Migratory Bird Conservation for Federal Partners

The Migratory Bird Conservation for Federal Partners course is designed to build a common understanding and cooperative dialogue for bird conservation strategies across the federal family. The 3-day course focuses on elements that allow federal employees to understand roles and responsibilities and provides the information and tools necessary to implement effective bird conservation within the agency mission. Target audience is federal staff that is involved in NEPA development, project planning, and implementing bird conservation measures.

Course Goal
Provide the information and tools necessary to empower federal agencies to incorporate effective and efficient bird conservation strategies into the agency’s actions, plans, and policies.

Course Objectives

• Ensure participants understand their agency’s legal responsibilities for bird conservation;
• Ensure participants receive the information and tools necessary to implement effective bird conservation strategies;
• Provide a clear understanding of when and how the Service can provide technical assistance to agencies for impact management and conservation planning;
• Empower federal agencies to efficiently and effectively reduce impacts from their actions;
• Empower federal agencies to work cooperatively for landscape scale bird conservation.

Course Design
This course is designed to provide students information regarding effective bird conservation, show them how to use that information and/or tools, and ask them to demonstrate an understanding of the information and tools through a series of small-group exercises and one larger-group exercise that ties all of the components of the class together.  The class is designed for a 3-day period.  Topics covered in the course include:

• Everything you need to know about the laws that protect birds and how they
  apply to your mission
• What birds are protected?
• Legal and enforcement perspectives in the modern world
• Understanding impacts to migratory birds and how to address them
• Using NEPA to document agency decision-making
• Implementing your MOU
• Tools that make bird conservation easier and more effective
• When is a migratory bird permit right for you?
• How can partnerships help your conservation efforts and where to find them?

For information about tuition fees and how to register for the class see the following  training announcement (383.5KB).