The Cass County Conservation Board is holding Sweethearts Snowshoe Hike. The Sweetheart Snowshoe Hike will be held at the Pellett Memorial Woods outside of Atlantic, IA on Friday, February 15th 2019 at 7 PM. Come out for a great night hike, who knows what nature has waiting for us then! Snowshoes (variety of sizes) will be available. Drive the short drive and hike off that dinner! The event WILL be CANCELLED with “NO SNOW!”

Owl Prowl Hike
The Cass County Conservation Board is holding Owl Prowl Hike. The Owl Prowl hike will be held at the Pellett Memorial Woods Park north of Atlantic, IA on Saturday February 16th 2019 at 7 PM. Come out for a great night hike, who knows what nature has waiting for us then! We will hike and try to call in various species of Owls that may be in the park that night! All ages welcome!

Montgomery County will host a Seed Treatment Continuing Instruction Course (CIC) for commercial pesticide applicators, Wednesday, February 27, 2019. The program will be shown at locations across Iowa through the Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Pesticide Safety Education Program (PSEP). The local attendance site is the Montgomery County Extension and Outreach Office at 400 Bridge Street, Suite 2, Red Oak, IA 51566. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m., and the course runs from 9 to 11 a.m. The registration fee is $35 on or before Feb. 20 and $45 after Feb. 20. To register or to obtain additional information about the CIC, contact Katie Hart at the ISU Extension and Outreach office in Montgomery County by phoning (712) 623-2592.

The course will provide continuing instruction credit for commercial pesticide applicators certified in categories 4 and 10. Topics to be covered include recognition of sensitive areas as potentially impacted by pesticides, pests, pest management, and pesticides, pesticide labels, and seed treatment equipment. Certified Crop Advisor (CCA) Continuing Education Units (CEUs) will be offered. Interested participants should bring their CCA number to the program.

Additional information and registration forms for this and other courses offered by the PSEP team can be accessed at www.extension.iastate.edu/PSEP/.

(Radio Iowa) — A district judge in Muscatine approved a 50 million dollar settlement Tuesday in a class action pollution case. Some 15-thousand neighbors of the Grain Processing Corporation’s plant can qualify for individual payouts after G-P-C was accused of polluting south Muscatine with haze, odors and particles. Bob Weatherman is one of the residents involved in the lawsuit. “You can’t enjoy your property when things like this happen. So…it’s a deprivement of your rights. So I think they’ve made a good decision in pointing that out to industry,” Weatherman says.

Those who saw the greatest impacts could get as much as 16-thousand dollars each. The judge called the settlement extraordinary and lawyers say the money could change lives.
Sarah Siskind was on the legal team for the neighbors. She says environmentalists across the country have been watching the case. “People are looking to this case now as an inspiration for other cases as a tool for environmental remediation for ordinary people who leave near an industrial area,” Siskind says.

Residents who lived within a mile and a half of the plant between 2007 and 2017 have until March 19th to apply for a payout.

w/Kate Olson.

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COUNCIL BLUFFS – A family friendly trout fishing event will be held at Big Lake this Saturday, Feb. 9 at 2:30 p.m. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will stock 1,000 rainbow trout in the lake. Previously scheduled for Jan. 19, the stocking was postponed due to unsafe ice conditions.  Anglers must have a valid fishing license and pay the trout fee to fish for or possess trout.  The daily limit is five trout per licensed angler with a possession limit of 10.  Children age 15 or younger can fish for trout with a properly licensed adult, but they must limit their catch to one daily limit.  The child can buy a trout fee which will allow them to catch their own limit of five trout.

This free event is sponsored by Woods Sporting Goods, Bass Pro Shops, Walmart, Council Bluffs Parks and Recreation and the Iowa DNR.

(Radio Iowa) — An Iowa State University science professor has launched a citizen science project — looking for people to help her catalog thousands of species in a collection at northwest Iowa’s lakeside lab. Lori Biederman is looking for people to help transcribe thousands of labels that belong to plant and animal specimens that will then be put in a database accessible to people around the world. Biederman says Iowa has lost a lot of biodiversity over the years. Many of the specimens are from the late 1800s or early 1900s and clue us into the past. “This is a way to get a measure of what was here before humans really started cultivating wide scale, or building cities, taking over the lake,” according to Biederman.

She says the database will help people learn more about diverse species whose populations have declined over time. “You may not see an indigo bunting anymore in your daily life but you could see this was an indigo bunting and it was caught in Iowa. It’s an Iowa thing,” according to Biederman.  The citizen science initiative has already attracted nearly 300 volunteers. Biederman found close to seven thousand preserved specimens of birds, mammals and plants at the lab in the Iowa Great Lakes area. She learned many of the records cataloging the specimens had been lost or never existed in the first place.

(Thanks to Katie Peikes, Iowa Public Radio)

(Radio Iowa) — Iowa-based researchers have concluded there’s little scientific evidence that sound from wind turbines poses a public health risk. Instead, the authors say reported symptoms of hearing loss or poor sleep are more likely related to people’s attitudes about wind development. The findings by the Iowa Policy Project and the Iowa Environmental Council are based on an overview of peer-reviewed studies. Co-author David Osterberg says reports of symptoms are associated with annoyance at developers rather than the actual sound of the turbines.

“Maybe you ought to think about how you treat people so they feel like they have more control over the whole process,” Osterberg says. “That would probably do more than trying to address the sound because we don’t think it’s the sound.” Wind turbines produce sound pressure, but Osterberg and his research associations concluded it’s not at a level that affects humans.

(Radio Iowa) — Ancient, unusual and a tongue-twister — just a few of the words Iowa lawmakers are using to describe a pre-historic weapon that’s made its way onto the pages of proposed legislation. A three-member panel of senators took up a bill this week that would let people use what’s essentially a spear-thrower to hunt deer in Iowa. The name of this weapon is a little weird. Pronouncing it properly is a challenge. “No, we don’t seem to have an agreement on that.” That is Senator Tom Shipley. He admits there was a good bit of laughter as senators in a subcommittee took at shot at it. “Everybody seems to know what we’re talking about when we mumble through it,” Shipley says. It’s called an atlatl (at-LAT-ull). That is the preferred pronunciation from hunters who’ve posted videos about the weapon online.

Archaeologists believe the atlatl was first used in North America about 13-thousand years ago. The bow-and-arrow began replacing the atalt for hunting about three-thousand years ago. Senator Shipley, who is from Corning, says some hunters from his area asked if hunting deer in Iowa with an atlatl could be legalized. “I looked into it and realized that two of our neighboring states close to me — Nebraska and Missouri — allow it,” Shipley said. Alabama does, too. So, Shipley’s sponsoring a bill to do the same in Iowa. “These things have been used for thousands of years to hunt with, so it’s probably the oldest form out there,” Shipley says.

According to the World Atlatl Association, atlatls are one of humankind’s first mechanical inventions. The atlatl is “essentially a stick with a handle on one end.” There’s a socket at the other. The spear is placed in that socket and “the flipping motion of the atlatl propels the spear much faster and farther than it could be thrown by hand alone.” As for whether it’s an effective hunting weapon, Shipley offers this opinion: “It’s just like everything else. It depends on who’s on the other end of it.”

Atlatls have long been legal to use in Alaska for spearing fish and big game animals.

w/Denny Heflin.

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(Radio Iowa) — Leaders of a group that’s been critical of industrial farming say they’ll again push Iowa legislators to ban any expansion or new construction of confined animal feeding operations. Jess Mazour of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, says they’ve been asking for changes in existing state rules for where large-scale livestock barns may be built. “We’ve given the DNR and the legislature ample opportunities to make small tweaks and improvements to our permitting system for factory farms here in Iowa and they’ve taken every opportunity to just dismiss or avoid or not pass anything to approve changes,” Mazour says. “We’re going to go for a moratorium this year. It’s going to be our big bill.”

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement helped form a coalition of groups last year to lobby for a moratorium. Mazour says the group believes it’s important to prevent expansion of existing facilities as well as a moratorium on construction of new livestock confinements. “That way we have a two-prong thing,” she says. “We need to stop the expansion of the factory farm industry here in Iowa through a moratorium, and then for the existing 10,000-plus facilities that we have in the state, we need strong Clean Water Act implementation to hold them accountable to protecting our water.”

Mazour says they’re targeting larger facilities in two categories. “For our definition of a factory farm, sometimes we can go by numbers. So medium and large facilities are any facilities that, for hogs, is 1,250 hogs or more,” Mazour says. “If you go by animal units, which takes into account all different kinds of animals, that would be 500 A.U. or above.” Mazour says the primary motivating factor is keeping one of Iowa’s most vital resources, our waterways, safe from pollution. “The other thing that’s really important to us is it’s not just about the size, it’s about the fact that these are no longer independent family farms,” she says. “These are corporate integrated sites.”

Critics of a moratorium say it would hurt Iowa’s rural economy. The Coalition to Support Iowa’s Farmers says there is already a “maze of state and federal regulations” producers must navigate before building a new livestock barn.