LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Pond owners are being advised to check for winterkill after the ice is gone.

Jeff Blaser with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission says the prolonged winter and recent frigid weather are keeping ponds covered with snow and ice well into March, creating conditions for winterkill.

Snow and ice covering a pond prevent the water from exchanging oxygen with the air. The snow and ice allow little sunlight penetration, so plants can’t produce much oxygen. If the cover persists, the plants die. Subsequent decomposition, along with respiration by various aquatic organisms, can completely deplete the oxygen supply. The fish die.

Blaser suggests owners check the status of their ponds’ fish populations this spring. The findings could indicate whether the ponds are candidates for restocking

Pond owners can contact Blaser at 402-471-5435 for suggestions on handling major fish kills.

KEARNEY, Neb. (AP) — The entry deadline is March 31 for this year’s Nebraska Handwriting Contest.

The contest is aimed at promoting and encouraging good penmanship and is open to Nebraska residents in four age categories: 12 and younger, ages 13-16, ages 17-49 and ages 50 and older.

It is administered by the Teacher Education Department at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Contestants will be provided text to copy for their entries, which must be written in any of the various styles of cursive handwriting and not printed. Rules and text to be copied is available online.

Entries should be mailed to: Nebraska Handwriting Contest, Attention: Julie Agard, University of Nebraska at Kearney/Department of Teacher Education, Kearney, NE, 68849.

Contact Agard at 308-865-8556 for more information.

KEARNEY, Neb. (AP) — The lingering snow and bitter winter in Nebraska has put a damper on the annual sandhill crane migration this year.

March is typically the prime time to see the roughly 500,000 sandhill cranes that stop along the Platte River as part of their annual migration.

But this year the crane numbers have been much lower because of the tough conditions.

Andrew Caven with the Crane Trust nature center told the Omaha World-Herald the number of migrating birds may not take off until sometime between mid-March and mid-April. But once it begins the cranes may gather in impressive numbers.

Every year, about 80 percent of the world’s sandhill crane population visits Nebraska to forage for food before continuing north to their breeding grounds.

Endangered whooping cranes and other rare birds also sometimes make an appearance.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — High school juniors with an interest in business are encouraged to apply for two summer programs hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Business.

The Accounting Summit and the Dreambig Academy provide insight into potential careers in the world of business and a preview of life at the university.

It’s scheduled for May 29-31. The students will stay in residence halls, work on projects with university accounting students and network with industry professionals during tours of local companies.

Go online by March 31 to apply for the Accounting Summit.

The Dreambig Academy is set for July 21-25. It emphasizes leadership, networking skills and success in the business world.

Anyone can go online by Friday to nominate a student.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — If you ever wished to gaze at a stomping, snorting, neighing panorama of Western heritage from your living-room window, now could be your chance.

A classic image of the American West — wild horses stampeding across the landscape — not only has endured through the years but has multiplied past the point of range damage. Through May 3, the U.S. government is seeking more private pastures for an overpopulation of wild horses.

Many consider rounding up wild horses to live out their lives on private pastures a reasonable approach to a tricky problem. Wild horses, after all, not only have romantic value, they are protected by federal law.

Just keep in mind a few of the dozens of requirements for getting paid by the government to provide wild horses a home.

“It’s not like you can do this in your backyard, or even a 5 acre plot,” said Debbie Collins, outreach specialist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program in Norman, Oklahoma.

You need a lot of fenced-in land, enough to sustain anywhere from 200 to 5,000 healthy horses. Exactly how much land depends on pasture quality as determined by the government, but you can safely assume several hundred if not thousands of acres (hectares).

The pastured horses typically are left on their own with little human intervention. Still, they require continuous water and basic shelter from the elements, such as trees or a canyon; supplemental forage; and corrals for loading and unloading from trailers.

Participants in the private-pasture system must live in 14 Western and Midwestern states, from eastern Washington to the Texas Panhandle. Over two-thirds of the 37 existing off-range pastures are in Oklahoma and Kansas.

And: These horses aren’t pets. They’ve had little exposure to people. Many are over 5 years old and therefore not ideal for training and individual adoption or sale, other options available through the BLM.

Still, there’s no shortage of interest in the off-range pasture program. People call all the time asking for details, Collins said.

“My only advice would be to go into it with your eyes wide open,” said Dwayne Oldham, a former Wyoming state veterinarian who has taken in wild horses on his family’s Double D cattle ranch outside Lander, Wyoming, since 2015.

Working with the government can be demanding, but providing for the over 130 horses on the Wind River Wild Horse Sanctuary on the ranch isn’t too difficult, Oldham said.

The sanctuary is a little different from most private wild-horse pastures: It’s open to the public. Tourists headed to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks increasingly stop there.

About 50 miles (80 kilometers) to the south, cattle ranchers, wild horse advocates and the BLM have been embroiled in decades of lawsuits over wild horses in an area of mostly unfenced, interspersed public and private lands called the Checkerboard. The booming wild horse population there competes with cattle for forage and water in the high desert, the ranchers claim.

The BLM abides by the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which protects wild horses and burros on BLM land in 10 Western states, attorneys for the government say.

“We want to be part of the solution and not just the adversary,” Oldham said.

A group often involved in wild-horse litigation, the American Wild Horse Campaign, says darting mares with contraceptives is the best answer to overpopulation but is underused. Roundups only encourage compensatory breeding and overpopulation, said Grace Kuhn with the group.

However, the group doesn’t oppose off-range pastures as an alternative to keeping wild horses in corrals for long periods.

“We do advocate that if the government is going to be removing wild horses from the range, long-term is more cost-effective than short-term holding,” Kuhn said.

Over 55,000 more horses and burros live wild in the West than the roughly 27,000 the BLM says can thrive in harmony with the landscape.

Adoptions and sales through the Wild Horse and Burro Program have recovered to over 3,400 a year after hitting a low of about 1,800 in 2014.

But while the number of off-range pastures has boomed from just a couple in the 1990s, the number of horses on them hovers very close to their current carrying capacity of about 36,500.

The number of pastured wild horses is determined mainly through roundups and adoptions. Stallions are gelded and kept at different off-range pastures than mares, preventing reproduction aside from the occasional pregnant mare rounded up from the wild.

How many new off-range pastures are established through the latest bid solicitation, the first of its kind since 2016, will depend on costs and how many existing ones get renewed, Collins said.

“It’s just a happier, healthier environment for a horse to be able to be out in a pasture,” she said.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Just over half of surveyed students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said they want red balloons to keep soaring over Memorial Stadium after touchdowns, despite protests about the environmental impact.

Almost 52 percent of the roughly 3,800 students surveyed indicated they wanted to keep the tradition alive, the Lincoln Journal Star reported. Almost 43 percent argued the practice should end, while 6 percent said they didn’t care.

The tradition to launch balloons after the football team’s first touchdown began in the 1940s. The university now uses thousands of biodegradable balloons tied with cotton string to minimize the environmental impact.

Sophomore Brittni McGuire is president of Sustain UNL, a student-led environmental sustainability organization that led an education campaign about the balloon issue.

McGuire said the balloons still take years to decompose and are a threat to wildlife.

“If we take away the balloons, we’ll still be celebrating touchdowns,” she said. “We don’t change the game, but we do save the water and the wildlife.”

McGuire said the survey was part of a broader conversation about what students can do to address issues about the environment and climate change.

“We’ve grown up with the science, and we see it as a huge threat and something we have to deal with,” she said. “My generation is thinking more about the future and the impact of our decisions now.”

McGuire said that although students seemed in favor of the balloon tradition, two-thirds of survey respondents indicated a desire to ban plastic bags from campus vendors.

There have been other attempts to end the tradition, including a billboard campaign last year launched by Balloons Blow, a Florida nonprofit, which equated the tradition to littering. An Omaha man in 2016 sued the university to stop the balloon release.