wildlife management

Already more than a decade in the planning, California’s proposal to build two massive tunnels stretching 35 miles beneath the Sacramento River delta has received an important green light from federal wildlife experts.

With enrollment in the land-idling Conservation Reserve nearing its statutory limit of 24 million acres, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced revisions in the program to protect water quality and to benefit wildlife, pollinators and wetlands. Under one of the changes, USDA will pay up to 90 percent of the cost of environmentally beneficial practices, such as bioreactors and saturated buffers that clean up run-off from drainage lines running beneath cropland.

The rampant destruction of rainforest by the Indonesian palm-oil industry is leaving villagers with few options but to poach species like the Helmeted Hornbill to extinction, says Jocelyn Zuckerman in FERN’s latest story, published with Audubon Magazine.

Voters in Texas will decide today whether to amend the state constitution to specify "the right to hunt, fish and harvest wildlife, including by use of traditional means," subject to game laws. The proposed amendment, Proposition 6, also says, "Hunting and fishing are the preferred methods of managing and controlling wildlife."