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Wildlife For Everyone Endowment Foundation Receives Youth Mentor Award

Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show

HARRISBURG, PA – -(Ammoland.com)- Wildlife For Everyone Endowment Foundation, a non-profit organization that works with state agencies to preserve and enhance wildlife habitat, wildlife scientific research, wildlife education, land preservation, youth programs, and to construct a wildlife education and research center, has received the 2012 Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show Youth Mentor Award.

As part of their education and youth missions, the foundation has worked to develop major funding support for the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s Seedlings for Schools program, which supplies seedlings to more than a thousand schools across Pennsylvania each spring.

Most of the seedlings, which are shipped from the commission’s Howard Nursery in Centre County, are part of the Seedlings for Your Class component of the program aimed primarily at third grade students. Each class or grade level receives enough silky dogwood or white pine seedlings for each student to take one home.

In addition, the seedlings come with an education package for the teacher, which provides the opportunity to teach a whole program around trees, environment, and the importance of planting trees in local communities.

Some of the seedlings are also shipped for the Seedlings to Develop Habitats component of the program, aimed at middle and high school students interested in planting them on school or community grounds, along a stream corridor to improve habitat, as a tree nursery or in an environmental area.

More recently, the foundation helped to expand an innovative college internship program that originated in 1999 in the Southwest Region of the Pennsylvania Game Commission to give college students hands-on experience in skills needed for careers in wildlife management.

The new Richard Guadagno Internship Program will provide stipends to students working eight-week internships with the commission’s regional office for the first time.

Previous interns have worked in summer bat roost surveys, breeding bird surveys, Canada goose banding, bear trapping, wildlife habitat assessments, vegetation sampling, legal updates and deputy meetings, data entry and analysis, report writing, wildlife biometrics and tissue samples, library research, and educational programming.

The Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show Outdoor Youth Mentor Award is presented annually to an individual or organization in recognition of their demonstrated commitment to using their knowledge of the outdoors and outdoor sports to educate and help young people.

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Dave Kaleta Receives Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show Humanitarian Award

Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show

HARRISBURG, PA – -(Ammoland.com)- Dave Kaleta (Shamokin, PA), founder and president of Habitat for Wildlife, Inc., has received the 2012 Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show Humanitarian Award for his continued efforts to improve the ecology of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal region.

Habitat for Wildlife, Inc. is an organization of conservation-oriented people dedicated to restoring, protecting and enhancing the wild areas of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Anthracite region. One of their most significant contributions was the establishment and development of the Alaska Site in Northumberland County. Their efforts have turned what was once an area of coal banks, strip mines and illegal dumping sites into a thriving habitat for grouse, woodcock, deer, turkey, bear and other non-game species.

Over the last 12 years, Habitat for Wildlife has planted more than 43,000 seedlings and 68 acres of food and cover plots on both reclaimed and non-reclaimed mine lands. They have removed thousands of illegally dumped tires and hundreds of tons of trash from illegal dumpsites. These efforts have reduced the negative visual impact to this economically depressed area, reduced the number of disease-carrying mosquitoes and rodents, and greatly reduced the risk of ground water pollution.

Last year, Habitat for Wildlife conducted an experimental brook trout stocking in Carbon Run, a tributary of Shamokin Creek. If successful, it is hoped that these trout stockings will help boost the attitude of local (as well as other) people toward the coal region’s environment.

Habitat for Wildlife also works on environmental improvement projects in tandem with other area conservation groups, including: Shamokin Creek Restoration Alliance, Woodcock Limited of Pennsylvania, and Pheasants Forever.

The Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show Humanitarian Award is presented annually to an individual or organization in recognition of their demonstrated commitment to using their knowledge of the outdoors and outdoor sports to improve and support their community.

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