Daily Score Blog

In early 2008, state wildlife officials confirmed the presence of a younger female wolf in northeastern Oregon near the Eagle Cap Wilderness. A radio-tracking collar she'd been wearing since 2006 confirmed that she had migrated from a pack near Boise, Idaho. (She's pictured in the photo above -- an aerial shot taken by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. You can see a video of her here.)

Apparently, she's been doing well for herself in Oregon. Last week, ODFW captured excellent video footage of her in the rugged Imnaha region in the northeast corner of the state. She's now the alpha wolf in an unusually large pack of 10 animals, including what appears to be a large number of pups.

The return of wolves to Oregon seems to be happening at the same pace as their return to Washington, where wolves have now been confirmed in at least two separate locations.

Stormwater -- the rainwater that streams off roofs, parking lots, roads, and yards, carrying with it toxic pollutants -- poses a costly, intractable problem for governments and businesses. In Washington, efforts to control stormwater have cost its cities hundreds of millions of dollars.

The problem with stormwater comes from its massive volume, which floods homes and blasts through streams, flushing salmon eggs, gravel, and everything else out to sea. And it comes from the pollutants that are picked up by the torrents of rain along the way, including copper, oil and grease, and pesticides.

Stormwater presents a daunting challenge considering the Northwest's rapid pace of development, and the fact that residential areas have three-times the rate of runoff compared to forests and fields (see page 12). Polluted stormwater kills salmon returning to urban streams to spawn before they can lay their eggs. It forces the closure of acres of shellfish beds made unsafe for human consumption. The rush of water causes erosion and fills basements with muddy water.

The good news is we already know some of the best, cheapest solutions for controlling runoff. The bad news is the solutions aren't being widely used. 

Surely one of the most encouraging conservation stories in recent years has been the phenomenal revival of wild wolves in the Rockies. Less well-known is that wolves are also returning to Oregon and Washington. Their future on the West Coast, however, remains highly uncertain. 

While Oregon and Washington are more politically progressive than the wolf strongholds in the Rockies -- Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming -- the truth is that there is not much reason to be optimistic for their prospects without good conservation policy. Toward that end, Oregon already has a wolf management plan in place, but Washington is just now drafting its own state plan.

Washington is considering four policy options for managing wolves. Somewhat bizarrely, the future of this endangered species -- which you might think would depend largely on science -- in fact depends greatly on public opinion. So if you're part of the public and you have an opinion, it might be a good to share your thoughts with your public officials.

Here are the remaining hearings:

Mon, Nov. 2, Seattle: REI flagship store, 222 Yale Ave N

Wed, Nov. 4, Mt. Vernon: 2300 Market St., Cottontree Inn Convention Center

Thu, Nov. 5, Sequim: 212 Blake Ave., Guy Cole Conv. Ctr., Carrie Blake Park

Mon, Nov. 9, Omak: 175 Rodeo Trail Road, Okanogan Co. Fairgrounds Agri-plex

Tue, Nov. 10, Wenatchee: 327 N. Wenatchee Ave., Chelan Co. PUD Auditorium

All hearings 6:30-9:00 p.m.

For background reading, here's Washington's draft wolf management plan; some excellent context from Conservation Northwest; and a first-rate website called Western Wolves. And if that's not enough, you can go read everything I've written about wolves in Washington. Have fun.

Photo by Gary Kramer, USFWS.

As a proxy for broader ecological health in the Northwest, Sightline monitors the populations of five wildlife species. Among the species included in the Cascadia Scorecard, we track the population of Chinook salmon returning in the Columbia River, specifically measured by the number of fish that pass the Bonneville Dam during the spring and summer runs. In 2009, more than 300,000 Chinook passed the dam, 146 miles upstream from the river's mouth on the Pacific Ocean.

It was a strong showing for the fish: a 29 percent increase over the previous year and the second consecutive year of increasing numbers. Yet annual population fluctuations send murky messages about the health of the fish. Chinook counts in the spring and summer months vary by about 40 percent a year, mostly due to natural population dynamics. Only long-term monitoring can reveal meaningful trends in the population. And last year's fish count, while good by the standards of the past 25 years, is still a very poor showing in historical terms: less than 11 percent of their estimated abundance in the 19th century.

The true story is even bleaker: wild salmon probably return at less than 3 percent of their former numbers. The rest of the returning salmon are hatchery-raised fish, whose numbers are far less meaningful as signals of the region's ecological health.

Chinook salmon are an important indicator because these fish inhabit the region’s ecosystems to an extent that few creatures other than humans do:  their well-being is dependent on the natural integrity of the forests, deserts, cities, and farms of the Northwest. The largest hydrological system on the West Coast of the Americas, the Columbia River and its tributaries stretch deep in British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. So the health of the river’s signature fish, the spring and summer Chinook, tell us something about how extensively northwesterners have altered the native landscapes of the region.

Restoration of the Columbia Chinook has proceeded haltingly in recent years and many salmon advocates have been disappointed by the Obama administrations efforts to date. In particular, some worry that the federal government is not seriously considering breaching the four dams on the Lower Snake River, which are obstacle to critical upstream habitat. Complicating matters, reducing the Northwest’s greenhouse gas emissions, especially phasing out coal power, may intensify the demand for hydropower production from dams. Yet some recent research suggests that the Puget Sound orcas (which were recently listed as a federal endangered species) rely on Chinook salmon as a dietary staple, underscoring their central place in the Northwest’s ecological web.

Update 10/16/09: I've made a few corrections thanks to the sharp eyes of a reader.

Editor's note: Want to experience Seattle's parks for yourself? Sign up for our daily or weekly emails before October 28, 2009 and be entered to win a two-night trip for two to Seattle. Sign up here.

It's only fitting that the Emerald City should be home to more than 400 parks. And that doesn't even count the nearly 150 "pocket parks" that are tucked into street ends, often giving a glimpse of the city's lakes or the Puget Sound. 

Seattle has parks and green spaces for all tastes. Moms with strollers seem magnetically drawn to the paved trail ringing Green Lake for its easy walk and great views. Parks including Seward and Discovery have miles of forested trails and some super tall trees that provide a verdant escape from the traffic and bustle of the city. Or check out the rainbow-hued rose garden at Woodland Park. Not only is it one of a handful of the American Rose Test Gardens (which basically means they try to grow fancy new varieties), but the whole place recently went pesticide free.   

Other favorites:

With loaded claims coming from both sides of the reintroduction debate, it was nice to see some good, science-based reporting from the Billings Gazette this morning (more coverage of the study here). A study by Montana State University takes a look at the wolf-elk relationship that’s developed in the Greater Yellowstone area, where wolves were successfully reintroduced in the mid-90s.

After reintroduction, elk populations dropped from around 18,000 to around 6,500. This year, the numbers are slightly over 7,000. Various explanations were given, from drought to over-hunting, but wolf predation on calves was seen as the most likely cause. However, the new study says scat evidence and radio-collar tracking shows relatively few elk calves have been killed by wolves.

The real culprit?

Puget Sound is in the big leagues with the EPA approving the state's "Action Agenda" for recovering Washington's inland sea. The approval "signifies the agency’s full commitment to helping carry out the Agenda to protect and restore Puget Sound," stated an agency press release from Wednesday.

With the EPA's blessing, the effort could get up to $20 million this year in federal funding for work to restore the Sound to health.

The 204-page Action Agenda, which was released in December by the state's Puget Sound Partnership and Gov. Chris Gregoire, is a "blueprint for recovery." It includes:

• Fixing and improving sewage and septic systems
• Increasing the use of development techniques that capture rainwater on site so that it doesn't flow as polluted runoff into the Sound
• Shoreline restoration work
  

This isn't the only pot of money coming to the Sound. The Northwest Straits Commission, a nonprofit working on Puget Sound projects, is getting $4.6 million of federal stimulus money to remove lost fishing nets that drown thousands of birds, fish, and marine mammals each year.

The money was awarded in June by the NOAA Fisheries Service to the Northwest Straits Marine Conservation Foundation. The commission's director, Ginny Broadhurst, said the 18 months of support could result in the removal of 90 percent of the abandoned nets in the Sound.

Steeple photo courtesy of Flickr user joiseyshowaa under the Creative Commons license.

Who ought to be better at raising endangered Oregon spotted frogs in captivity? Zookeepers or felons?

Since the project started, only eight of their frogs have died — a figure significantly lower than at Woodland Park Zoo, the Oregon Zoo and Northwest Trek, which are also part of the project to rear the Oregon spotted frog in captivity.

Marc P. Hayes, the Department of Fish and Wildlife senior research scientist leading the effort, said that he had doubted the success of the project behind bars. But his concerns vanished after he saw how much time Greer and Delp could devote to the project.

"They have the time to address care on a level that is not possible with those other institutions," Hayes said. "They baby those things literally night and day.

It turns out that people with little else to do all day than lavish attention on their tadpoles -- changing water every two hours and slipping their charges an extra cricket or two -- raise very happy frogs. And it beats handing out basketballs at the prison gym.

As one might expect from a prison near the Evergreen State College, the Cedar Creek Corrections Center also keeps inmates busy with organic gardening and beekeeping. And as a recent KUOW story points out, other institutions in WA's Sustainable Prisons Project are teaching meth manufacturers to grow native plants and drug dealers to raise composting worms.

It's that much more proof that no stone should go unturned to find easy, low-cost sustainability measures -- and that the benefits far outstretch our conventional understanding of "going green." It means jobs, rehabilitation, stronger communities, economic development. And, if they're as successful as the frog project, maybe we should all worry about keeping our day jobs.

One in which geothermal energy is heating greenhouses that help produce a pesticide-free application for strawberry patches, almond orchards and mint fields. The same hot water helps brew beer, raise tropical fish, melt snow off downtown sidewalks and sell homes in Klamath Falls' Hot Springs neighborhood. And renewable energy is just one plank of a plan to help right the rural area's economy by focusing on more sustainable business lines.

I don't know what Kool-Aid the region's newsrooms were serving this weekend, because it was one of several stories that reexamined iconic Northwest conflicts -- the timber wars and salmon recovery -- and found pretty constructive solutions.

That's not to suggest there hasn't been plenty of real fight to write about. And I'm no fan of self-serving "good news" stories pitched to make someone look good or mask actual problems. But as a journalist, it's also possible to get so bored with old narratives that you fail to see how the world has moved beyond them in interesting ways.

The Oregonian story isn't exactly a good news story anyway. It's about a place where unemployment hit 15 percent. Sure, there's a little positive spin about the "Sustainable Klamath" brand. But the story manages to offer a real - and surprising - portrait of a community that's thinking about its future and making investments so history doesn't repeat itself.

Check out the rest of the Northwest's top 10 sustainability headlines at Sightline Daily, or get the news delivered via email each morning by clicking here. All of today's news can be found here.

As part of the Cascadia Scorecard’s wildlife indicator, Sightline monitors the populations of five Northwest species as a proxy for broader ecological health. We track the population of greater sage-grouse in Oregon, which can tell us something about the integrity of the region’s sagebrush country. Unfortunately, recent population trends are troubling: biologists believe there are now as few sage-grouse in Oregon as at any time since they have been studied.

With the Northwest’s abundant iconic scenery, it is easy to ignore the vast swath of interior desert of southern Idaho, eastern Oregon and southeastern Washington. That's unfortunate because the “shrub steppe” ecosystem -- it’s not technically a desert -- is home to an astonishing array of wildlife, some of which inhabit no place else on earth but the arid Northwest. In fact, the region is home to curiosities like pygmy rabbits and giant earthworms, but also a full suite of more “charismatic” critters like elk, owls, porcupines, cougars, and of course, the sage-grouse.

Perhaps no single species speaks for the health of sagebrush country as well as the greater sage-grouse, a bird that is best known for its ostentatious breeding displays. (Check out this video to see what I mean.) The birds can serve as a rough indicator of the health of their ecosystem because nearly every form of human activity in sage country affects their populations. Fencing, towers, and transmission lines give their predators the advantage. Resource extraction, such as mining and drilling, stress the grouse and render land unsuitable for mating and breeding. Farmlands and sagebrush eradication destroy their habitat conspicuously, while livestock grazing and off-road vehicles accomplish the same end more subtly. Invasive species, especially cheat grass, render their landscapes more vulnerable to fire even while simplifying the native plant communities, making food more scarce. And long-term mismanagement of the land can turn even native species, like juniper, into a threat.

Sage-grouse are now under consideration for listing as a federal endangered species in the United States. (A decision is expected by summer of 2009.) And if the future of sage-grouse is in doubt, then it is probable that the integrity of the large sagebrush ecosystem is also severely weakened, boding ill for a number of plants and animals.  

But the real story -- often buried below headlines like "Eco-Wars" -- is how these two camps of environmentalists are already working together to reconcile the critical need (and indeed the opportunity) to transition to clean energy to combat global climate change with the need to stick to their guns when it comes to environmental protection and sensitivity to critical habitats.

In fact, just yesterday The Oregon Natural Desert Association released a mapping project that determines optimal sites for responsible wind development in the Oregon desert. They worked with Audubon Society of Portland, Defenders of Wildlife, Hells Canyon Preservation Council, Oregon Sierra Club, and WildEarth Guardians to put it together.

We'll likely see more and more of this kind of cooperation. As Johanna Wald, a senior lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council put it in the Washington Post, "There is no free lunch when it comes to meeting our energy needs," She added, however, that the renewables boom "offers a chance to do it right."

"We want to do it differently compared to how we did oil and gas development."

A new comprehensive report -- Retention of High-Valued Forest Lands at Risk of Conversion to Non-Forest Uses in Washington State -- makes a good contribution to land use policy. Not only does it provide a detailed analysis of the causal factors behind forest clearing, but it includes some interesting maps of forestlands that are at especially high risk.

Best of all, the report offers a range of real solutions:

This report examines other states' efforts and proposes that a successful state strategy to support the future of working forests must improve the value of both the timber resource and non-timber resources, such as carbon and biodiversity, and prevent forest fragmentation.

The report proposes a "supply curve" under which landowners would accept compensation to combine working forest retention and ecosystem service-enhancing forest management. To respond, public or conservation organizations must specify the terms of a "demand curve" to meet the supply in order to capture the public values that are otherwise lost with forest conversion. Such a commitment by the State of Washington will also afford public forestlands' ability to provide more protection of critical resources.

To the extent that we'd like to preserve local forests -- which strongly affect the health of Puget Sound -- we should pay close attention to what's going on, and what's gone wrong so far. If not, we could be looking at a future Evergreen State that's less green than it ought to be.

So I was really excited this week to tune into PBS to watch Frontline, a standout of investigative journalism, as it delved into what's ailing Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay in a special called "Poisoned Waters." All right! Nationally acclaimed, heavy hitting reporting brought to bear on our own Sound.

A recent Crosscut post by Knute Berger has people fretting over the possible impact of their cat on the planet. Berger suggests that getting rid of your cat might be the solution. But a closer look at Mossback’s logic reveals a bias against density.

Berger’s criticisms make a big (and probably mistaken) assumption about the cat population: that they are all roaming around chasing birds and burying their poop in the yard of single family homes. That’s not the whole story. Many cats live in apartments and condominiums where their ecological effects are likely negligible. If Garfield stays indoors, as happens for nearly every condo or apartment-dwelling feline, birds will stay perfectly safe. Plus, by building dense communities, we spare the habitat of wild birds on the urban fringe.

And as for the cat poop that Mossback worries about, there’s no yard to bury it in.  Owners can just flush it. That way it gets treated and processed like our own excrement.  It just means a little extra scooping now and then.

As Berger’s mistaken cat criticism shows, urban living can do a lot of good. It lightens our ecological footprints (and pawprints). It’s easier and healthier for us, as well as for our pets (indoor cats live longer and have healthier lives).

Update 4/13/2008 As Cat Lover points out in the comments below there is an ongoing debate about what to do with animal excrement including output from cats .  But locally anyway Seattle Public Utilities does recommend flushing pet excrement as preferable to other options because their treatment accounts for pet waste.