dobrowski, fire paleoecologist Philip Higuera, biologist Anna Sala and geoscientist Marco Maneta at UM along with colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service and University of Colorado-Boulder to produce the study, which was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. “What’s striking is if you asked scientists two decades ago how climate warming would play out, this is what they expected we’d see,” Higuera said. 

A Bozeman Democrat wants Montana to offer a logging deferral alongside every timber sale it puts out, an idea that drew a cavalcade of opponents during a legislative hearing on Monday.House Bill 627, sponsored by Rep. Jim Hamilton, would force the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation to accept bids for timber conservation licenses on each logging project it proposes. It would also require DNRC to set separate minimum bids for logging and for a logging deferral, meaning the people who want each one would bid different amounts. The winning bid would be whichever is a greater percentage increase over the respective minimum bid. The bill would expand an option some Bozeman residents used to prevent logging on 443 acres of state land south of town for the next 25 years.