Conservation

MY FISHING BUDDIES AND I ARE BLIGHTED BY SEVERE GOUT. When we hobble into the offices of local doctors they tell us it results from our drinking habits. But we don’t believe that Ripple wine, which we never touch before 9 a.m., has a thing to do with our affliction. What’s more, we’ve consulted the sewer commissioner, the building inspector and the managers of five liquor stores. They all confirm what we suspect—that our diagnoses result from an abstinence cult among the medical profession, which opposes anything that feels or tastes good and which, in an effort to drum up business, is always trying to panic the public.

Black Bile from the North

   

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Foreign interests want to gouge the world’s dirtiest oil from under Canada’s vast boreal forest and pipe it through some of North America’s most important fish and wildlife habitat.

Conservation NEW

  

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Tobogganing on cafeteria trays can be dangerous, especially when icy conditions coincide with heavy drinking, as always seems to happen in my part of the Northeast. So I stick to the foothills. But recently a dozen more daring participants were hospitalized. Some suffered cranial pressure from ependymal hematomas; others had bone splinters in their meningeal tissue; still others leaked cerebrospinal fluid. Since the brain-trauma physicians were on a golf holiday in Aruba, the hospital administrator enlisted the custodians, providing them with condensed neurosurgical guidelines along with carte blanche authority to do whatever seemed necessary with their saws, chisels and staple guns. All the patients died.

How to Kill a Reborn River

September 17, 2011 was a day of wild celebration in northwest Washington state for what is billed as the most ambitious salmonid recovery project ever undertaken on a single river. After nearly half a century of lobbying, negotiations, legal wrangling, legislation, environmental review, and a federal outlay of $325 million, the continent’s biggest dam removal project was underway.

Wild, Scenic & Trashed

If not for their horse, ORV and jet-boat hatches, the first two scenic rivers designated by Congress would offer only inspiring scenery and quiet, enjoyable fishing.

Let Them Eat Tin

On a may pre-dawn in 2009 i held a quivering loon in my arms. It had crawled out of Big Island Pond and onto my beach, where it sought shelter against my canoe—a bad start to the day, because loons are a recent addition to this busy southern-New Hampshire lake. When I came in from fishing it had died of plumbism.

Plumbism (lead poisoning) in wildlife is caused almost entirely by ammunition and fishing tackle. The most common victims of tackle are birds that eat fish or dabble in bottom muck. Because they lack teeth they “chew” their food with gizzards, ingesting pebbles to aid the process. Frequently they mistake lost sinkers or jigheads for pebbles; in fact, they key in on them. Even more frequently, they eat lead-toting fish that have broken off anglers’ lines.

State of the Bluefin

What are we to make of the international effort to manage bluefin tuna? A better question might be: Is there an international effort to manage bluefin tuna? From what we saw in 2010 and over the past 45 years, the answer to the second question has to be “No.”

Under BP's Sheen

Exclusive Report: No one has a clue what will befall fish in the biggest toxicology experiment in U.S. history. Our Conservation editor examines the situation...