Game & Fish

Free trail map will help you find wildlife in the Pinetop-Lakeside area

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[Source: WMIcentral.com] – With the weather getting warmer, it may be a good time to plan a family outing to hike and enjoy wildlife viewing in the ponderosa pine country of the White Mountains.

The Town of Pinetop-Lakeside, with assistance from the Arizona Game and Fish Department, recently developed a new trail guide called the “Pinetop-Lakeside Wildlife Viewing Guide” to help you map out a fun trip to enjoy nature and wildlife in eastern Arizona. It comes complete with a local hiking trail map and descriptions of several prime areas in and around the town where you can see a variety of animals.

“The guide will help people to streamline wildlife-viewing trips in the Pinetop-Lakeside area,” says Bruce Sitko, spokesman at the department’s Pinetop office. “Families and friends will be able to plan out which types of wildlife and which areas they want to see and how to most quickly and effectively get from one to another.”[to read the full article click here].

Arizona Game and Fish to restore river bed

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[Source: WMIcentral.com] – The Arizona Game and Fish Department is implementing a water quality improvement project along the banks of the Little Colorado River on its Wenima Wildlife Area located just north of Springerville. 

The 355 acre property is managed for native wildlife, and includes 2.5 miles of the Little Colorado River.  Some of the river’s stream banks are very unstable, and large amounts of soil is washed downstream when water levels rise.  The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality funded a water quality improvement grant to address these eroding banks. The Department originally purchased this 355 acre property in 1993 with the aid of the Heritage Fund, which utilizes Arizona lottery monies to protect habitat for threatened and endangered species.  Since the 1993 acquisition, the habitat within the Wenima Wildlife Area boundaries has greatly improved, but a few sections of the river continue to experience excessive erosion events during spring run off and after large monsoon rains.

The Department applied for and was awarded a water quality improvement grant administered by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. [to read the full article click here].

Heritage Fund gives head start to Chiricahua leopard frogs

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[Source: AZ Game & Fish News Media, 2-23-2011] – Celebrating 20 years of conserving Arizona’s wildlife

One of the most beneficial sources of funding for Arizona’s wildlife and outdoor recreationists is the Heritage Fund. Two decades ago, Arizonans overwhelmingly approved the creation of the fund, which, among other things, directs money from lottery ticket sales to the Arizona Game and Fish Department to invest in conservation efforts like educating children about wildlife, acquiring critical wildlife habitats for sensitive species, and protecting and recovering many of the state’s imperiled wildlife.
  
One sensitive species benefiting from the Heritage Fund is the Chiricahua leopard frog.  This medium-sized frog was once abundant throughout the White Mountains of eastern Arizona. It has a green-brown skin color with numerous dark spots on its back, thus its name “leopard frog.”

Reductions in the frogs’ distribution the past few decades prompted their listing as federally threatened in 2002 under the Endangered Species Act. Reasons for declines of wildlife species are not always clear, and several interacting factors are often at play. Biologists generally agree that predation by introduced species, especially crayfish, American bullfrogs and sport fishes, and chytridiomycosis, a fungal skin disease that is killing frogs and toads around the globe, are the leading causes. Other factors have also contributed to their decline, including degradation and loss of wetlands, recent catastrophic wildfires, drought and contaminants [to read the full article, click here].