This month, four endangered whooping crane chicks hatched in the wild at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. It has been a banner year for the cranes at Necedah, with 20 pairs of the endangered birds nesting at the refuge. That’s great news. Coming as it does during the month we celebrate Endangered Species [...]

Ever since President Theodore Roosevelt established the very first national wildife refuge in 1903 to protect pelicans at Pelican Island, Florida, refuges have been critical to birds. From hundreds of thousands of neotropical migrant songbirds that rest and feed at refuges along the major flyways, to shorebirds and waterfowl that depend on…[Read more]

Although the Conserving the Future: Wildlife Refuges and the Next Generation vision process continues on into July 2011, this Earth Day (April 22) marked the closing of the 60-day public comment period for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s draft document offering a 10-year vision for the National Wildlife Refuge System. A very big thank you to [...]

“A Billion Acts of Green ” is the theme of Earth Day 2011, but in the spirit of thinking globally, but acting locally, we’re only asking for you to do three simple things to celebrate the 41st annual Earth Day on April 22 . If everyone in this online community makes a commitment to these three simple actions, we’ll [...]

It’s now official: America is an increasingly diverse nation, a melting pot with people from a large variety of ethnic backgrounds gathered under one roof. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, which in late March released details about America’s ethnic make-up from the 2010 Census, non-white populations have grown at a much faster rate than [...]

Even in times of robust funding, our national wildlife refuges rely heavily on volunteers, who perform an estimated 20 percent of the work done in the nation’s 553 refuges. One key need is the monitoring of refuge resources, yet currently the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) does not have the funding or the staff [...]