Adopt A Wildlife Acre

National Wildlife Federation’s Adopt-A-Wildlife-Acre Project Update:  February 2014

National Wildlife Federation’s Adopt-A-Wildlife Acre program continues to see incredible success. To date, the program has succeeded in retiring more than 680,000 acres of vital wildlife habitat, securing safe areas for wildlife to roam. Most recently, thanks to successful NWF negotiations in 2013, we eliminated conflict between domestic and wild bighorn sheep by retiring grazing privileges on 12,000 acres of Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. This retirement will prevent domestic sheep from spreading fatal disease to two herds of bighorn sheep.

Thank you for your help in retiring this critical acreage! Retirement of these domestic sheep allotments is also important for enhancing trout habitat and rebuilding a wildlife corridor between the Greater Yellowstone and Salmon Selway ecosystems.

Removing domestic sheep allows riparian vegetation to flourish, which improves water quality and cool streams during Montana’s hot summers. The end of sheep grazing and the wildlife conflicts they created also allows large carnivores such as grizzly bears and wolves to move more freely across the mountain ranges between Montana and Idaho.

The efforts of Adopt-A-Wildlife-Acre are on-going to retire more acreage across the region in order to give wildlife the opportunity to roam and thrive in their native habitat. Thank you for making our project a success!