Free Republic

Longtime observers say they've seen a sharp increase in endangered blue and humpback whales feeding near California shores, where they spend the spring and summer before heading to their winter breeding grounds off Mexico and Central America.

A MONSTER white pointer snatched a young surfer before trying to knock a jet-ski rider into the water in the fifth fatal shark attack in 10 months along a 380km stretch of the WA coast. The 4m killer dubbed Brutus by surfers near Wedge Island, 180km north of Perth mauled a 24-year-old man as he surfed with a mate at 9am yesterday. Fisheries Minister Norman Moore ordered a shark hunt to capture and kill the beast, saying of the unprecedented spate of attacks: "We seriously have got a problem." The jet-ski rider who tried to retrieve the man said it...

A lack of transparency by top Obama administration officials has prompted an environmental group to sue the Interior Department to determine whether wind power projects are killing large numbers of bats and birds. The American Bird Conservancy (ABC) filed the lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia accusing the government of intentionally withholding the information and refusing to comply with requests for certain documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). “It’s ridiculous that Americans have to sue in order to find out what their government is saying to wind companies about our wildlife,” ......

When the steel claw of an excavator slashes into the berm of the Great Works Dam on Monday morning, it will mark the start of a multimillion-dollar project to allow endangered and dwindling species to return to their historic spawning grounds along Maine’s longest river, the Penobscot. When the project is done - scheduled for 2015, after an additional dam is razed and another bypassed - it will open access to 1,000 miles of habitat for the native fish, including endangered Atlantic salmon and short-nosed sturgeon that journey from the Gulf of Maine to breed in the cold, fresh waters...

Several years ago, there was a large reward posted for evidence that the Ivory Billed Woodpecker was not extinct as was previously thought. Strangely, the classic car world has yet to respond in like fashion for evidence that breeding pairs of Plymouth Crickets or Mercury Bobcats are still out there. To qualify for the list a car must have been produced in large numbers (10,000-plus) within the last 40 years with few (if any) roadworthy survivors. Here are some of our favorite threatened, endangered and extinct cars:

House Republicans on Tuesday rode to the rescue of 41 hunters who shot polar bears in Canada at least four years ago but have been unable to bring their trophies back into the U.S. because the bears were subsequently declared an endangered species. Powered by gun-rights and hunting advocates, the House voted 262-155 in favor of letting the dead bears into the U.S. - with backers citing everything from Second Amendment priorities to the fact that two of the hunters caught up in the situation were wounded American troops. “They were in Iraq, in that heated area. The one dream...

Roanoke police are seeking the public’s help to find a 17-year-old girl who was reported by her family as a runaway. The police department was contacted March 23 by a family member of Katelyn Anne Ellison, who said the girl was last seen March 22 leaving Patrick Henry High School at the end of the school day. Investigators have been following up on various leads since the report was filed, Roanoke police spokeswoman Aisha Johnson said. “The detectives the people have spoken to say they have not been in contact with her, which raises more concern than was already there,”...

Battered by the worst drought on record in Texas, the world's only self-sustaining flock of migratory whooping cranes is showing vulnerabilities that raise the stakes for crane work in Wisconsin. Texas' dry conditions and booming development have heightened worries about the health of the cranes and have sparked a legal battle over whether the endangered birds are getting their fair share of fresh water. The specter of drought, hurricanes or other calamity is the reason why Wisconsin and a few other states - away from Texas - were identified as candidates for crane reintroduction. The 5-foot tall cranes that migrate...

A group of Sacramento-area property owners and land managers on Wednesday threatened to sue the federal government if it does not proceed with removing a native beetle from the endangered species list. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initially proposed removing the valley elderberry longhorn beetle from the endangered species list in 2006. But the process has dragged along and the beetle remains protected. On Wednesday, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit law firm, said the delay may have cost its clients millions of dollars over the past five years. Those clients include land owners, levee maintenance districts and...

The recent killing of an aggressive Mexican gray wolf by federal agents at a ranch near Winston could lead to a reassessment of the already struggling recovery effort for that species. The wolf was reportedly shot by agents with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division on Dec. 14, after it paced across the porch and gazed through the window of John and Crystal Diamond’s Beaverhead Ranch home. The Diamond residence is located in Catron County, although near enough to Sierra County to be in the Winston mailing area. The wolf was killed just weeks after the Arizona Game...

An endangered listing for the DSL would ruin the oil drilling industry in the Permian Basin, that area of west Texas and eastern New Mexico that produces about 20% of all the oil from the lower 48 states and 5% of total oil produced in the US. The oil produced there also constitutes 68% of all oil produced in the state of Texas.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) declared in October that the South Florida rainbow snake (Farancia erytrogramma seminola) is extinct, but the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Snake Conservation think otherwise, and have put up a $500 reward to the first person who can document that the snake is not extinct. Cameron Young, executive director of the Center for Snake Conservation said in a press release that declaring the snake extinct without adequate research is scientifically irresponsible. Young hopes that in offering a reward for valid documentation that the snake is not extinct, the proof will...

Amy Mattson of Mequon was driving south of Port Washington earlier this month when she spied an all-white buck standing in a field. The nose of the 6-point buck appears to be pink in the photos that she and a friend shot. A pink nose and presumably pink eyes - a deer bereft of any color - means the two appeared to be observing a rare albino deer, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. "It was very pretty," Mattson said Saturday, the first day of Wisconsin's traditional nine-day gun season. In the dim light of late afternoon, "it...

The Obama administration is taking steps to extend new federal protections to a list of imperiled animals and plants that reads like a manifest for Noah's Ark - from the melodic golden-winged warbler and slow-moving gopher tortoise, to the slimy American eel and tiny Texas kangaroo rat. ... With a Friday deadline to act on more than 700 pending cases, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service already has issued decisions advancing more than 500 species toward potential new protections under the Endangered Species Act... Patrick Parenteau, an environmental lawprofessor at the University of Vermont. "They are moving through this large...

...turtles unexpectedly making a go of it in mangrove estuaries. Scientists have made the surprise discovery that a population of critically endangered hawksbill turtles, thought to have been wiped out in the eastern Pacific from Mexico to Peru, has survived by occupying a novel habitat — mangrove estuaries — rather than coral reefs where they have been slaughtered for their exquisite shells. The finding is particularly significant because it suggests a potentially unique evolutionary trajectory, said Alexander Gaos, lead author of a report being released Thursday in the online scientific journal Biology Letters. "We now know there are about 500...

(CBS News) The lightning-fast die-off of bats is being called the No. 1 crisis affecting mammals in this country. Scientists from more than 100 state and federal agencies are coordinating their efforts to learn why bats are dying. CBS News Correspondent Betty Nguyen noted on "The Early Show" that one of the consequences of the bats' deaths is more bugs. Wildlife officials now are pointing to a fungus they say is killing bats in unprecedented numbers. It's a desperate situation with no solution in sight. Nguyen reported bats often get a bad rap as creepy, blood-sucking night creatures. But farmers,...

PORTLAND — Oregon and Washington have been given permission to resume removing or killing California sea lions at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, a federal agency said Friday. The decision by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came about six months after a federal appeals court struck down a similar permit aimed at reducing the number of threatened or endangered salmon eaten by the hungry marine mammals. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the practice last year. NOAA Fisheries officials said they believe the agency has fixed flaws the court pointed out in the original permit issued...

The dune sagebrush lizard is a 3-inch critter that lives only among stands of shinnery oak, which itself is a somewhat rare tree that lives only in the sandy soil on something like 4 million acres spread between Roswell, New Mexico and Midland, Texas. The area around Midland is known as the Permian Basin, and is one of the oldest and most prolific crude oil regions in North America.

COEUR D'ALENE -- Deer and pheasant hunting seasons kicked off in North Idaho this last weekend. While wolves were also hunted last season, they’ve been put back on the endangered species list and are now officially off limits. There are two camps at polar opposite ends of the debate over wolf hunting. There are the hunters who believe wolves should be fair game and there are the environmentalists who want wolves left alone. One of those that was looking forward to wolf hunting this season is William Rutherford, who hoped to land his first wolf tag this season. “I didn't...

Idyllwild, Calif. (AP) -- Researchers have released dozens of tadpoles into a Riverside County stream in hopes of reviving a frog species endangered in the region. San Diego Zoo officials say zoo researchers bred the 36 mountain yellow-legged frog tadpoles that were released Tuesday into a stream near the town of Idyllwild. The mountain yellow-legged frog is on the federal Endangered Species List in Southern California and has recently been proposed for listing under the California Endangered Species Act.