Publication archives

Pine plantings tumbled 12 percent across the South in 2005, slumping to their lowest level in years, but a flurry of planting in the late '80s left the nation's leading timber-producing region with plenty of trees for lumber, paper making and a source of alternative fuels, experts say.

High overhead on many of these spring nights the dark skies are filled with unseen flocks of migrating birds, sturdy travelers winging their way back to the Upper Midwest from Mexico and Central and South America and other points south.

Some fourth-graders at Madison's Marquette Elementary School got to see something Wednesday they likely never will again - Principal Joy Larson wearing a boa. Not the fluffy, feathery kind, mind you. The 45-pound, 8-foot boa draped around Larson's neck and shoulders was scaly and very much alive.

The number of butterflies migrating through the state has fallen to a nearly 40-year low as populations already hurt by habitat loss and climate change encountered a cold, wet spring, researchers said.

Get ready for a new kind of firefight in Western skies this summer, with a 747 jumbo jet taking on a hulking DC-10. Evergreen International Aviation of McMinnville is betting about $40 million on the 747. That's how much the company known for flying cargo airplanes around the world has spent equipping a 747 to spew retardant on raging wildfires.

A new historical account of the Tongass National Forest contains literally hundreds of surprising facts about the "good old days" of logging on Alaska's Panhandle. Some Panhandle historians and economists who have read drafts of Jim Mackovjak's 540-page manuscript - which he is now trying to publish as a reference book - say it is a revelation.

Concern about global warming, energy conservation and rapid depletion of the Earth's nonrenewable resources has not gone unheeded in the building industry in the United States.

A dozen disease-resistant Asiatic elm trees were planted Friday at the State Fairgrounds to mark Arbor Day and kick off this year's effort to buy more trees to replace ones that were lost.