Endangered & Protected Species

 

State Report Finds Population Of Wolves Grew 11% In 2019. According to Associated Press, “The wolf population in Washington state increased by at least 19 animals in 2019, despite multiple lethal removals due to wolf-livestock conflict, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife said Monday. The agency estimated that the wolf population grew to an estimated 145 wolves in 26 packs. That compared to 126 wolves in 27 packs in 2018. Washington’s wolf population was virtually wiped out in the 1930s, but the state documented a resident pack in Okanogan County in 2008. Since then, the number of wolves has increased every year. The state found a minimum of 108 wolves in areas managed by WDFW and 37 wolves reported on the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in 2019. The wolf population grew by 11% in 2019, well below the historical average of more than 20%, the state said. ‘The actual number of wolves in Washington is likely higher,″ the state report said, because this is a minimum count. Most packs range across public and private land in Ferry, Stevens, and Pend Oreille counties in the northeast corner of the state, but increasing numbers are found in southeast Washington and the north-central region.” [Associated Press, 4/20/20 (=)]

 

Wildlife

 

The Sound Of One Shrimp Snapping. According to The New York Times, “Spring in Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, in Northern California, is typically a natural symphony. Streams whoosh, swollen with winter rains, and birds — robins, sparrows, grosbeaks, woodpeckers and hawks — trill and chatter. But in 2011, a yearslong drought set in. By spring 2015, a local creek had dried up and the valley had gone quiet. ‘The park went from an extremely vibrant habitat to one that was dead silent,’ said Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist who has been recording in the park since 1993. ‘Nothing was singing, nothing was chirping, nothing was moving. It’s like it was dead.’ In the coming years, severe droughts are likely to become more common; as the water dries up, bird song could disappear along with it. It is just one example of how climate change may be altering the planet’s soundscapes, or ‘breaking Earth’s beat,’ as Dr. Krause and his colleagues put it in a paper last year. Dr. Krause, who has amassed more than 5,000 hours of natural recordings for his company, Wild Sanctuary, wrote the paper with Jérôme Sueur, an ecoacoustician at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Almo Farina, an ecologist at the University of Urbino in Italy. Climate change will silence some species and nudge others into new habits and habitats, changing when and where they sing, squeak, whistle, bellow or bleat. (In New York, several species of frogs now begin croaking nearly two weeks earlier in the spring than they did a century ago.) It will also alter the sounds that animals produce, as well as how such vocalizations travel.” [The New York Times, 4/21/20 (+)]

 

 

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