Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 13h 04m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 21.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1945, the Japanese Instrument of Surrender is signed by Japan and the major warring powers aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Paul Smith writes Natural Resources Board set itself up for a lawsuit by failing to take more measured approach to wolf kill quota:
When wildlife protection groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday in an effort to stop the fall Wisconsin wolf hunting and trapping season, it was as much of a surprise as the sun rising over Lake Michigan.
It was going to happen. The only question was when.
The Natural Resources Board seemed to beg to be taken to court over wolf management when at its Aug. 11 meeting it voted 5-2 to set a kill quota of 300 wolves for the November season.
The decision overruled biologists and wildlife managers with the Department of Natural Resources, who had recommended a quota of 130.
And the board’s number was seemingly plucked from the air.
Wolf issues are more contentious even than those surrounding white-tailed deer.
Wolves have been see-sawing between federal protections of the Endangered Species Act and state management for more than a decade. Litigation on wolves is nothing new.
So if some board members were going to disregard a plan presented by DNR professionals, you’d think they would have offered strong, science-based reasoning.
But the meeting proceeded like some sort of amateur auction, starting with a motion to set the quota at 504 and dropping to 350 before a majority agreed to 300.
The world was watching, of course.
In less than three weeks, groups including Animal Wellness Action, the Center for a Humane Economy, Friends of the Wisconsin Wolf and Wildlife and Project Coyote organized to file Tuesday’s lawsuit in Dane County.
Wisconsin’s wolf-quota process has become a national topic. Accompanying the mere power to set a quota should have been a reasoned approach, lacking here.