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SD public defense duties shift from counties to state; SCOTUS appears skeptical of restricting government communications with social media companies; Trump lawyers say he can't make bond; new scholarships aim to connect class of 2024 to high-demand jobs.

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The SCOTUS weighs government influence on social media, and who groups like the NRA can do business with. Biden signs an executive order to advance women's health research and the White House tells Israel it's responsible for the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

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Midwest regenerative farmers are rethinking chicken production, Medicare Advantage is squeezing the finances of rural hospitals and California's extreme swing from floods to drought has some thinking it's time to turn rural farm parcels into floodplains.

Conservation Groups Helping Midwest Animal Species

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Monday, February 8, 2016   

INDIANAPOLIS – Twelve animal species that call the Midwest home are being championed by Chicago Wilderness, which is made up of more than 200 conservation groups in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Scientists, educators and ecologists spent months deciding which would be added to the list.

Suzanne Malec-McKenna, director of Chicago Wilderness, says the group selected species that are rare or threatened and would benefit by some extra attention.

Now a five-year plan will be put together. She says one example is the red-headed woodpecker.

"Conservancy Indiana and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore are signing on as the Indiana leader to look at oak ecosystems, and the red-headed woodpecker has declined dramatically and requires healthy oak woodlands for it to continue to survive," she states.

Other species on the list include the blue-spotted salamander, the bobolink, Henslow's sparrow, the little brown bat and the smooth green snake.

Seth Magle is the director of Urban Wildlife at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. He hatches eggs from the smooth green snake and then releases them back into forest preserves and grasslands. The snakes are a struggling species because their habitat has been destroyed by development.

"A lot of these sites have been lost over time, and now actually a lot of them are being restored or kind of recreated,” Magle states. “But these snakes are so small their ability to disperse is really very limited, so in many cases they need our help."

Magle says the little brown bat was chosen because it's at risk from a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome.

He says that disease hasn't hit the Midwest hard yet but it's likely to.

"We just want a sense of how are they going to do, how are they going to persist in the face of that disease,” he states. “How can we help them, we hope, to make a full recovery from that disease."

Others on the list include the regal fritillary butterfly, the ellipse mussel, Blanding's turtle, the rusty patched bumble bee and the monarch butterfly.





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