Animals fleeing Yellowstone supervolcano?

At Not Just The News, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Not Just The News and how it is used.

Log Files

Like many other Web sites, Not Just The News makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons

Not Just The News does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Not Just The News.


• Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Not Just The News and other sites on the Internet.


• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Not Just The News send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

Not Just The News has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Not Just The News"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.

Animals fleeing Yellowstone supervolcano?

"Gestapo" tactics meet senior citizens at Yellowstone

NEWBURYPORT — Pat Vaillancourt went on a trip last week that was intended to showcase some of America’s greatest treasures.

Instead, the Salisbury resident said she and others on her tour bus witnessed an ugly spectacle that made her embarrassed, angry and heartbroken for her country.

Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.

The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.

When finally allowed to leave, the bus was not allowed to halt at all along the 2.5-hour trip out of the park, not even to stop at private bathrooms that were open along the route.

“We’ve become a country of fear, guns and control,” said Vaillancourt, who grew up in Lawrence. “It was like they brought out the armed forces. Nobody was saying, ‘we’re sorry,’ it was all like — ” as she clenched her fist and banged it against her forearm.

Vaillancourt took part in a nine-day tour of western parks and sites along with about four dozen senior citizen tourists. One of the highlights of the tour was to be Yellowstone, where they arrived just as the shutdown went into effect.

Rangers systematically sent visitors out of the park, though some groups that had hotel reservations — such as Vaillancourt’s — were allowed to stay for two days. Those two days started out on a sour note, she said.

The bus stopped along a road when a large herd of bison passed nearby, and seniors filed out to take photos. Almost immediately, an armed ranger came by and ordered them to get back in, saying they couldn’t “recreate.” The tour guide, who had paid a $ 300 fee the day before to bring the group into the park, argued that the seniors weren’t “recreating,” just taking photos.

“She responded and said, ‘Sir, you are recreating,’ and her tone became very aggressive,” Vaillancourt said.

The seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door.

“They looked like Hulk Hogans, armed. They told us you can’t go outside,” she said. “Some of the Asians who were on the tour said, ‘Oh my God, are we under arrest?’ They felt like they were criminals.”

By Oct. 3 the park, which sees an average of 4,500 visitors a day, was nearly empty. The remaining hotel visitors were required to leave.

As the bus made its 2.5-hour journey out of Yellowstone, the tour guide made arrangements to stop at a full-service bathroom at an in-park dude ranch he had done business with in the past. Though the bus had its own small bathroom, Vaillancourt said seniors were looking for a more comfortable place to stop. But no stop was made — Vaillancourt said the dude ranch had been warned that its license to operate would be revoked if it allowed the bus to stop. So the bus continued on to Livingston, Mont., a gateway city to the park.

The bus trip made headlines in Livingston, where the local newspaper Livingston Enterprise interviewed the tour guide, Gordon Hodgson, who accused the park service of “Gestapo tactics.”

“The national parks belong to the people,” he told the Enterprise. “This isn’t right.”

Calls to Yellowstone’s communications office were not returned, as most of the personnel have been furloughed.

Many of the foreign visitors were shocked and dismayed by what had happened and how they were treated, Vaillancourt said.

“A lot of people who were foreign said they wouldn’t come back (to America),” she said.

The National Parks’ aggressive actions have spawned significant criticism in western states. Governors in park-rich states such as Arizona have been thwarted in their efforts to fund partial reopenings of parks. The Washington Times quoted an unnamed Park Service official who said park law enforcement personnel were instructed to “make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

The experience brought up many feelings in Vaillancourt. What struck her most was a widely circulated story about a group of World War II veterans who were on a trip to Washington, D.C., to see the World War II memorial when the shutdown began. The memorial was barricaded and guards were posted, but the vets pushed their way in.

That reminded her of her father, a World War II veteran who spent three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

“My father took a lot of crap from the Japanese,” she recalled, her eyes welling with tears. “Every day they made him bow to the Japanese flag. But he stood up to them.

“He always said to stand up for what you believe in, and don’t let them push you around,” she said, adding she was sad to see “fear, guns and control” turned on citizens in her own country.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

"Gestapo" tactics meet senior citizens at Yellowstone

Grizzly Bear Survival: Yet Another Reason Not To Shoot Yellowstone Wolves

Pro-wolf-shooting activists should check out this study to see just how beneficial wolves are to the Yellowstone ecosystem–and the survival of one of its most iconic animals.

By Dan Nosowitz Posted 07.29.2013 at 5:31 pm

A Grizzly Bear In Yellowstone National Park Wikimedia Commons

Even though every respectable regulatory service says shooting wolves in and around Yellowstone National Park is bad for everyone involved, wolves are still being shot. Well, add one more paper to the pile: a new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology finds that the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone has had a positive effect on the population of…wait, what? Grizzly bears? How?

Putting together the puzzle pieces of a diverse ecosystem like Yellowstone is tricky; shooting wolves is like pulling out a piece of an enormous Jenga game. Some parts seem unaffected, some parts are distinctly less balanced, and eventually the whole game will crash. This study looks at how the wolf affects the ecosystem as a whole, and, as we thought, wolves are an essential part of the health of Yellowstone.

The iconic, endangered-in-the-U.S. grizzly bear relies on lots of fruit, especially berries, when preparing for its winter hibernation. High in sugar and containing lots of important vitamins, the berries, including serviceberry, chokecherry, buffaloberry, twinberry, huckleberry, and others, and make up a substantial portion of the grizzly’s diet in the summertime. A lower amount of berries has been found to have a negative effect on the survival and reproductive abilities of grizzlies the following year.

There have been quite a few low-berry years lately. That problem, says the study, can be attributed to the lack of wolves in Yellowstone: wolves typically prey on the abundant elk herds in the park. Elk eat berries, just like the bears do. But without wolves, the elk population has exploded, which means there’s hardly any berries left for the bears. So the bears aren’t as well fed, which makes them less healthy.

And it’s not even just as simple as that. The elk are eating so many berries, including the entire berry shrubs, that animals that rely on the shrubs, like bees and butterflies, are also in decline. The bears, without access to the fruit they’d normally be eating, have to eat more meat, which means they sometimes prey on elk, but just as often on livestock nearby. And that makes the ranchers angry, and the ranchers shoot bears or wolves or whatever else they feel like, because Wyoming does not know or care how ecosystems work. (Neither does Friends of the Yellowstone Elk Herd, a pro-hunting organization.)

But the reintroduction of wolves, the study finds, has had a marked improvement on that entire system. The researchers, from Oregon State University and Washington State University, analyzed grizzly bear scat and found that the percentage of berries in the scat has doubled since the reintroduction of the wolves. Turns out the two most iconic animals of Yellowstone depend on each other in more ways than we thought.

[via PhysOrg]

Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

Grizzly Bear Survival: Yet Another Reason Not To Shoot Yellowstone Wolves