Hands off the Heritage Fund, lawmakers

[Source: Arizona Republic Editorial Board] – Lawmakers, show some respect for voters.

In 1990, Arizonans overwhelmingly approved the Heritage Fund, directing $10 million a year in Lottery revenue each to the Arizona Game and Fish Department and the Parks Department. This reflected a deep commitment to some of Arizona’s greatest resources: a rich history, diverse wildlife and dazzling natural landscapes.

The Legislature took the state parks’ share during the recession, and has unwisely rejected a number of efforts to restore that funding.

Now some of the Game and Fish share is at risk.

A portion of Game and Fish Heritage money is supposed to be spent on acquisition of land as habitat for threatened and endangered species. A strike-everything amendment to a House-passed bill would allow it to be used for operation and maintenance.

This goes against the “heart and soul” of what voters intended when they passed the Heritage initiative, says Beth Woodin, member of the Arizona Heritage Alliance and former Game and Fish commissioner.

What’s more, it’s sneaky.

This is a stealth effort to do something the public probably would not approve.

To that point, the altered bill was held in a Senate committee last week after it began to attract attention and opposition. It should disappear entirely.

If the Game and Fish department needs more money, let it ask for the funding. Then invite the Heritage Alliance and others who respect the spirit of this voter-approved law to be part of a discussion about what changes make sense.

Game and Fish offers additional Heritage Grants award opportunity

[Source: Yuma News Now] – The Arizona Game and Fish Department announced the availability of additional Heritage Grant awards in two categories for the 2014 grant cycle. Grant proposals will be accepted until Friday, March 14 at 5 p.m. MST in the environmental education and outdoor education categories.

Applicants should review the revised Heritage Grant eligibility funding windows (eligibility criteria) and application forms at www.azgfd.gov/w_c/heritage_apply.shtml to obtain specific guidance for goals and objectives listed within each grant category.

The grants are supported by revenue from Arizona Lottery sales and are available to projects that focus on wildlife. In the last grant cycle. Game and Fish used Heritage funds to award more than $415,000 to 32 grant projects across Arizona. When combined with matching money from other sources, the projects being funded total nearly $1 million invested in Arizona.

Started in 1990, the Heritage Fund was established by Arizona voters to further conservation efforts in the state, including protecting endangered species, educating our children about wildlife, helping urban residents to better coexist with wildlife, and creating new opportunities for outdoor recreation. Over the years, Game and Fish has awarded more than $13 million in grants to communities across the state. Arizonans can help raise money for the Heritage Fund every year simply by buying Arizona Lottery tickets.

Application proposals can be submitted either electronically to [email protected] or mailed directly to Arizona Game and Fish Department, ATTN: Wildlife Grant Administrator, 5000 W. Carefree Highway,  Phoenix, AZ 85086. No faxed applications will be accepted.

More information on the grants and application forms can be found at www.azgfd.gov/w_c/heritage_apply.shtml or contact Robyn Beck at [email protected]. For more information on the Heritage Fund, visit www.azgfd.gov/heritage.

Remember the Legislature’s shameful decision to cut Lottery funds for parks

[Source: Barbra Barnes, Phoenix, Arizona Republic Opinion] – Regarding “State is biggest lottery winner” (Republic, Dec. 1):

The important article about the Arizona Lottery didn’t talk about the tragedy that befell Arizona State Parks in March 2010. A state budget was approved that summarily removed $10 million from the Heritage Fund — permanently.

As stated, in 1990 voters required that $20 million a year in Lottery revenue go to heritage funds for Arizona State Parks and the Arizona Game and Fish Department, money to be paid before the general fund landed its share. Game and Fish has received allocations, but since 2010, there is nothing for state parks.

Considering that Arizona State Parks already was underfunded, it seems particularly outrageous that this important state treasure, which encompasses historic preservation and environmental education within its purview, should be so deliberately excluded from benefiting from our Lottery. The public should be reminded of this injustice.

Arizona volunteers aid annual count of endangered ferret

[Source: Brandon Loomis, The Arizona Republic] – SELIGMAN — At 2 in the morning, you start seeing things in the path of the spotlight.Ed the Fed, a recaptured black-footed ferret, was identified from the chip placed in him during last years spotlighting event.  Ferrets captured for the first time are anesthetized, examined, vaccinated and implanted with a chip.  Recaptured ferrets are vaccinated.

A shrub that appears to move. A pair of red eyes that quicken the pulse until you realize they belong to a common rabbit. Anything, it seems, but the green glow from the eyes of one of the world’s rarest mammals.

Then, “Ferret!” someone in the truck shouts. Brakes lock and tires slide on the dirt road.

You can’t make out its shape in the distance, but the telltale green reflection from a black-footed ferret’s eyes give it away. And, in this case, rather than freezing or running, the weasel bobs playfully as it inspects the intruders.

Every spring, the Arizona Game and Fish Department seeks the nocturnal predators with an army of spotlighting volunteers who count and vaccinate the endangered black-footed ferret, the only American species, which was once on the brink of extinction.

The collapse of prairie-dog towns from poison and the plow nearly wiped out ferrets in the past century. But, 17 years ago, they were transplanted from captivity into prairie-dog towns throughout the West because they dine almost exclusively on the destructive rodents. Now, under protections for both predator and prey, ferrets are thriving here like nowhere else.

Searchers are never skunked in scrubby Aubrey Valley, about 30 miles northwest of Seligman. March 29, the second of six outings planned for this year, was no exception.

“We hit new records every year, so it’s quite exciting,” wildlife technician and veteran spotlighter Heather Heimann told volunteers before the hunt. Then, she told them that any fingers that they’d like to keep should be kept away from trapped ferrets and to expect the animals to deploy some smelly defenses.

“I call it endangered-species pee,” Heimann said. “A bonus.”

Arizona’s ferret-recovery zone, in the northwestern part of the state, has proved a pleasant surprise to federal wildlife managers. It is one of just a few colonies where the ferrets are self-sustaining.

The search leads to captures so that the animals can be counted and vaccinated against canine distemper. If one of these silky, black-masked ferrets is trapped for the first time, an electronic ID chip is inserted in the nape of its neck. The animal is gassed with a sedative, first while inside a capture tube and then through a mask.

Volunteers come from all over Arizona and beyond, and there’s always someone who went to great pains to be there. This time it was Neil Edwards of Swansea, Wales. He and his wife re-arranged their Grand Canyon vacation to co-incide with the spring trapping.

“I’m a keen bird-watcher in the U.K.,” he said, “but also animals. Whenever I go on holiday, I study up on animals in the area.”

At 2 a.m. last Saturday, he got a special thrill when he walked toward a 2-foot-long ferret and watched it disappear down a burrow. About 60 people helped search dirt roads for the animals that night, and he was in a group of seven.

They approached and placed a wire-cage trap with spring-loaded door into the hole. They covered it with a burlap sack to block light, presenting the ferret with the illusion that the exit was now a few feet higher.

Then, they placed Big Gulp cups over other potentially connected holes, leaving the ferret only one way out. They marked the spot on a global-positioning system and left, planning to return within an hour to ensure that their quarry wouldn’t spend too much time exposed to the cold.

“I just think it’s brilliant,” Edwards said of Arizona’s recovery efforts. “What a success story.”

Volunteers in each of the past couple of years have found more than 100 ferrets in Aubrey Valley. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates there are about 500 ferrets in 20 reintroduction sites from northern Mexico to the Dakotas.

In three nights, volunteers captured 28 ferrets. That would be low by recent standards if it held as the yearly count, but Game and Fish expects a second round of trapping this month will greatly increase the total.

“Last year, we were probably the most successful site in the country,” said Jennifer Cordova, Arizona Game and Fish’s ferret-program supervisor. “Others, unfortunately, plagued out.”

She referred to the same black-death plague that terrorized Europe in the 14th century. Antibiotics and other defenses minimize the threat to people, though rare deaths still occur.

But the insect-borne disease can wipe out ferrets as well as the prairie dogs they eat. The illness is relatively new to North America, having first arrived in California around 1900. It’s unclear why it hasn’t struck the Aubrey Valley, but it has devastated other recovery areas.

It’s possible to slow plague by dusting animal burrows with flea killer, but that’s expensive and time-consuming. Plague vaccines can’t be administered without a veterinarian present, which is also expensive. The state’s program, funded through the federal government and a match with Lottery proceeds in the Heritage Fund, is $200,000.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, massive swaths of ferret habitats in the western Great Plains were plowed under, and ranchers who worried about competition for grass poisoned many of the prairie dogs that remained.

Ferrets were absent from Arizona for 65 years before being reintroduced in 1996. They were thought to be extinct until a colony was discovered in Meeteetse, Wyo., in 1981.

Disease killed all but 18 animals in the mid-1980s, and the government trapped those for captive breeding. Several zoos, including the Phoenix Zoo, and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service center in northern Colorado help maintain a captive population of 300, some of which were conditioned for release.

The number of captures in Aubrey Valley has steadily increased in recent years, from 60 in 2009 to 96 in 2010, 116 in 2011 and 123 last year.

“I was on the project in ’99,” Cordova said, “and we’d go out spotlighting and maybe find one ferret.”

The government’s goal is to have 3,000 adult ferrets in 12 states, with at least 10 populations exceeding 100, said Pete Gober, ferret-recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Sixteen-year-old Texan Molly Campbell traveled from Fort Worth for the roundup. With her headlamp shining onto a caged ferret that she was preparing to return to the wild, she said she came to make a difference and maybe preview a career.

Her uncle Ed Newcomer, a Fish and Wildlife Service special agent from Los Angeles, accompanied her. They ended up catching the same ferret two nights in a row — something one researcher is counting on during these events, to help chart ferret movements.

Volunteers who trap a ferret that has never been tagged and cataloged get to pick the name that biologists will call it each time it’s caught. Campbell and Newcomer named theirs Ed the Fed.