environment

Call it "canary in the smoke-choked city."

While people are struggling with the unhealthy air quality in Seattle, the animals are having similar issues.

When it comes to wildfires, the people of Wenatchee remember 2012.

The air was so choked with smoke that summer camps were canceled and kids kept inside. Clinics and drug stores ran out of masks.

Stay inside if you can.

With wildfire smoke billowing into the Seattle area from a number of fronts, that’s the advice of the Puget Sound Clean Agency.

The sky is ash gray; the lake is too.

Wenatchee and Chelan, popular summer destinations for middle class Seattleites, look like the end of the world right now. Like sets from the movie “Mad Max,” as smoke from nearby wildfires engulfs the area.

A judge in Seattle has dismissed a lawsuit from a group of children seeking to protect their generation from climate change.

Scientists have taken an unprecedented step to save one of the Salish Sea’s 75 endangered orcas: They tried to feed her in the wild.

A firefighter is being treated at a Seattle hospital after being burned in wildfire in eastern Washington.

Okanogan County fire officials said Brett Read, 38, was injured Saturday as he attempted to flee an unexpected flare-up of the Grass Valley Fire.

A grieving mother orca has finally let her dead calf go, ending her "tour of grief."

An extraordinary effort to feed a sick, young orca got underway Friday morning in the waters west of Bellingham.

Crews loaded 24 live chinook salmon into tanks aboard King County's Research Vessel SoundGuardian as well as the Lummi Nation police boat at Squalicum Harbor.

As scientists searched Salish sea waters for the young, emaciated orca known as J50, they spotted her relative, still carrying her dead calf.

J50 is alive.

The emaciated, 3 1/2-year-old orca had seemingly gone missing over the weekend, leading some biologists to worry that she may have died.

Plans were underway to feed the young whale with live salmon – possibly laced with medicine – or to inject her with antibiotics, in the hopes of saving the youngest orca in this endangered group.

Michael Milstein, a spokesman for NOAA, confirmed that the young orca was found west of Vancouver at the Port Renfrew near the west entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Boat crews were out again on Washington waters Tuesday looking for J50, the starving orca that’s part of the endangered Southern Resident killer whales that frequent the Pacific Northwest.

In late July, an orca calf died within half an hour of its birth. The mother carried the dead calf on her head for more than a week.

Now whale scientists and NOAA are weighing trying to feed live Chinook salmon to an emaciated 4-year-old orca or trying to inject her with an antibiotic.