For migrant birds in North America, 2011 emerged with a startling truth?things that go "boom" in the night can kill you. On New Year's Eve in Beebe, Arkansas, more than 3,000 red-winged blackbirds and migrating birds of several other species tumbled from a night sky lit with fireworks. Preliminary necropsy reports from the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC) in Madison, Wisconsin, have confirmed "impact trauma" as the culprit in the bizarre event, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

Feeding Wildlife?Just Say NO! has been reprinted and again is available to state and provincial wildlife agencies, conservation and sportsmen's organizations, businesses and individuals who want facts and perspective on the serious issue of supplemental feeding of wildlife, particularly big game.

On December 23^rd, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar issued a Secretarial Order (Order No. 3310) directing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to manage public lands with wilderness characteristics as Wild Lands. The Order calls for the BLM to develop a process for conducting wilderness inventories and considering lands with wilderness characteristics in land-use planning and project-level decisions, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

On January 7, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced a new initiative through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to conserve working lands and protect wildlife habitat in the headwaters of the Florida Everglades. The proposal would create a new national wildlife refuge and conservation area of approximately 150,000 acres of important environmental and cultural landscapes in the Kissimmee River Valley south of Orlando.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced the funding recipients through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's 2011 National Coastal Wetlands Conservation Grant Program on December 22. Twenty-four projects protecting coastal habitats on nearly 6,000 acres in 12 states will be awarded a total of more than $19 million, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. An additional $21 million in matching funds from local partners, including state and local governments, conservation organizations and private landowners will augment the federal grants.

In the history classes of our Junior High yesteryears, we learned of a vague sometime called the Dust Bowl era. Amid the doodles in high school textbooks, we looked at Harry Eisenhard photographs of weathered American nomads in frayed coveralls, traversing rippled sand dunes and bent against gale-force winds. We gazed at surreal images of an inland hurricane known as Black Sunday.