Conservation Force
A Force for Wildlife Conservation

Dr. Dale E. Toweill has spent more than 30 years managing wildlife in the West. As the statewide leader of trophy species programs in Idaho for the past decade, he has managed programs for bighorn sheep, mountain goats, moose and grizzly bears and supervises statewide management of waterfowl and upland game. He has also directed public lands policy for Idaho for more than a decade, managed the Idaho Wildlife Health Laboratory, and conducted and published research on bighorn sheep, elk, mule deer, pronghorns, mountain lions, and many other species. 

 

Dale is perhaps best-known for his award-winning books about elk and bighorn sheep. North American Elk: Ecology and Management (published by Smithsonian Press) has been called “perhaps the best book on a single species ever written,” and Return of Royalty: the Wild Sheep of North America was recipient of the international Prix Excellence award presented by the Conseil de la Chasse et tu la Conservation, the international hunter's organization, in 2005. He has written a number of other books, such as Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep (for the National Bighorn Sheep Interpretive Center in Duboise, Wyoming) and Desert Bighorn, and was a contributing author to Perspectives on Biodiversity for the National Research Institute of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition, Dale has contributed chapters to many books including the Wildlife Techniques Manual published by The Wildlife Society. 

 

In addition to hundreds of papers on technical aspects of wildlife research, Dale is a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America and has written many popular articles about hunting and the outdoors, most illustrated with his own photographs of wildlife and wild places. Dale has also written several scripts for the award-winning television series“Leupold’s Big Game Profiles” presented by the Boone & Crockett Club on the Outdoor Channel. 

 

Not an academic, Dr. Toweill is a hands-on manager and avid hunter who has successfully hunted throughout North America as well as Africa, Australia, and Europe. He has harvested all varieties of North American wild sheep and has several of his North American trophies listed in Records of North American Big Game. As a passionate hunter, he is very familiar with the critical role that hunting plays in wildlife conservation around the world. 

 

Well-known among professional wildlife managers, Dale has been a member of The Wildlife Society since 1969 and was among the first recognized as a Certified Wildlife Biologist by that group in 1982. He served as representative of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies to the Committee on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and on national review panels dealing with critical and complex land management issues including climate change, forest ecosystem management, and a national review of big game habitat on public lands. Dale also spent more than a decade dealing with public land management policy and state and national legislation on environmental affairs.  

Dale is especially interested in conservation and management of African wildlife (he has visited Africa nearly 20 times) and the worldwide conservation of wild sheep.