Jackie Malone Wins NTA
Director of the Year Award
Jackie Malone, NTA Director for the Alabama Trappers and Predator Control Association, was presented with the NTA Director of the Year Award at the 2009 National Trappers Association banquet in Lima, Ohio. This award is for the affilate NTA director that promotes the NTA within their respective trapping association and builds or strengthens the bond between their affiliate and the NTA. The director fulfills the criteria of this award by communicating to the affiliate what the NTA is doing and makes sure that the NTA is aware of their affiliates' concerns and opinions. The director also sets up an NTA booth at the affiliates' convention, fur sale and other similar functions where they promote the NTA, sell NTA memberships and merchandise. They take the time to help neighboring NTA directors at other conventions, attend the National conventions, sit in meetings and volunteer to work the NTA booth at the National convention, these are just a few of the things that your NTA Director accomplishes on your behalf.
Jackie Malone & NTA President Kraig Kaatz Mike Sievering & NTA President Kraig Kaatz
Mike Sievering Wins
National Leadership Award
Mike Sievering, Supervising Wildlife Biologist for District III, was presented with the National Trappers Association Leadership Award at the 2009 National Trappers Association banquet in Lima, Ohio. This award is given to an individual or organization for work in the education field, establishing trapper education programs or similar accomplishments.
In 2007, Mike established a trapper workshop for the youth of Alabama. The initial program was held in Decatur, Ala. The three-day workshop consists of a day of classroom education, a day of field work that includes setting traps with trapping mentors and a day of checking traps and learning how to prepare and market the fur.The overwhelming success of that workshop led to three workshops in 2008-09. There will be four workshops held during 2009-10.
The trapper workshop is an outreach program that gives both the students and their parents the opportunity to experience and to be educated in an outdoor skill that helped to settle this country. It is a pilot program that was initiated by the Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries Division with assistance from the Alabama Trappers and Predator Control Association and USDA Wildlife Services. This outreach program passes on the historical aspects of trapping, biological information concerning furbearers and furbearer management and allows students to learn the proper techniques that include the use of trapping as a sound wildlife management tool.