This article was originally published by High Country News.
In the summer of 2022, several researchers with USDA Wildlife Services held their breath as a drone pilot flew a large drone, equipped with a camera, toward a wolf standing in a pasture in southwestern Oregon. The team members, watching from a distance, expected the wolf to freeze or run away the minute the whirring rotors approached it. But to their disbelief, it did neither.
This article was originally published by High Country News.Chunks of carbon-rich frozen soil, or permafrost, undergird much of the Arctic tundra. This perpetually frozen layer sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, sometimes storing it for tens of thousands of years beneath the boggy ground.The frozen soil is insulated by a cool wet blanket of plant litter, moss, and peat. But if that blanket is incinerated by a tundra wildfire, the permafrost becomes vulnerable to thawing.
This article was originally published by High Country News.Two Septembers ago, the residents of Grotto, Washington, woke to the Bolt Creek Fire ripping through the mountains above their homes. “This doesn’t happen here,” Patricia Vasquez remembers saying at the time, shocked.
This article was originally published by High Country News.It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky-blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now new research has found that male elks’ bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live.