Tag: U.S. Fish
How Long Should a Species Stay on Life Support?
At about 3:30 a.m., four hours into our drive, Travis Livieri’s phone began to thrum. “I’ve got a ferret for you,” a voice crackled through the static. The animal in question was one of North America’s most endangered mammals, for which the next hour might be the strangest of her life; for Livieri, the wildlife biologist tasked with saving her, it would be one of thousands of interventions he’s made to prevent her kind from permanently vanishing. Over the
How the Fight to Save One Butterfly Rescued a Whole Ecosystem
This article was originally published in High Country News.
From the top of Pigeon Butte in western Oregon’s William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, the full width of the Willamette Valley fits into a gaze. Slung between the Coast Range and the Cascades, the valley is checkered with farmland: grass-seed fields, hazelnut orchards, vineyards. In the foreground, however, grassy meadows scattered with wildflowers and occasional oaks trace the land’s contours.
Upland prairie landscapes like these once covered 685,000 acres of
The Biologists Stranded on an Erupting Alaskan Volcano
On the evening of August 6, 2008, on a remote island in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, the side of a volcano began crumbling into the turquoise waters of its crater lake. Gulls fled from the falling rock. The wind whistled around Chris Ford as he peered over the lip of the crater. “It’s starting to get tumbling down pretty good,” he shouted into his radio.
Ford had climbed up the volcano’s steep slope to get a bird’s-eye view of the small