Wildlife

Harbor porpoises began disappearing from San Francisco Bay during the height of Navy ship activity there during World War II. "We don't know why they disappeared. … It's very possible that they just abandoned the place because it became too hard to feed, reproduce and raise their young," said William Keener, a co-investigator and spokesman with the nonprofit Golden Gate Cetacean Research group. "Then all of a sudden, the porpoises were back."

"The deaths of up to 20,000 migrating birds this year in a wildlife refuge near the Oregon border has renewed debate about resource management on the Klamath River, where myriad competing interests are fighting for water rights."

"WASHINGTON — A hunting bill passed by the House on Tuesday makes it harder to restrict hunting and fishing on public lands and ensures that the hunter's arsenal will continue to include lead bullets."

"To the untrained eye, a weed is just a weed, and few of us can tell a thistle from a teasel. But for Paul Heiple and his team of Weed Warriors, knowing the difference is essential to their work routing out invasive plants that threaten the native species at Edgewood Park, a 500-acre natural preserve that overlooks California’s Silicon Valley."

"Federal Fish and Wildlife Service officials say that a drought-induced bird die-off in the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge along the California-Oregon border has ended. But they warn that unless proposals to reconfigure water distribution along the Klamath River are enacted, the problem could recur."

"It's wild times in the watershed. The most happy-go-lucky denizen of Bay Area creeks is back, after a hiatus of at least three decades: the river otter."

"Louisiana and the nation can't wait 50 years to restore economically and environmentally important coastal wetlands, a task that is likely to cost $50 billion or more, says a new report released Monday by a team of state and national environmental and social scientists and engineers. And the rest of the nation should shoulder part of the cost, the report says."

"Symptoms of a mysterious disease that has killed scores of seals off Alaska and infected walruses are now showing up in polar bears, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said on Friday."

"Dave Mauser walked the edge of a mudflat, peering underneath the dried brown rushes where one coot after another had gone to hide and then die."