Reflecting on 2014

We’ve been hard at work this year, and we have some incredible accomplishments to report as a result. Thank you so much for your dedication and support, which made all these achievements possible.

Across the U.S.
We conducted crucial on-the-ground projects and mobilized members across the United States to conserve wildlife.

• We worked closely with the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes in Montana to return more bison from the herd in Yellowstone National Park to the Ft. Peck Indian Reservation, further expanding wild bison on native lands.
• A new colony of black-footed ferrets is growing on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana thanks to the combined efforts of the affected tribes and Defenders to bring these critically endangered animals back.
• We helped organize and win a constitutional amendment for Florida’s Water and Land Legacy , which will dedicate billions of dollars to protect habitats on land and water that Florida’s diverse wildlife needs to thrive.
• Defenders’ effective and relentless advocacy efforts encouraged California to take steps to protect and conserve gray wolves, including listing them under the California Endangered Species Act.
• We hosted a Capitol Hill Lobby Day fly-in, bringing Defenders members from around the country to Washington, DC to show members of Congress their strong support for the Endangered Species Act.
• Defenders supporters spoke out for wolves when they needed it most, submitting hundreds of thousands of comments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in opposition to the proposed delisting of gray wolves.
• Our field teams on the ground worked to put dozens of non-lethal solutions in place to protect people’s property and keep local wildlife out of trouble. Wolves , grizzly bears and even wandering wild bison are safer thanks to property owners willing to put these common-sense solutions into place to coexist with native wildlife.

Lobbying and Legal Efforts:

Our lobbying efforts on the federal and state level produced some amazing results:

• The California governor signed into law a Defenders-sponsored bill that will phase in a ban on the use of lead ammunition by all hunters in that state, which will protect endangered California condors and other wildlife from lead poisoning.
• Defenders once again helped win passage of California legislation to promote the California Sea Otter Fund. Since 2007, it has raised more than $2 million to support southern sea otter research, conservation and education projects.
• Defenders and our allies helped mobilize public support for what resulted in the largest geographical area ever designated as critical habitat —685 miles of nesting beach from Mississippi to North Carolina and more than 300,000 square miles of open ocean are now protected for endangered sea turtles.
• Defenders, our partners and our supporters spoke out against the proposal to build a commercial spaceport within the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which is estimated to have more endangered and threatened species than any other federal wildlife refuge in the continental U.S. The project is now being moved elsewhere, and will not impact the refuge.

Our legal team had some incredible victories:

• Our legal efforts in Wyoming put the state’s wolves back under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.
• After Defenders and our allies took the issue to federal court, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game announced an end to their wolf extermination program in the Frank Church Wilderness Area for this winter, which would have killed wolves to artificially inflate elk populations.
• After more than a decade of advocacy and litigation by Defenders and others, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated 1,194 square miles of critical habitat and migration corridors for endangered jaguars in Arizona and New Mexico.
• We won an important victory when the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission agreed to ban spotlight coyote hunting in the imperiled Red Wolf recovery area in Eastern North Carolina. Gunshots had been the leading cause of death for these critically endangered wolves, which can be mistaken for coyotes.

Around the World:
Wildlife doesn’t stop at U.S. borders – and neither do we. Working with partners around the world:

• Defenders’ heavy involvement in a nest monitoring and protection program for military macaws in the Puerto Vallarta region of Mexico was a huge success this spring. As a result, no monitored nests were poached, and 15 chicks survived this nesting season! One of the successful nests had been poached constantly for the last ten years, and this is the first time it has produced chicks that left the nest on their own.
• In Veracruz, Mexico, we were part of the effort to release 27 scarlet macaws into the wild. This release brought the birds back to the Gulf of Mexico for the first time in 50 years, and is just the first step of a project that plans to create the largest wild population of scarlet macaws in Mexico.
• When an online ad company in Mexico began to run TV ads promoting illegal parrot trade, Defenders of Wildlife sprang into action. Along with fellow conservation groups, our outcry ultimately led the company to not only put an end to their ad campaign, but also agree to greater oversight of the ads they run, so that the company’s website cannot be used to buy or sell endangered species.
• Hard-won international regulations went into effect to protect five species of sharks and two manta ray species from being overharvested. Defenders’ experts worked hard to help educate representatives from many countries on how to put the new regulations (which we had helped achieve at the 2013 CITES convention ) into practice.

Thank you so much to all of you who have been a part of making all of this important work possible. We wish you a very happy new year, and look forward to achieving even more successes with your help in 2015!