No golf when hawk's around, the flower really stinks, twinpalooza

LARAMIE, Wyo. — A mini golf course in Laramie is once again doing business after aggressive hawks caused a temporary closure.

The Casper Star-Tribune reports that Lisa Poledna put a sign reading "closed due to angry hawk" outside her business, Oasis Golf, when parents of at least two nesting baby hawks became aggressively protective.

She says in her 10 years of owning the course, hawks have never been so aggressive that she has to hide from the dive-bombing birds.

The course is open now that the babies are older and their parents are less protective.

Wyoming Game and Fish Laramie regional wildlife coordinator Corey Class says the parents probably didn't know they'd picked such a crowded nesting spot, and that Poledna just has to wait them out.

ALBUQUERQUE — The creation of the atomic bomb in a New Mexico secret city and newly restored and declassified footage will be featured in a new PBS special released as the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches.

"The Bomb," which begins airing this week on most PBS stations, seeks to tell the story of a weapon that transformed history and continues to affect relationships among dueling world powers.

Filmmaker Rushmore DeNooyer said the project took a year and half to complete, since producers had to comb through footage and images only recently declassified by the U.S. Department of Defense.

That footage showed the "ironic beauty" of mushroom clouds detonating over the New Mexico desert and the Pacific while posing a serious threat, DeNooyer said.

"We're trying to take 70 years of history and tell it in two hours," DeNooyer said. "We probably spent the first six months just researching and reading."

The first atomic bomb test — the Trinity Test — took place in the southern New Mexico desert as part of the Manhattan Project, the secretive World War II program that provided enriched uranium for the atomic bomb.

The project involved three research and production facilities: Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington.

"Everything was hush-hush ... go where you are told," said retired U.S. Army engineer and Trinity witness Roger Rasmussen. "They knew exactly who I was and why I was there. And that was better than I knew."

For years, only grainy black and white video footages of scientists working at the Trinity site and the blast were available to the general public. But DeNooyer and producers got access to a color-home video shot by a Los Alamos scientist, depicting life in the secret town. They also added color to old images and footage, providing a new way to look at the Trinity Test.

The film also shows the horrific effect on Japanese citizens and discusses John Henry's 1946 New Yorker essay on the victims of Hiroshima that shaped public opinion on the threat of nuclear weapons.

Besides the Trinity Test and bombings of Japan on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, the film examines post-World War II nuclear tests and Cold War tensions, including the Cuban Missile Crisis.

DeNooyer said he believed the film was important given today's debate over the Iran nuclear agreement and fears that terrorists groups might try to obtain a nuclear bomb.

"We should care about it because the bomb is still there," DeNooyer said. "The danger is that we don't really think about it as much anymore. But we still have enough (bombs) to destroy human civilization."

BOZEMAN, Mont.— Three sets of fraternal twins were born on the same day at a Bozeman hospital — adding up to more than half of the hospital's births that day.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports  the first of the trio of twins was born at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital at 7:49 a.m. on July 22. The other two sets followed over the next seven hours, making it the first time in a decade the hospital has seen so many twins born in a day.

First-time parents Dustin and Davya Jackson say twins run in both their families, so it was almost inevitable when they found out they were having both Sonja Ryann and Landon Lee.

Including the three twins, 11 babies were born at the hospital that day.

BOISE, Idaho — More than a quarter million sockeye salmon returning from the ocean to spawn are either dead or dying in the Columbia River and its tributaries due to warming water temperatures.

Federal and state fisheries biologists say the warm water is lethal for the cold-water species and is wiping out at least half of this year's return of 500,000 fish.

"We had a really big migration of sockeye," said Ritchie Graves of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The thing that really hurts is we're going to lose a majority of those fish."

He said up to 80 percent of the population could ultimately perish.

Elsewhere in the region, state fisheries biologists in Oregon say more than 100 spring chinook died earlier this month in the Middle Fork of the John Day River when water temperatures hit the mid-70s. Oregon and Washington state have both enacted sport fishing closures due to warm water, and sturgeon fishing in the Columbia River upstream of Bonneville Dam has been halted after some of the large, bottom dwelling fish started turning up dead.

Efforts by management teams to cool flows below 70 degrees by releasing cold water from selected reservoirs are continuing in an attempt to prevent similar fish kills among chinook salmon and steelhead, which migrate later in the summer from the Pacific Ocean.

The fish become stressed at temperatures above 68 degrees and stop migrating at 74 degrees. Much of the basin is at or over 70 degrees due to a combination that experts attribute to drought and record heat in June.

"The tributaries are running hot," Graves said. "A lot of those are in the 76-degree range."

In Idaho, an emergency declaration earlier this month allowed state fisheries managers to capture endangered Snake River sockeye destined for central Idaho and take them to a hatchery to recover in cooler water. Of the 4,000 fish that passed Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, less than a fourth made it to Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake River. An average year is 70 percent.

"Right now it's grim for adult sockeye," said Russ Kiefer of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. He said sockeye will often pull into tributary rivers in search of cooler water, but aren't finding much relief.

"They're running out of energy reserves, and we're getting a lot of reports of fish dead and dying," he said.

Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead are listed as endangered or threatened in the Columbia River basin.

Don Campton of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said fish congregating in confined areas trying to find cool water makes them a target for pathogens.

"When temperatures get warm, it does stress the fish out and they become susceptible to disease," he said.

Graves said that this year's flow in the Columbia River is among the lowest in the last 60 years. But he said the system has experienced similar low flows without the lethal water temperatures. He said the difference this year has been prolonged hot temperatures, sometimes more than 100 degrees, in the interior part of the basin.

"The flow is abnormally low, but on top of that we've had superhot temperatures for a really long time," he said.