Finding Wilderness

Archive for November, 2009

Winchester Wasteway is a great single or multi-day float in a wildlife-rich high desert environment. Located in Western Washington near Moses lake, it flows through sand dunes to Potholes Reservoir. Here is a map of the location. The shuttle is about 13 miles whether you do the close takeout or the full trip. If you do the full trip there is a waterfall at the place where the canal flows into the reservoir that must be portaged, then a three-mile paddle to the takeout at Potholes Reservoir State Park.

The area is called the Potholes because of the many ponds and small lakes that are scattered throughout the sand dunes. A couple of small lakes are crossed when floating the canal, and campsites can be located near other larger lakes within portage distance. It makes for an even more varied trip.

The canal picks up speed after the alternate early takeout at the end of Road C SE. It takes on more of the character of a mountain stream, and there are rocks to dodge.

Lime Kiln Point, on the west side of San Juan Island in Washington state, may be the best place in the world to view orca whales from shore. The best viewing is from the rocks around the light house.

Viewing orcas from Lime Kiln Point

This orca came within 20 or 30 yards of the rocks we were standing on. San Juan County Park is a great place to stay if you want to camp.

The view from San Juan County Park

Close enough to recognize the saddle patch.

Orcas among the kelp.

The orcas fish for salmon among the kelp, right next to the rocks. An orca’s white patch can be seen beneath the surface in the above photo.

Multi-day backpacking with kids should not be undertaken lightly. It’s serious business committing your family to the vagaries of mother nature with only the items on your backs to keep you warm and dry for multiple days. But kids can be kept warm, dry and happy by applying a few basic principles:

Full coverage rain jackets, pants, and rubber rain boots.

Full coverage rain gear, including rain boots

“Oversized” backpack covers that cover your head and shoulders, in addition to your pack.

Oversize pack covers

A large, lightweight tarp that shelters your tent and provides a place to cook, eat and to take off and store wet items.

Large, lightweight tarp

A good knife to split wet wood down to its dryer center – sometimes the only source of dry wood.

Good quality knife for splitting wood

The oversized pack covers and the tarp are made from silicon impregnated ripstop nylon – a light, tough fabric that is ideal for the purpose. You can make them yourself inexpensively. I order my silicon nylon from Outdoor Wilderness Fabrics in Boise, Idaho.

Simply Living Smart carries the ideal knives for this purpose.

Click here for a longer photo essay that details these and other techniques for keeping kids warm, dry and happy in wet weather.

This report in The Economist is of an interesting study in Spain that indicated that wild dogs prey more on livestock than wolves do.  Not clear who applicable it would be to the American West.  In many of the more remote areas where wolves are present, I don’t believe there are a large number of wild dogs.  But I am always interested in studies that compare dogs with wolves, because, after all, they are not that much different.

From The Economist article:

Jorge EchegarayLunch!

How much sheep-rustling actually goes on is a moot point—and a pertinent one when the town-dwellers are prepared to put their money where their sentiments are, to compensate farmers for the damage done by wolves. Such is the case in Spain, where about €1.5m ($2.3m) a year is paid out to farmers in compensation for damage those wolves are alleged to have done. During 2003 and 2004, for example, 432 farm animals were attacked in 154 incidents in Spain’s Basque country. Almost 95% of these attacks were blamed on wolves.

As they report in Animal Conservation, Mr Echegaray and Dr Vilà were able to identify 86 of the samples from DNA they contained. Of these only 31 were from wolves. A further 53 were from dogs, and two fox droppings had been picked up by mistake.

Just came across this post that provides yet another example of the limitation of guns in general and handguns in particular to stop aggressive animals:

My friend I hate to be the one to pass along bad
news; but NO handgun caliber is adequate
for one shot stops on the big bears or mountain
lions. Recently, a friend was hunting in the
Oregon forest and came upon an angry cougar.
The cougar took six shot’s of .357 magnum’s to
his mid section, and was still able to launch some
what of an attack! I’m not sure what load he was
using; but I believe the gun was a Smith & Wesson
627PC model?

Best advice I could give, would be to carry the largest
caliber that you can control; and place your shot’s
to a vital area. Caliber’s that come to mind, would
be not smaller than the .44 Remington magnum;
up to and including the .480 Ruger. Most satisfying
probably would be the .45 LC using heavy handloads.

I agree with the author’s conclusions, except that I would recommend using pepper spray before resorting to a gun. In most cases you can change an animal’s mind with pepper spray quicker than you can kill it with a bullet.  True you can kill an animal instantly if you hit it in the brain, but that is hard to do.  It takes an animal awhile to die, even if you hit it in the heart or lungs.

Here is an account where pepper was used effectively to deter a mountain lion.

As I make clear at my page on “fighting bears,” I think a large bore handgun is the best backup to pepperspray, but shouldn’t be your first defense.

While we are on the subject of animal territories, here is an interesting report on great white shark territories that indicates they wander less than was thought, staying close to shore and near areas where humans hang out, but also having predictable migration patterns between California and Hawaii.

Bonnie Berkowitz, Gene Thorp and Todd Lindeman/The Washington Post

I have to say though, shark biologists have the same tendency to minimize the reality of shark attack risk in the same way that wildlife researchers do with bears, cougars and other dangerous predators.  This quote from the Washington Post Article:

The fact that “a major concentration” of great whites can ignore the humans who might have crossed their path there “shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering,” said Stanford University post-doctoral scholar Salvador J. Jorgensen, the paper’s lead writer.

If I ever have a chance to have a conversation with Mr. Jorgensen, I will point out that what matters to humans is not the number of sharks that could have bit them, but the number that actually do.  Likewise, a person being attacked by a shark doesn’t care what a shark’s regular business is, only what it is doing right then at the time of the attack.  If humans are successful in making the oceans more healthy for sharks, and thereby increasing their populations, that is a good thing in my view.  But we should face the increased risk to humans squarely.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there is a fascinating story about how a a species’ territorial boundaries can get fixed and then passed on to subsequent generations. In this case, red deer populations on the border of West Germany and Czechoslovakia have failed to cross over the border even though it has been 20 years since the electric border fence was taken down.  The article explains how most species have spread beyond the border since then but the deer have not:

But one species is boycotting the reunified animal kingdom: red deer. Herds of them roam both sides of the old NATO-Warsaw Pact border here but mysteriously turn around when they approach it. This although the deer alive today have no memory of the ominous fence.

Ahornia, a doe with a grayish-brown winter coat and a light patch around her tail, was born 18 years after the fence came down. Wildlife biologists who track her and other deer via electronic collars know that she has never ventured beyond the strip where the fence once stood.

That is now just a narrow footpath in the woods, today marking the border between Germany and the Czech Republic. On a misty October afternoon, the sound of a distant woodpecker was all that disturbed the mountaintop silence. A small white sign in German said “State Border.” Ahornia grazes on the Western side but stops when she nears the border, her world ending where the Free World once did.

“The wall in the head is still there,” says Tom Synnatzschke, a German producer of nature films who has worked in area.

In the seven years since wildlife biologists began tracking the deer, only two, a German stag named Florian and a Czech stag incongruously called Izabel, have crossed the border to stay. Lately, some young males have begun to explore the pastures on the other side, but they always come back. Females don’t set foot in the once-forbidden area.

I think most wildlife researchers would have expected that the deer would have wondered from their old locations before now.  There are many other influences that temporarily restrict a population to a given area for a time.  It seems this study may significantly impact research and practices regarding wildlife population movement.

Eastern Coyote (Canis latrans) Photo by Steve Byland

“Biologists baffled by attack” is the headline from the Chronicle Herald article by Ian Fairclough and Evan Hoare, a Nova Scotia newspaper.  The article quotes Jon Way, said to have studied coyotes for 12 years, and who runs Eastern Coyote Research in Massachusetts:

“I don’t think they regard people, even kids, as an opportunity for a food source, so this is certainly an abnormal attack,” Mr. Way said. “They certainly are not like (big) cats that regard people as food, they just don’t do that.”

I am always baffled at biologists who are baffled when larger predators attack and even kill people.  Mr. Way should know that at least one child has been killed by a coyotes, and there have been numerous attacks by coyotes on children as well as adults (including an attack on two boys right here in Bellevue in 2006).

One of the reasons I started BEARS and Other Top Predators magazine 11 years ago was that I didn’t trust the information about animal attacks that I was getting from people who should know better — from public land managers and publicly funded wildlife biologists.   For example, when we first started the magazine, many park rangers and even wildlife PhDs told us that there has never been a documented fatal killing of a human by a wolf.  It was repeated like a mantra.  This didn’t ring true, especially since it is common knowledge that dogs sometimes kill humans.  As it turned out, there are numerous documented cases of wolves preying on humans, including some in North America in the last two decades.

Coyotes are no different from other predators, except the are smaller than wolves, bears and cougars.   The only reason fatal attacks by coyotes on humans is more rare than these with these other predators is because of the coyotes size.  But that doesn’t mean they won’t take an advantage of an opportunity if it presents itself.

Once while kayaking on a medium-sized stream I  had a pack of coyotes follow me along the bank for several hundred yards.  I think they were just curious, but I wasn’t going to get close enough to find out.  Coyotes can be fearless when food is at stake.  Another time I watched two coyotes harass a grizzly bear off its kill and literally chase him away, nipping at his heel as he ran.  Then they went back to eat what was left of the elk calf the bear had killed.