Refuge Update – September/October 2008, Volume 5, Number 5

Table of Contents: Rebuilding after Hurricane Ike, page 3 Texas and Louisiana refuges were severely damaged in mid-September. A Crane Species Rebounding, page 5 At a Mississippi refuge, the world’s longest-running crane reintroduction program is succeeding. Focus on. . . Refuge System Wetlands, pages 8-13 The Refuge System manages wetlands to enhance their value for migratory waterfowl and shorebirds, threatened and endangered species and a myriad of native fish, wildlife, and plants. Fluttering Close to Extinction, page 17. Antioch Dunes Refuge is out to save the Lange’s metalmark butterfly.

Book Review of Stone by Stone: Exploring Ancient Sites on the Canadian Plains by Liz Bryan

Liz Bryan begins her book with a description of the Canadian Plains:" . .. a voluptuous landscape of hills and valleys and plains, of lakes and tiny twinkling potholes, of flower-filled coulees and vast sand dunes." Her emphasis throughout on the landscape of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta is necessary since the ancient monuments she describes only truly resonate within this setting. Indeed, almost every page of this attractive book is adorned with at least two color images-of scenery, stone features, artifacts, and aboriginal events. She then proceeds to an eclectic overview of the archaeological record of the Plains of Saskatchewan and Alberta, including the earliest human evidence, such as the Clovis points from the Wally's Beach site, Alberta, where the trackways of mammoths, camels, and muskoxen were miraculously and briefly exposed in the late 1990s. There is one perplexing error, however-the attribution of the extinction of the ice age bestiary, about 12,000 years ago, to the meteorite that felled the dinosaurs!