From the ArbonValley.com community blog, 2010–2020. This page preserves the original post; dates, announcements, and contact details reflect the time it was published.
I was driving into work the other morning about 7:30 am and I noticed a bird in the road up ahead. I normally don’t slow down for birds unless they are fairly large ones like an eagle or a buzzard. I figure they have wings and much greater maneuverability than I have so I feel it’s up to them to get out of my way not the other way around.
As I got closer I realized it was a pair of sage grouse participating in their courtship ritual. [I recognized it from a wildlife documentary.] The rooster was performing his fan dance right there in the middle of the road while the object of his affections was sitting at the very edge of the pavement in rapt attention.
I breezed through them at about 50 miles per hour and neither one of them flinched or flew. I doubt they even noticed I had gone by.
Hmmmmm…. I think I may have just figured out why they are almost on the endangered species list.
Shoshone-Bannock Fish & Wildlife crews built 31 imitation beaver dams on West Fork Bannock Creek and let two beavers go there in the fall of 2019, and by 2020 the creek was carrying more trout.
In 1989 Idaho’s governor praised Arbon Valley’s farmers and deer hunters for settling their quarrel, and over the next decade the valley’s ranchers found themselves in the West’s wider argument over mountain lions.
In January 1963 Merle Meyers, his sons Jerry and Jay, and Kenneth Pevoe ended the career of a big female mountain lion blamed for lost sheep near Bannock Peak.
