We just this morning launched our revamped web site and brought Critterthink over to the new site. We’ve held off on posting for a while during the transition but we’ll be back in action this week. We have really enjoyed being here at WordPress and have only good things to say about them.
Please visit us at the new site.
Music isn't our forte at Critterthink but this one is too good to pass up. From an AP story in Forbes:
The Dixie Chicks appear to be more popular than the president these days. President Bush's approval rating has plummeted, but the Chicks are on top of the pop and country charts with their first album since publicly criticizing Bush three years ago.
At least a few times each year, we get phone calls here at the office from people looking for a humane way to relocate prairie dogs from a site that is about to be developed, or a site where they are otherwise going to be removed by poisoning or shooting. Our friends at the Prairie Dog Coalition maintain a very useful list of prairie dog relocators, and we usually direct callers there. The list is organized by state (AZ, CO, KS, NM, MT, ND/SD, NE, TX, WY, UT) and only includes relocators known to practice "humane, live, wild-to-wild relocations."
Jon Marvel of Western Watersheds Project has an eloquent quote in the Eugene Register Guard about the continuing demise of this species endemic to north-central Washington:
"This is a population that has existed since before the last Ice Age in Eastern Washington. The loss is something we can never calculate," said Jon Marvel, executive director of the Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project, which works to protect pygmy rabbit populations across the West. "Any time we lose a species it diminishes us all."
Biologists are continuing their captive breeding efforts by crossbreeding the two surviving females with another subspecies, the Idaho pygmy rabbit.
Center for Native Ecosystems is part of a coalition working to save the entire pygmy rabbit species, which used to inhabit huge portions of the Sagebrush Sea across Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
It’s earth day, friends. We might have spent our time here on the blog talking about oil hitting $75/barrel (as Environmental Action reports).
We might have discussed the Wall Street Journal’s celebration of a job well done (Earth Day Mission: Accomplished).
Instead, we send you to the good folks at Daily Kos for their ever insightful and interesting reflections on Earth Day 2006.
Among the oddities of election year politics is that Congress, for the most part, stops passing legislation when they get close enough to election day that they are worried about what affect their votes might have. We are now in mid-April without a bill in the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee (that would presumably be a companion bill to the Pombo bill passed by the House last fall) and with no motion on the Crapo bill sitting in the Finance Committee, and everyweek that goes by without movement on a "gut the Endangered Species Act" bill in the Senate, then, is one week closer to mid-term elections. For that reason, it's both a small victory in its own right and another step toward prevailing in our campaign to defend the Act. Not only does the political will to move legislation diminish with every passing week, the Senate calendar gets more and more jammed up with top Republican priorities (which do not include the Act).
For all of these reasons, the Associated Press is now reporting on the "dwindling prospects of Senate action." We aren't in the clear yet, of course, but things are looking better every day.
In case you don't know, Senator Lincoln Chafee - the Republican Senator from Rhode Island - is one of the Senate's great conservation champions. On the Endangered Species Act, for example, where a party line vote in the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee might well mean the end of the Act as we know it, Senator Chafee has so far stood with the Democrats in refusing to support a damaging bill. For his deep commitment to a conservation ethic shared by Republican icon Teddy Roosevelt he has earned the enmity of his party and a challenger in the Republican primary.
If you didn't hear National Public Radio’s Living on Earth interview yesterday you can listen to it or read the transcript on Living on Earth web site.
Our mission, simply put, is to save endangered species across Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. We play an "urgent care" role for the imperiled plants and wildlife most at risk of extinction, buying some time to figure out the long term solutions. We also work hard to recover these species, restoring them and their habitats to health. And we blog because doing so gives us a great way of keeping folks a little more plugged in to what's happening in the world of endangered species advocacy, offering some insight into what we do and how we do it, and fostering conversation among our supporters, our staff, and others.
