Nearly 30 hunting/conservation organizations have urged Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to make greater use of the Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (CFWRU) research and training partnership in carrying out cooperative conservation efforts to meet this nation's pressing future natural resource challenges, reports the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI).

Recent research at Colorado State University (CSU) and published in the journal Science (vol. 314: 133-136) suggests that chronic wasting disease (CWD) can be spread from one animal to another through their saliva, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

In 2005, the North American Grouse Partnership secured a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Grant to develop grassland conservation plans for greater and lesser prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse-flagship species of prairie ecosystems and conservation planning. These grassland plans feature an ecosystem diversity approach to identify areas of the landscape on which to focus quality and quantity grassland habitat management efforts and to develop monitoring strategies to determine changes in prairie grouse populations.

On October 12, President Bush signed the Great Lakes Fish and Wildlife Restoration Act of 2006 (S. 2430) into law, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. The bill was cosponsored in the Senate by Mike Dewine (OH) and Carl Levin (MI) and in the House by Dale Kildee (MI) and Mark Kirk (IL). As reported in the August issue of this newsletter, S. 2430 doubles the existing authorization for fish and wildlife management activities in the Great Lakes states from $8 million to $16 million. Actual funding levels will be determined by Congress later this year.

Who among us hasn't yearned to live a carefree, self-sufficient life in the wilderness, far from traffic, televangelism, election blather, cell phones, Paris Hilton updates and rap music, among other daily inflictions here in dense America? Who among us hasn't thought wistfully of escaping to the frontier, any frontier, to hunt, fish, trap, gather and generally be organic and at peace? Who among us hasn't decided to do all that maybe next year?

Marley & Me (2005) is about a hunting dog that wasn't. Marley is a male yellow Labrador retriever. Me is John Grogan, a professional and talented scribe...talented enough, that is, to take a standard issue self-indulgent, tragicomical family pet story and turn it into a New York Times bestseller.