Outdoor News Daily

OLYMPIA - Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) officers are issuing safety advice while they continue to look for a cougar reported in several west Olympia locations over the past few weeks.

Previous attempts to track the animal with hounds have been unsuccessful and have been discontinued because of the dogs’ inability to pick up a scent in recent dry weather. Officers are not able to set live traps for the animal or use unleashed tracking dogs in the area populated with homes, businesses and arterial streets.

“Setting a trap in an area like this would more likely draw pet dogs and cats than a cougar,” said Mike Cenci, deputy chief of WDFW’s enforcement program. “We’ll keep looking for the animal, but in the meantime, there are safety precautions area residents can take as well.”
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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has sorted through the 13,598 comments it received in response to the agency’s call for public input on potential modifications to its rule that established the Mexican wolf reintroduction project. The Service announced in 2006 it would continue reintroducing wolves into native habitat in New Mexico and Arizona and would modify the rule to address lessons learned over a decade of reintroducing wolves. The Service began reintroducing Mexican wolves as a “nonessential experimental population” in 1998.

In the comments, people tended to either strongly support or strenuously object to reintroducing the wolf into the wild, which is not the issue at hand. The issue is how best to pursue reintroduction, thus recovery, in terms of a modified rule. Many submitted detailed comments on how to improve or modify aspects of the reintroduction project. Comments were grouped into 26 themes ranging from geographical boundaries to compensation for depredated cattle to social and economic impacts of the project.
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New genetic tests have verified that a canine found dead on a road northwest of Spokane last month was a pure gray wolf.

A second road-killed animal found slightly farther west about two weeks later was a wolf-dog hybrid, genetic tests determined.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) sent tissue samples from both road-killed animals to the University of California-Los Angeles Conservation Genetics Resource Center to determine whether they were wolves. The California lab recently developed DNA-sequencing techniques to genetically distinguish gray wolves (Canis lupus) from wolf-dog hybrids or domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). The genetic make-up of wolves and dogs is so similar that previous tests were unable to distinguish the two. Wolf and dog DNA differs by only two-tenths of one percent (0.2%).
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FLORENCE, Ore. — Human feeding of bears and a suspected poor berry crop are blamed for the worst-ever year for bear damage in the Florence and Yachats area in memory.

Within the past week, six bears have been killed in the Florence and Yachats areas, bringing the year’s total to 12. Four of the bears were public safety risks due to their behavior—one broke through a kitchen window looking for food and another charged growling and snarling into a backyard towards a homeowner. The other two bears killed tried to break into the same goat pen where a goat was killed last week.

All bears killed were repeatedly seen in the daytime and did not show wariness of people, indications that they had come to associate people with food and were now habituated. While attacks are rare, habituated bears are often the ones involved in attacks on people.
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Two brothers from Milton are the latest victims to get clobbered by a leaping sturgeon.

Sam, 43, and Chris Parish, 25, were enjoying a leisurely morning of bass fishing on the Yellow River June 28 until a leaping Gulf sturgeon, estimated 5 – 6 feet in length, came over the bow and hit both men in their faces and upper bodies. They escaped the encounter with minor cuts, scrapes and bruises. The sturgeon ended up back in the river.

Neither brother required medical treatment.

Sam ended up with a cut over his left eye and a cut to his right forearm.
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