Louisiana HCR86: WILDLIFE/HABITAT: Expresses legislative support for a request by Senator John N. Kennedy to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct a study addressing the impact of land use changes and habitat loss on migratory waterfowl behavior

What the bill says

A concurrent resolution To express legislative support for a request by Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to initiate a formal study to evaluate how land use changes and habitat loss affect migratory waterfowl productivity and breeding population distribution, behavior, wintering distributions, and associated economic outcomes in the Mississippi Flyway.

From the introduced text:

A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION To express legislative support for a request by Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to initiate a formal study to evaluate how land use changes and habitat loss affect migratory waterfowl productivity and breeding population distribution, behavior, wintering distributions, and associated economic outcomes in the Mississippi Flyway. WHEREAS, Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana wrote a letter to the USFWS concerning the recent decline in annual waterfowl migration to Louisiana; and WHEREAS, as a result of continental wetland loss and changes to land use and policy, substantial landscape alteration has occurred in areas important to Mississippi Flyway waterfowl hunters; and WHEREAS, data from the USFWS shows that the Louisiana wintering mallard population declined from approximately eight hundred thousand in 1999, to three hundred thousand in 2018, representing a three and two-tenths of a percent average annual decline over those years, the largest decline in mallards among the fourteen states in the Mississippi Flyway; and WHEREAS, this same data also shows that states to the north, from Iowa to Mississippi, have observed average annual increases in their mallard populations of roughly eleven percent; and Page 1 of HLS 26RS-4252 ORIGINAL HCR NO. WHEREAS, the annual mallard harvest in Louisiana declined by approximately ninety-five percent between 1999 and 2021, marking …

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