Colorado panel: Nice and slow on gray wolf reintroduction
DENVER – Some wildlife advocates are urging Colorado officials to streamline planning for reintroducing the gray wolf, arguing the launch of an overly bureaucratic process will frustrate the intent of voters who approved reintroduction by the end of 2023.
But the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, which must approve a plan, delivered a message Wednesday: Take it nice and slow.
It will take time to ensure that scientists and ranchers, wildlife activists and the rural Western Slope counties where wolves will be reintroduced all have a say on the divisive issue, commissioners agreed during a meeting on the topic.
To that end, they re-endorsed a proposal by CPW staff that calls for educational seminars on the wolf for commissioners themselves; recruiting scientists for a technical advisory panel; recruiting members of a “stakeholder advisory group” to represent advocacy groups and individuals; hiring a “facilitator” for that group; and studying how to hold public meetings on wolf management in far-flung rural counties during the coronavirus pandemic.
CPW biologists have been working with their counterparts in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, also home to wolf populations, as well as federal wildlife officials, to help craft the outlines of a reintroduction plan to be released sometime this year.
Presented by Reid Dewalt, a CPW assistant director, the path to introduction likely will run to the end of 2023. That timeline reflects continuing polarization over the reintroduction of the gray wolf on public lands which Colorado voters narrowly approved in a November ballot measure.
The predator was hunted, trapped and poisoned to extinction in Colorado decades ago. A handful of wolves have been sighted in recent years in northern Colorado, presumably descendants of packs reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park in 1995.
Rural county commissions and agricultural, business and sportsmen’s groups opposed the initiative, citing a threat to livestock and to a $1billion hunting industry based on elk, deer and moose that supports 25,000 jobs.
Dozens of wolf advocates warned the agency could miss the Dec. 31, 2023, deadline for the first wolf reintroduction, saying in a recent letter CPW had created “a perilously cumbersome process.”
“The planning process is overly complex and more expensive than necessary,” Norman Bishop, a National Park Service retiree who worked on the Yellowstone reintroduction, told the commission Wednesday. “You are inviting those with opposing microphones to repeat the campaign debate.”
“These advisory groups aren’t required by the ballot measure. Having scientists hold statewide public hearings is the way to do that,” Michael Robinson, senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview. “Just say, ’Here’s what we’re going to do and why. Now comment on why we’re wrong or why we’re right.”
Others – including Dan Gibbs, the director of the Department of Natural Resources – suggested dusting off and updating a wolf management plan crafted by the state in 2004.
But elected officials from the Western
Slope welcomed the commission’s caution, noting that only five of 22 counties in the region voted for the initiative.
“Please stay true to your vote and the will of the people and do not succumb to political pressure,” urged Garfield County Commissioner Mike Samson.
NEW YORK – February is usually the peak of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals packed with suffering patients. But not this year.
Flu has virtually disappeared from the U.S., with reports coming in at far lower levels than anything seen in decades.
Experts say that measures put in place to fend off the coronavirus – mask wearing, social distancing and virtual schooling – were a big factor in preventing a “twindemic” of flu and COVID-19. A push to get more people vaccinated against flu probably helped, too, as did fewer people traveling, they say.
Another possible explanation: The coronavirus has essentially muscled aside flu and other bugs that are more common in the fall and winter. Scientists don’t fully understand the mechanism behind that, but it would be consistent with patterns seen when certain flu strains predominate over others, said Dr. Arnold Monto, a flu expert at the University of Michigan.
Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record,” according to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hospitals say the usual steady stream of flu-stricken patients never materialized.
At Maine Medical Center in Portland, the state’s largest hospital, “I have seen zero documented flu cases this winter,” said Dr. Nate Mick, the head of the emergency department.
Ditto in Oregon’s capital city, where the outpatient respiratory clinics affiliated with Salem Hospital have not seen any confirmed flu cases.
“It’s beautiful,” said the health system’s Dr. Michelle Rasmussen.
The numbers are astonishing considering flu has long been the nation’s biggest infectious disease threat. In recent years, it has been blamed for 600,000 to 800,000 annual hospitalizations and 50,000 to 60,000 deaths.
Across the globe, flu activity has been at very low levels in China, Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. And that follows reports of little flu in South Africa, Australia and other countries during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter months of May through August.
The story of course has been different with coronavirus, which has killed more than 500,000 people in the United States. COVID-19 cases and deaths reached new heights in December and January, before beginning a recent decline.
Flu-related hospitalizations, however, are a small fraction of where they would stand during even a very mild season, said Brammer, who oversees the CDC’S tracking of the virus.
Flu death data for the whole U.S. population is hard to compile quickly, but CDC officials keep a running count of deaths of children. One pediatric flu death has been reported so far this season, compared with 92 reported at the same point in last year’s flu season.
“Many parents will tell you that this year their kids have been as healthy as they’ve ever been, because they’re not swimming in the germ pool at school or day care the same way they were in prior years,” Mick said.
Some doctors say they have even stopped sending specimens for testing, because they don’t think flu is present. Nevertheless, many labs are using a Cdc-developed “multiplex test” that checks specimens for both the coronavirus and flu, Brammer said.
More than 190 million flu vaccine doses were distributed this season, but the number of infections is so low that it’s difficult for CDC to do its annual calculation of how well the vaccine is working, Brammer said. There’s simply not enough data, she said.
That also is challenging the planning of next season’s flu vaccine. Such work usually starts with checking which flu strains are circulating around the world and predicting which of them will likely predominate in the year ahead.
“But there’s not a lot of (flu) viruses to look at,” Brammer said.