Wildlife Management Institute

The Program Steering Committee for the 75th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference has announced the event’s four Special Sessions.  The Conference will be held March 22-27, 2010, at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Special Sessions will be held concurrently on Wednesday, March 24.  They will follow the Conference’s Opening Session that morning.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed its version of a comprehensive energy and climate change bill on May 21, by a vote of 33-25, largely along party lines.  The American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is intended to move the country towards a clean energy economy through a comprehensive approach to energy policy built largely around an emissions “cap and trade” program.  Components of the bill include a 20-percent national renewable energy and efficiency standard by 2020 along with numerous programs to encourage energy efficiency and conservation.  Another component of special interest to the conservation community is a reliable funding source for natural resource adaptation, which could top $4 billion by 2030, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. 

Papers presented during the workshop “Predators and Prey: Integrating Management to Achieve Conservation Objectives,” held during the 72^nd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, have been posted to the Websites of the cosponsoring organizations, the Safari Club International Foundation (SCIF) and the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI).  In addition, the papers were published in the Transactions of the 72^nd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference.

Research released in this month’s Journal of Mammalogy suggests that, if polar bears adapt their summer diets, they may be able to survive through longer periods without sea ice.  The study evaluated whether alternative foods that polar bears have been documented eating opportunistically during summer months could provide the energy the bears need to survive and reproduce.  Researchers Markus Dyck and Ermias Kebreab suggest that these foods could sustain polar bears if the bears would change behavior and adapt to eating those foods as primary sources, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

My dog is a German wirehaired pointer.  He’s considered a “versatile” dog.  His registered name is Half-fast Bandit, but goes by Bandit, and he looks a lot like Prussian King Wilhelm I.  Now that he is too old to be a first-rate upland bird dog, he has exhibited his versatility by collecting eastern box turtles from the woods around my house.  I find that weird and suspect the turtles do, too.

It turns out, according to Bryan Christy, collection of turtles for fun or profit isn’t an unusual pastime.  For that matter, Christy insinuates that collecting herptiles for fun isn’t particularly weird and, done for profit, it has been altogether epidemic.  So too, for amphibians and reptiles.  His book, The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers is an eye opener about slimy life forms.  Those would be the smugglers of rare and endangered snakes, turtles, lizards and whatever else shows up on well-intentioned CITES lists that serve to keep the bad guys apprised of what’s really valuable.