Jim Hudgins- Caption included with picture

Service Biologist Heather Rawlings traveled to Angola, Ind. April 29-30, 2008 for the second bi-annual Tri-State Partners for Fish and Wildlife (PFW) meeting.  The meeting allowed biologists and supervisors from Michigan, Indiana and Ohio to share ideas and compare strategies to make our programs more consistent regionally, with one another, and possibly find new and better ways to achieve habitat restoration goals on private lands.  Jeffrey Kiefer, State Coordinator of the Indiana Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, was the host of the meeting. 

The meeting’s focus was the federally endangered copperbelly water snake. Coordinators in the tri-state area have focused wetland restoration efforts on the copperbelly because recovery efforts are linked with wetland restoration, the biggest focus of the PWS Program in the midwest.  Copperbelly snake experts Yu Man Lee from Michigan Natural Features Inventory and Bruce Kingsbury from Indiana-Purdue University gave presentations updating PFW coordinators on the latest science of the copperbelly, and then led the group into the field to view known locations of the copperbelly.  The highlight of the meeting was a wild foods dinner held in Pokagon State Park and hosted by the Indiana PFW Coordinators held Tuesday evening.