Over the last year, chronic wasting disease (CWD) has been found in one new state, whereas four previously affected states have seen small increases in their CWD-positive regions, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

Surveillance

The double-barreled blow of high corn prices and the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) decision to suspend general enrollment opportunities for the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), does not bode well for wildlife, according to the Wildlife Management Institute.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will cut 565 of its staff on national wildlife refuges nationwide by 2009, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. Several years of stagnant or declining budgets have exacerbated a backlog in refuge operations and maintenance of more than $2.5 billion, forcing the dramatic 20-percent reduction in staff.

To benefit grassland birds and agriculture, Tennessee conservationists are providing key leadership for the restoration of native grasses in the Southeast, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. Native grasslands and savannahs once were common throughout much of the region, but 99 percent of them have been eliminated. The Northern Bobwhite Conservation Initiative (NBCI) has identified the restoration of native grass/forb communities across most of the bobwhite range as the primary management objective for recovery of sustainable quail populations.

A multi-year effort by several agencies and citizen organizations to save important habitats along the Rio Grande in New Mexico would receive a needed boost in funding if federal legislation introduced recently in Congress is passed, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

Next week, Richard Louv will be a keynoter at the Opening Session of the 72nd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, in Portland, Oregon. His remarks will center on the subject of his best-selling book, Last Child in the Woods, a really important volume and a much better read that you might expect. But that's not the title reviewed here. Instead, I want to tell you about a book I read and thoroughly enjoyed shortly after its release in 2000, and which I just reread and liked even more.