The Wildlife Management Institute announces the launch of a new website designed to provide a wealth of information on the New England cottontail. The site provides landowners and the general public with information about the species and descriptions of habitat-creation projects that can help keep this brush-dwelling rabbit off the federal endangered species list. In addition, professional wildlife managers will find solid scientific information to assist with their management efforts. Partners in the effort to restore the New England cottontail include state and federal agencies, foundations, private individuals and businesses, towns and municipalities, nongovernmental organizations, land trusts, and Native American tribes. WMI coordinates the region-wide conservation effort.

The New England cottontail (Sylvilagus transitionalis) today exists in five separate subpopulations scattered across Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and southeastern New York ? less than a fifth of the species' historic range. New England cottontails need young forest and shrubland ? also called "early successional habitat" ? in tracts five acres and larger. Such habitat is dwindling throughout the Northeast as abandoned farmland grows into mature forest, development fragments natural lands, and humans suppress large-scale disturbances such as wildfires and beaver activities that once created large swaths of young regrowing forest on the landscape.

Restoring habitat for New England cottontails helps more than 40 other birds, mammals, and reptiles identified as "species of greatest conservation need." Such wildlife includes rare creatures like the golden-winged warbler and Canada lynx, as well as more common species such as the wood turtle, ruffed and spruce grouse, and snowshoe hare. Many other wildlife species, including ones that generally inhabit mature woodland, such as wild turkeys, black bears, and interior-forest songbirds, also rely on young forest during critical parts of their life cycles.

The new website joins a sister site, Timberdoodle.org, that describes the implementation of the American Woodcock Conservation Plan. This ambitious habitat-creation effort that has begun to reverse the population decline of the American woodcock, whose numbers have fallen by about 1% annually over the past fifty years. A third website, Youngforest.org, now under development, will further explain the importance of young forest habitat to a wide range of wildlife species. Visitors will be able to move freely between all three sites, learning about wildlife and their habitat requirements and finding out how best to create young forest on lands that they own or manage. (sjw)