March 17, 2017

Senator's Idea to Enhance Conservation in the Farm Bill
By Senator John Thune/Rapid City Journal
Photo by Daniel Brock/flickr
After months of collecting feedback from farmers and other agriculture stakeholders, I've introduced a new farm bill program that's intended to protect farmers' income in these tough economic times. My bill, the Soil Health and Income Protection Program (SHIPP), is an economic assistance tool that offers several conservation benefits. SHIPP will not compete with or replace the popular Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), but would be a voluntary alternative for farmers who don't want to tie up their land for long periods of time.

Most farmers are familiar with CRP. It's a good, common-sense program that provides a long-term benefit to farmers, wildlife, and the environment. It creates a safe and healthy habitat for South Dakota's pheasant population, which has an exponential impact on the state's economy. But in order to enroll land in CRP, farmers must be willing to commit to a lengthy contract of up to 15 years. SHIPP, on the other hand, would give farmers the flexibility they need to plant their least productive cropland to a soil-enhancing, low-cost perennial conserving use crop for three, four, or five years. In return, they would receive an annual rental payment and additional crop insurance assistance.

Technology, like yield maps, for example, can help many farmers identify their poorest producing land. Other farmers know certain areas of their fields are less productive than others because of consistently excessive wetness, dryness, or other yield-reducing factors.
Drones Keep Watchful Eyes on Wildlife in Africa
By Rachel Nuwer/The New York Times
Photo by Diana Robinson/flickr
Night has fallen at Malawi's Liwonde National Park, but the trespassers are clearly visible. Three hundred feet in the air, a thermal camera attached to a BatHawk drone tracks their boat, a black sliver gliding up the luminous gray Shire River.

"They're breaking the law by coming into the park," said Antoinette Dudley, one of the drone's operators, pointing to her computer screen.

More than two miles from the boat, she and her partner, Stephan De Necker, are seated in a Land Cruiser that serves as their command center. A monitor attached to the driver's seat displays the drone's vitals, and another behind the passenger's seat streams live video from the camera, operated with an old PlayStation console.

"Let's give them a scare," said Mr. De Necker. With the tap of a few keys, he switches on the drone's navigation lights and sends it beelining toward the boat.
A Tax Conservationists Should Love, or at Least Like
By Hal Herring/Montana Outdoors
Photo by bettyx1138/flickr
As we gnash our teeth and rail at the assaults on our natural world-from calls to sell off federal lands to oil spills fouling our drinking and fishing waters-we conservation-minded Montanans need to take a few long moments to unclench our jaws and celebrate our successes. One in particular is largely unknown to the ranks of new hunters-the men and women who want to harvest naturally organic meat for their families. I enthusiastically welcome these newcomers. I want them, and the rest of us, to truly understand how we produced the wildlife populations they are just now beginning to enjoy and the rest of us have been appreciating most of our lives.

I want to tell them about the Pittman-Robertson Act (also known as P-R), and the cash that for decades has been flowing from it into our state's wildlife management coffers. As hunter license sales level off and nonhunting-related demands on Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks continue to increase-grizzly bear management alone costs the agency $650,000 per year-P-R has never seemed so important, or so visionary.

I thought most people in the hunting world knew about P-R, but I was wrong.
A Zoo Rhino was Killed for its Horn - Could it Happen Here?
By Karin Brulliard/The Washington Post
Photo by Bernard Dupont/flickr
The  slaughter of a white rhinoceros   at a zoo near Paris was a brazen escalation for a global wildlife trafficking industry behind a poaching crisis in Africa. The incident made clear that possession of a rhino horn - which is desired in parts of Asia as   an investment   or as medicine, despite no scientific evidence of its medicinal efficacy - can be so lucrative that poachers were willing to break through a gate and two locked doors, as security cameras rolled, to shoot a caged rhino and saw off its horn.

European zoo officials and authorities have since said that they suspected that zoos would eventually become targets. Traffickers, after all, have pilfered rhino horns from several European auction houses, private art collections and museums, many of which have replaced previously displayed horns with replicas. Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, warned in 2011 that zoos might also be hit,  Agence France-Press reported.
Restoring Bobwhite Quail Means Restoring Habitats
By Shannon Tompkins/Houston Chronicle
Photo by Joe Kayaker/flickr
Three bird dogs - Eliot Tucker's sleek brace of Celtic field red setters and  
Jim Willis ' energetic Brittany - stood frozen around a patch of bluestem grass and broomweed, looking like statutes instead of the animated, coursing creatures they had been only moments before.

Henry and  Russell Hamman   inserted shotshells into chambers of their over/under shotguns, closed the guns' actions and made note of the dogs' positions, angle of the sun and direction of the brisk wind. In a coordinated motion the Houston father and son have practiced together so many times it needed no words to direct, they walked past the seemingly paralyzed dogs, one to each side of the brown clump they intently eyed.

The grass almost beneath the nose of one of the setters erupted, a starburst of brown/white blurs arcing away over the coastal prairie. Barrels barked. A blur tumbled to earth, marked by a puff of feathers drifting in the February morning sky.

Jim Willis smiled as his Brittany came bounding back with a cock bobwhite quail in her mouth. The dog looked like she was smiling, too.

"There used to be more than a million acres like this," Willis said. 
 
"The man who was never lost in the woods, or got his car stuck on a fishing trip, ain't been anywhere."