How should researchers measure the populations of migratory birds? Researchers developed an idea around a campfire that was put to the test for the first time in Bosque Del Apache earlier this month, according to the University of New Mexico.
Each winter, wildlife managers must count migratory waterfowl as they fly down into refuges. However, this is a difficult task that involves scaring birds into the air by flying past them in airplanes.
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U.S. congressmen are pushing back against a proposed rule listing Rio Grande mussels as an endangered species.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed this new rule on July 25th, 2023 that would list the Salina mucket and the Mexican fawnsfoot mussels as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently announced a $5.1 million investment initiative for endangered species recovery implementation efforts for four focal species groups.
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The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay a Biological Opinion, a type of permit, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), according to Reuters. The Wednesday decision allows construction of the 303 mile natural gas pipeline to go forward while the courts consider the merits of other legal challenges to the pipeline.
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by Richard McCarty It is well-known that the federal government has a spending problem, but it is less well-known that the government also has a hoarding a problem. As most Western state residents know, the federal government likes to hoard land. Unfortunately, it has not shown itself to be capable of managing the land that it holds. This hoarding impedes economic growth, and federal land mismanagement allows catastrophic fires that unnecessarily endanger lives and property. To address this problem, Congress should stop appropriating funds to buy more land and direct the administration to begin selling off unneeded federal lands to the private sector or turn the land over to lower levels of government that are closer to the people. Just how much land does the federal government own? It turns out that the federal government owns so much land that it does not even know exactly how much it owns. According to a report issued this year by the Congressional Research Service, “The total federal land in the United States is not definitively known.” The government’s “rough estimate” is that it owns 640 million acres, which is equivalent to one million square miles. To put that in perspective, 640 million…
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