Nebraska Master Naturalist Foundation

09/07/2026

Do you like eating? Do you like sleeping? Do you have absolutely no interest in developing a sensible relationship with either?

Then perhaps the Katmai bear diet and exercise plan is for you.

Step 1: Eat raw salmon for one hour.
Step 2: Lie on a beach and sleep for two to three hours.
Step 3: Repeat until winter, or until someone asks whether you have considered Pilates.

It’s a remarkably simple fitness regiment. No supplements. No personal trainer. No complicated meal plan. Just salmon, sleep, and the relentless pursuit of becoming too large to be bothered.

Scientific moment: Katmai’s brown bears spend summer and fall packing on as much weight as possible, and salmon provide the calories and fat they need to build those reserves. When they enter their dens for winter, they can go for months without eating. So every salmon is essentially another tiny deposit into the bear's winter savings account.

09/07/2026

09/07/2026

09/07/2026

09/07/2026

Artist: Kai Skye (also known as Brian Andreas)

09/07/2026

A massive study uncovered significant survival differences between the two sexes of North America's perching birds.

09/07/2026

A gray wolf just crossed to the west side of Interstate 5 in California. Wolf advocates have been waiting decades for that to happen.

California Fish and Wildlife got two sighting reports in late August, plus photos, from where Mendocino, Glenn and Lake counties meet. A biologist confirmed the photos, surveyed the area, and found tracks at one of the locations.

Wolves were wiped out of California by 1924. In December 2011 a young male called OR7 walked down from Oregon and became the first documented wolf in the state in 87 years. The first pups born in California came in 2015.

Everything since traces back to that.

The state's official count was at least 50 wolves at the end of 2024. Fish and Wildlife now tracks 12 known packs, up from nine three months earlier, which is the fastest quarter of growth since they returned. Yosemite has been added to the species' range.

But nearly all of that has happened in the northeastern corner of the state, east of I-5.

They've now crossed to the other side, which is important because of what lives there. There are more elk and other prey west of that line, which makes it some of the best wolf habitat California has.

"This is incredibly exciting news, the news we in wolf recovery for decades have been waiting for," said Amaroq Weiss, formerly a senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. "For it to get to the west side of I-5, where we know is the best habitat in the state."

But the story of wolves in California isn't a clean story with sunshine and roses throughout.

Last year the Beyem Seyo pack killed at least 88 cattle in Sierra Valley over a single summer, and the state killed the pack. That was the first time in modern California history wolves were lethally removed by the state. In the first quarter of 2026, Fish and Wildlife investigated 47 livestock depredation reports and confirmed 21 as wolf attacks.

But the state has since built out a wider toolkit, including strike teams, drone hazing, pepper balls, and a compensation program for producers who lose animals. Whether that keeps up with a population growing this fast is a real question that no one really has an answer for.

Meanwhile, last Friday, the President signed an executive order giving the Interior Secretary 90 days to decide whether gray wolves and Mexican wolves should lose or reduce their federal Endangered Species Act protections. The stated reason is support for ranchers.

The first Trump administration tried this in 2020 as well. A court reversed it, and in 2022 protections were restored across 48 states and Mexico.

California protects wolves under its own state endangered species act, and it's illegal here to hunt, pursue, harass, capture or kill one.

09/07/2026

Some thoughtful words to consider from the poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry, who died earlier this week. Here is his beautiful poem, Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



📷John Woodworth