CWD puts
deer farms
in crosshairs
By Tony Kennedy/Star Tribune
Photo by Mark Robinson/flickr
Thor, a spectacularly antlered whitetail buck, lives only in the fevered imaginations of most of the 450,000 Minnesota hunters who have ventured afield this deer season in search of a trophy.
But to a select band of hunters willing to pay money, everything about Thor is real.
The 5-year-old buck is a genetically engineered wonder. His monstrous, knotty, bulging rack of antlers would measure more than 280 inches. He reigns supreme in the breeding pens at Autumn Antlers, a 400-acre hunting preserve that features more than 100 bucks with traits rarely seen by hunters in the wild.
Hunting preserves have been around for decades and are an integral part of the $7.9 billion deer farming industry. In states like Texas, where public hunting land is scarce, high-fence hunting is common. That’s not the case in Minnesota, but the state’s 339 family-owned deer and elk farms are emerging as a flash point in an increasingly acrimonious debate over who is to blame for spreading deadly chronic wasting disease (CWD) to Minnesota’s wild deer herds.
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Congress advances 2 key conservation bills
TRCP
Photo by John Williams/flickr
“State wildlife agencies have the most to lose if hunting participation continues to decline, because many of them depend entirely on Pittman-Robertson dollars, but that’s why it’s so critical that these agencies market to and educate prospective sportsmen and women,” says
Whit Fosburgh, president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership
.
“This critical update to the original law—which was written at a time when more than half the country hunted or had access to someone who could likely show them how—would help ensure the future of our traditions and turn the tide on a looming conservation funding crisis in America.”
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In Florida, fisheries efforts finally pay off
By T. Edward Nickens/Field & Stream
Photo by Florida Fish and Wildlife/flickr
The school is strung out for 300 yards, the dark mangroves of Cape Sable in the background, the water barely ruffled, broken by silver tails, heads, bellies, and entire bodies. There are dozens of fish, 100 or better, the closest within an easy cast of my Tarpon Toad. On the poling platform, my guide, Chris Wittman, shakes his head slowly, afraid to break the spell. “I hope you know how special this is,” he says softly. “You could fish a very long time and not see tarpon like this.”
The pain of missing four tarpon eats in a row, thanks to lifting the rod on the set, still stings. Now I lay out another cast to the silver kings, and let the line and fly sink. I focus on my hands and the fly reel because I don’t want to see the strike—I want to feel it. There is total silence on the boat. I tell myself I will not lift the rod tip. I will not set the hook until I feel the fish eat, turn, and run. I retrieve to the beat of a mantra in my head:
strip-strike, strip-strike, strip-strike.
Strike!
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When crabs choose plastic for their shells
The Washington Post
Photo by Derrick Mercer/flickr
A study that called attention to a remote cluster of islands off Australia’s coast was met with international concern when it published in May. In a harrowing account of their trip to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands two years prior, researchers recalled seeing beaches that were “literally drowning in plastic.”
But Jennifer Lavers and her research team now say they made another startling observation while digging through copious amounts of litter on that 2017 trip: Many of the bottles, cans and containers were not empty. Scores of hermit crabs, mostly dead, were trapped inside.
The scientists say plastic debris has caused the deaths of more than half a million hermit crabs on the Cocos Islands and the similarly remote Henderson Island in the South Pacific. Their findings illustrate yet another consequence of man-made waste that enters the world’s oceans and pollutes its beaches — defiling nature in ways that foster unsettling imagery. Turtles with
straws in their nostrils
. Sperm whales with
pounds of garbage
in their stomachs.
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‘Horror story:’ The spread of feral hogs
National Wildlife
Photo by Don McCullough/flickr
"It’s a never-ending battle,”
says J.P. Fairhead, feral hog program coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Heading efforts to eradicate feral hogs in Arkansas, Fairhead has a grim outlook: “Some folks say we’re probably going to be doing this for the rest of our career.”
He has good reason to worry.
A
nonnative species
first brought to the United States by Spanish explorers in the 1500s, Sus scrofa is the same species as the domestic farmyard pig—but far more insidious. The feral hogs running rampant today are descendants of those imported Eurasian wild boar, escaped domestic pigs or hybrids of the two. Sexually mature as early as six months and averaging about two litters of up to 12 piglets a year, feral swine spread exponentially across the southern United States. That spread accelerated beginning in the 1980s, when the pigs became a popular game species for hunters, leading some to transport wild hogs far beyond the South to establish new populations.
Still fanning out due to natural dispersion and human transport, feral swine now rip through at least 35 states coast to coast and border to border, topping 6 million animals. “This is a horror story,” says Dale Nolte, program manager for the
APHIS National Feral Swine Damage Management Program
, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “We know who the villain is”—and it’s a daunting foe.
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“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”
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To read past McGraw Reports click
here.
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