by Bob Marshall

Sportsmen's groups got some new ammunition in their fight against the energy industry's push to open more public fish and wildlife habitat to development: A new Department of Interior report shows that 70 percent of public areas under lease by energy companies currently are "inactive" - meaning they are neither producing energy or part of an approved or pending development plans.

This helps put the lie to claims by energy's friends in Congress that public lands "locked up" for fish and wildlife are creating a supply problem causing high gas prices.

--Chad Love

As if the news that spending time outside is good for your kids' eyesight wasn't enough incentive to push them outdoors, it now appears that thinking outside the (X)box, and good teachers, make your kids better at science, too.

From this story on Time.com:
...He went on to a successful career as a principal and is retiring this summer, but would no doubt be happy to know that today’s science teachers seem to be having an impact on kids, too, according to science achievement-test data released yesterday.

by Bob Marshall

Are they crazy or brilliant?

That's a question Trout Unlimited and a growing number of sportsmen are asking about the House leadership after it launched yet another attempt to block a proposed new wetlands guidance that could restore protection to millions of acres of wetlands, including headwaters of trout streams across the West.

The latest effort comes from the House Appropriations Committee, which voted along party lines for a measure that would prevent the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from spending any money to implement the guidance, expected to be issued by the Obama Administration in the next few months.

Two House GOP budgets previously contained similar policy directives, neither of which made it through Congress. But the fact this try came so late in the game – and from a different vector – makes many conservationists nervous.

--Chad Love

Two Utah wingnuts are behind bars after setting a series of bizarre booby traps on a popular hiking trail. Then (as all master criminals seem to do these days) they bragged about it on Facebook.
 
From this story on Gawker.com:
 
Two men whose parents did not raise them well have been arrested in Utah after allegedly setting up potentially deadly homemade booby traps to ensnare travelers along a popular hiking trail. One of the traps was designed to send a tripped victim tumbling into a bed of pointy wooden stakes protruding from the ground. Another, pictured above, was to be triggered via a fishing line trip wire; when crossed, it would send a 20-pound boulder, to which several sharpened spikes had been affixed with what looks to be just tons and tons and tons of rope, speeding at a victim's head. The traps were set around the entrance to a makeshift wooden shelter used by hikers as a sleepover and campfire site.