The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed their version of a federal highway bill in mid-March by a vote of 74-22, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. The "Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century," or MAP-21 bill (S. 1813), authorizing $109 billion in total spending over the next two years, is more limited in scope than previous highway bills that have typically been authorized for five or six years.

An outbreak of avian cholera has killed 10,000 to 15,000 ducks and geese in the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge complex, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. Most of the affected species are snow and Ross' geese, pintail ducks, and coots.

As the next Farm Bill is developed, a core issue will be inclusion of conservation compliance language, according to the Wildlife Management institute. First established in the 1980's, conservation compliance is the application of a set of minimum conservation practices that farmers must implement on sensitive lands in order to participate in some federal farm subsidy programs.

Revered waterfowl biologist and consummate conservationist Robert "Bob" Blohm was honored with the Wildlife Management Institute's (WMI) 2012 George Bird Grinnell Memorial Award for Distinguished Service to Natural Resource Conservation. The award was conferred last month during the annual Conservation Administrators Luncheon at the 77^th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

A national Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) workshop held in Denver in late March had 350 conservation professionals in attendance, according to the Wildlife Management Institute. The purpose of the workshop was to advance the evolution of the LCC network by providing a forum for the LCCs and partners to share and discuss landscape conservation tools, approaches, challenges, and successes.

The Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies' Mule Deer Working Group (MDWG) recently released two new publications to help managers improve monitoring of the species and deal with the rapid expansion of energy development in the west. The MDWG also completed a documentary titled "Mule Deer: Saving the Icon of the West" that is now showing on the Sportsman Channel. Each of these outreach materials is helping to spread the word about the status of mule deer and what is being done to reverse the declines in deer numbers, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.