Outdoor News Bulletin

In graduate school, a professor of mine posed a question one afternoon that has stuck with me ever since. He asked, if Charles Darwin had not described the process of natural selection, would someone else have figured it out? The room split. I answered yes. Natural selection seemed so intuitive to me, so cleanly mechanical, so obviously how the system had to work, that I could not imagine the idea remaining undiscovered for long. Plenty of my classmates disagreed. They argued that the concept was so far outside the human-centered view of time that the leap was much harder than I was crediting. Without Darwin, or without someone else who happened to have his particular cast of mind, the leap might have waited another century.

Wildlife Management Institute Vice President Scot Williamson retired April 3, 2026, after 32 years of service to the organization. Prior to joining WMI as the Northeast field representative in 1994, Scot was deer project leader for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and big game program director for Texas Parks and Wildlife. As field representative, Scot quickly saw the need for projects that spanned state and international boundaries and helped state and federal initiatives with fundraising, contract management, project oversight, and communications.

The Wildlife Management Institute (WMI) and its partners have created a forum to create a refined set of Foundational Elements of Fish and Wildlife Conservation that is current and forward-looking. The link below takes you to a questionnaire that seeks to gain insights from practitioners, policymakers, and academics about what policy items each person believes important to include in a future list of Foundational Elements. To date, we have received over 900 responses. Please consider adding your thoughts to this effort before the questionnaire closes on May 31, 2026.

Alabama’s Gulf Coast is explored by nearly 8 million visitors each year. Among those visitors are the state’s native-nesting sea turtles and their emerging hatchlings. Classified as Threatened or Endangered under the U.S Endangered Species Act, the sea turtle species along Alabama’s Gulf Coast are at the center of a major research effort to support sea turtle population recovery.