9-12 SS NW Conservation

 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has awarded $950,000 to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to monitor Species of Greatest Conservation Need.

   The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service very recently announced the distribution of $950,000 under its 2012 Competitive State Wildlife Grant Program to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to help prevent “Species of Greatest Conservation Need” from becoming threatened, endangered, or extinct.  As lead agency, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game will work with over twenty partners from state, tribal, federal, university and nonprofit organizations to implement the “Multi-Species Baseline Initiative” (MBI). The MBI will focus on acquiring distribution and abundance information for twenty species in the Idaho Panhandle, northeastern Washington and British Columbia. 

All of that makes sense but when I came to a sentence that said biological data of these species, including rare forest carnivores, amphibians and terrestrial gastropods, will be collected over three years I wondered what they were.  I called up U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson, Karla Drewsen:  “terrestrial gastropods, what are those? Slugs. And rare forest carnivores?  Wolverines, the lynx,  Bobcat. The Bobcat is not so rare but things of those nature. These all threatened? Yes. So it all boils down to efforts at conservation and that is very good.