Ron Refsnider, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Midwest Regional Office in Fort Snelling, was honored today by the U.S. Department of the Interior as part of a team that helped recover the gray wolf in the western Great Lakes. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne presented the Cooperative Conservation Award to the 10-member team at a ceremony in Washington, DC.
The award recognizes conservation achievements by groups of diverse partners, including federal, state, local and tribal governments, non-government organizations, and individuals. The award recognized the wolf partnership’s work to establish the political, cultural and biological conditions that allowed the once-imperiled gray wolf to recover in Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“ We are grateful to Ron and the team for their perseverance, creativity and dedication to gray wolf recovery,” said Robyn Thorson, the Service’s Midwest Regional Director. “By engineering wolf recovery, Ron and his teammates have made a lasting contribution to the conservation legacy of the United States.”
Other team members receiving the award included Michael DonCarlos, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; Abigail Kimbell, U.S. Forest Service; L. David Mech, U.S. Geological Survey; Walter Medwid, International Wolf CenterWilliam Paul, U.S. Department of Agriculture; Brian Roell, Michigan Department of Natural Resources; Richard Thiel, Timber Wolf Information Network; Pam Troxell, Timber Wolf Alliance; and Adrian Wydeven, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Only a few decades ago, gray wolves were rare in the Midwest and across the contiguous United States; only a few hundred wolves remained in Minnesota. With the protection of wolves under the Endangered Species Act in 1970s, wolf recovery began. Partners representing a wide range of interests worked on behalf of the species, protecting the wolf from illegal killing, researching wolf ecology and population dynamics to aid management, monitoring wolf populations, and raising public awareness of the wolf’s role in the ecosystem.
Today the region’s gray wolf population numbers about 4,000 and occupies large portions of Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.
As lead biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for Midwest wolf recovery, Refsnider coordinated the federal role in wolf recovery, as well as efforts by the Service in the Midwest to implement recovery actions. He worked with partners to educate the public about wolf recovery and authored the rules that removed gray wolves in the western Great Lakes from the list of endangered and threatened species.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal federal agency responsible for conserving, protecting and enhancing fish, wildlife and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. The Service manages the 96-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System, which encompasses 545 national wildlife refuges, thousands of small wetlands and other special management areas. It also operates 69 national fish hatcheries, 64 fishery resources offices and 81 ecological services field stations. The agency enforces federal wildlife laws, administers the Endangered Species Act, manages migratory bird populations, restores nationally significant fisheries, conserves and restores wildlife habitat such as wetlands, and helps foreign and Native American tribal governments with their conservation efforts. It also oversees the Federal Assistance program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing and hunting equipment to state fish and wildlife agencies.
