Becky Kramer

A Saturday memorial service will honor of the life of Dr. Maj StormoGipson, a local pediatrician who made frequent trips to Latin America to help people in need. StormoGipson, 57, died Friday in a rafting accident during a family outing on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The service is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. at the Kroc Center in Coeur d’Alene, 1765 W. Golf Course Road.

PLUMMER, Idaho – Peggy Mahoney always wanted to open a regalia store. She spent hours stitching intricate beadwork on the outfits that her husband and kids wore for powwows and other special occasions, and she knew plenty of other Native American families crafting heirloom-quality clothing that would patronize a local supplier.

As an adult osprey circled overhead, Wayne Melquist perched an extension ladder against a piling in Cougar Bay and scrambled up to the nest. “There’s two here – one big enough to band,” he called down to others in the pontoon boat. As Melquist attached an aluminum band to a wriggling young osprey’s leg, boat operator Ross Walkinshaw worked to keep the craft from rocking in the wind that swept across Lake Coeur d’Alene.

The wolf’s skull told a painful story. Teeth were broken and missing; the jawbone infected. An injury – probably caused by a kick to the wolf’s face – had also festered. Despite poor health, the gray wolf kept his status as alpha male of the Rose Creek pack until he died, probably of septicemia, said Sue Ware, a paleopathologist who works for Denver’s Museum of Nature and Science. A week before his death, tourists in Yellowstone National Park videoed him “hanging off the rear quarters of an elk,” Ware said.

LAMAR VALLEY, Wyo. – Seeing wolves for the first time left Jimmy Jones awestruck. Wolves were mythic, larger-than-life creatures to the 59-year-old Los Angeles resident. Yet there they were, two of them, chasing bison at Yellowstone National Park in 2005.

Seventy-five goats pushed past Reece Dobson as he opened the enclosure to a new area of pasture. Heads down, they tore into a thorny plant called prickly lettuce. Before they leave the enclosure, the goats will also munch their way through patches of spotted knapweed, dalmatian toadflax and other nonnative, invasive weeds.

BRIDGEPORT, Wash. – Cheers went up when Colville tribal fisherman Mylan Williams hauled a 20-pound chinook out of the Columbia River with a dip net. Then hats came off in a show of respect. Tribal elders circled the fish and sang, honoring the salmon that gave up its life to feed the people.

An Idaho State Police trooper shot and killed a man during a struggle over a handgun today along Interstate 90 at Lookout Pass, just west of the Idaho-Montana state line.

Ending federal protections for gray wolves could hinder dispersal of the keystone predators west of the Cascades, slowing or halting them from recolonizing suitable habitat in Western Washington and Oregon, Northwest conservation groups said Friday. They were reacting to the Obama administration’s proposal to lift federal protections for wolves in the Lower 48 states, with the exception of Mexican gray wolves in the Southwest. With more than 6,000 wolves roaming the Northern Rockies and western Great Lakes, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said the species nearly exterminated during the last century has successfully rebounded.