Mountain West (CO ID MT NV UT WY)

"The state Department of Fish and Game last month hired a trapper to eliminate the pair of wolf packs from the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho, where wolves were imported from Canada in the mid-1990s in a bid to reintroduce the species to the Northern Rockies."

"An unprecedented wintertime outbreak of West Nile virus has killed more than two dozen bald eagles in Utah and thousands of water birds around the Great Salt Lake, state wildlife officials said on Tuesday."

"A controversial hunting contest in Idaho targeting wolves and coyotes has ended with nearly two dozen coyotes killed but no wolves shot, though rancor over the event remains undiminished."

"SALT LAKE CITY -- Bald eagles are dying in Utah - 20 in the past few weeks alone - and nobody can figure out why."

"A number of unexplained bald eagle deaths in Utah when hundreds of the government-protected birds have migrated to wintering grounds in the central Rocky Mountains has wildlife officials worried."

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- "A judge's order issued Tuesday evening has further muddied the already cloudy situation surrounding the fracking ban approved by Broomfield voters."

"Federal and state wildlife managers of grizzly bears in the Yellowstone National Park area recommended on Wednesday that U.S. Endangered Species Act protections be lifted for the animals, a decision that would open the way for them to be hunted."

"No other coal deposit on the planet is so big, so close to the surface, and so cheap to mine as the rich seams in eastern Wyoming and Southern Montana."