WASHINGTON, DC – Bureau of Land Management Director Robert Abbey announced today that he will retire from public service at the end of May to rejoin his family full-time in Mississippi. Appointed by President Obama in 2009, Director Abbey’s three-year tenure in leadership of the nation’s largest land management agency marks the culmination of a 34 year career of state and federal service.
Washington, DC – May 10, 2012 – The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has rejected an attempt by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to withhold and ignore critical scientific evidence in its decision-making process for the implementation of a precedent-setting plan to castrate wild stallions. At issue were expert declarations submitted to the BLM from leading experts in wild horse behavior and biology outlining the devastating impacts of castration on the health and natural behaviors of wild free-roaming stallions and wild horse herds.
Shards of pottery with traces of mare’s milk, mass gravesites for horses, and drawings of horses with plows and chariots: These are some of the signs left by ancient people hinting at the importance of horses to their lives. But putting a place and date on the domestication of horses has been a challenge for archaeologists. Now, a team of geneticists studying modern breeds of the animal has assembled an evolutionary picture of its storied past. Horses, the scientists conclude, were first domesticated 6000 years ago in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe, modern-day Ukraine and West Kazakhstan. And as the animals were domesticated, they were regularly interbred with wild horses, the researchers say.
COROLLA, N.C. — Come summer, the beaches of this barrier island will be choked with cars and sunbathers, but in the off-season the land is left to wild horses. Smallish, tending toward chestnut and black, they wander past deserted vacation rentals in harems of five or six.
Thousands of them once roamed the length of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the likely descendants from mounts that belonged to Spanish explorers five centuries ago. Now their numbers have dwindled to a few hundred, the best known living on federal parkland at Shackleford Banks.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is under fire from a source very close to him. We’re not talking, of course, about his inner circle of advisers or political allies, but rather … his bolo tie.
Salazar’s Western neckwear has been expressing its frustration with its owner, who it feels has grown distant of late, on its Twitter feed @kensbolo (described in its bio as “a stylish, jetsetting accessory on exciting adventures within the federal government. Oh yes.”)
It surely cannot be easy these days being Joan Guilfoyle, the (relatively) new director of the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. On the one hand she works for a federal agency, the Interior Department, which is largely beholden to the powerful industries it is supposed to regulate. And on the other hand, she is responsible, under federal law and policy, for ensuring the survival and management of the nation’s wild horses at a time when relentless political and economic forces threaten to decimate the herds.
A federal judge will require further evidence before deciding if federal management of wild horses has harmed threatened steelhead in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest.
Dayville ranchers Loren and Piper Stout contend that the U.S. Forest Service has violated the Endangered Species Act by allowing too many wild horses to “take” the federally protected fish by harming its habitat.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is investigating the shooting deaths of nearly a dozen federally protected wild horses and offering a $10,000 reward in connection with the four separate incidents reported in California and Nevada since the beginning of the year, agency officials said Monday.
To begin with, the National Association of Conservation Districts (the “mother” of all Conservation Districts) is partnering in a way that promotes IUCN and ICLEI USA, thus pushing Agenda 21, the UN’s action plan that will do away with your private property rights and Constitutional rights.
The Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse & Burro Advisory Board meeting (April 2012), was the first meeting including Sec. of Interior Ken Salazar’s new appointee, Callie Hendrickson. Hendrickson has served as an Executive Board member of the National Association of Conservation Districts, and works for the White River and Douglas Creek Conservation District in Colorado.
COROLLA, N.C. – Beach driving fees in Hatteras and a new global advertising campaign pitching Corolla’s wild horses could send thousands more this summer to the Currituck Outer Banks, where beaches are already teeming on summer weekends.
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