Outdoor Notes : Group Threatens Calgary Boycott

An environmental group says it will organize a boycott of the 1988 Olympic Winter Games at Calgary, Canada, if the Alberta provincial government proceeds with plans to kill wolves near Jasper National Park.

“We do have a target in Alberta and that’s the Olympics,” said Paul Watson, head of Friends of the Wolf.

He said he will go to Alberta and use an airplane to interfere with any government biologist trying to shoot wolves from the air. During a previous aerial wolf hunt in northern British Columbia, Watson threatened a similar boycott against Expo 86.

He said he also helped end the hunt by flying an airplane between a government biologist armed with a rifle in a helicopter and a wolf pack.

In a confidential document obtained by the Calgary Herald, Janet Edmonds, an Alberta government biologist, recommended killing 70% of the wolves in the Grande Cache-Willmore area north of Jasper park.

Edmonds said wolves have been killing too many of the province’s threatened woodland caribous. She said that shooting the predators from the air is the most humane and efficient way to kill them.

She also said that the killings were part of a comprehensive caribou restoration plan that has elements conservation groups favor, including preserving their habitat, and reducing poaching, highway and railway kills.

Biologist Dennis Bedford of the Department of Fish and Game has scored a first in his billfish monitoring project.

Bedford’s group, working in conjunction with the National Marine Fisheries Service, tagged and tracked a swordfish for the first time in California waters. The fish, tagged 20 miles off Dana Point Nov. 8, traveled seven miles in the 24 hours it was tracked.

Bedford hopes that his project will reveal behavior of both marlin and swordfish, migration routes, time spent by billfish in California waters and their vulnerability to fishing gear.

A structure that used to help fishermen in one way may shortly be helping them in another.

The old San Pedro viaduct, a bridge that many anglers used to get to the 22nd Street sportfishing landings, has been demolished, and the rubble produced by the demolition is being dumped into water 70 to 100 feet deep off Huntington Beach. Biologists say that the reef formed by the 10,000 tons of clean concrete rubble will soon become a veritable hotbed of marine life and fishing activity.

According to John Grant, marine habitat development coordinator for the DFG and an artificial reef expert, the reef is being built in a relatively barren sandy area that previously offered few opportunities for recreational fishermen.

The Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners approved fishing regulation changes in the minimum size and limit for bass on waters of the Colorado River system.

Beginning Jan. 1, the bag limit for largemouth bass on lakes Mead and Mohave will be six, with no minimum size limit. The minimum 13-inch size limit on largemouths in the river below Davis Dam will be dropped.

The commission also authorized the continuation of spear-fishing for striped bass in Mead and Mohave beyond Dec. 31, the date it was to have ended.

Briefly A plan to plant striped bass in San Diego County’s San Vicente Lake has been postponed so that the DFG can buy and install an aeration system in the lake. The purpose of the striper planting was to evaluate the impact that striped bass would have on other species of fish in the lake. . . . California marine life funds will be increased by $340,000, thanks to a $1.7-million out-of-court settlement resulting from the explosion of the oil tanker Puerto Rican near San Francisco in 1984. The explosion killed marine life and damaged the near-shore environment of Bodega Bay, where spilled oil came ashore. . . . Morro Bay has been reopened for the recreational gathering of oysters, clams and mussels. . . . Rewards offered by government agencies and individuals for information about the killing of a mature bald eagle on the Verde River near Needles Rock in Arizona in late October now total about $5,000. Anyone with such information may call Operation Game Thief at (800) 352-0700.

Nine peregrine falcons that were bred in captivity were recently released in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains as part of a continuing project to establish a breeding population there. . . . A field of 250 professional bass fishermen will compete for $80,000 in cash and merchandise at the U.S. Bass Lake Mead Draw tournament Saturday and Sunday. . . . The last marlin of the Catalina Island 1968 fishing tournament was caught by Ted Royal. Although more anglers participated in this year’s tournament than last year’s, only 150 billfish were weighed in. The tournament runs annually from Easter weekend through the first Sunday in November. . . . Showtime: Don Bullock’s Gun/Knife & Collectors’ Show, Anaheim Convention Center, Dec. 6-7.