Robert Beall won the Federal Duck Stamp Art Contest with the portrait above. Beall, the Washington Post tells us, is a farmer, fish taxidermist and wildlife artist from Maryland — and after 27 years of trying, he's finally won the only art competition sponsored by the U.S. government. 

The government prints 3.1 million duck stamps a year. You can't mail a letter with a duck stamp. You need a stamp to hunt ducks, and stamps are collected by birders, hunters and philatelists. The government has been printing duck stamps since 1934 and the program has raised more than $750 million, enough to purchase 6 million acres of wildlife habitat.

Beall painted a wigeon. He first entered the competition in 1982 and in 1983, he came in second — losing to a pair of wigeons. The Fish and Wildlife Service selects five waterfowl a year for the contest. This year the Service picked the wood duck, the gadwall, the cinnamon teal, the blue-winged teal and the wigeon. Beall thought the wood ducks would drive the judge snow-blind and that the teals were "niche ducks." So he painted a wigeon, and won. "Now I'll always be referred to as a Federal Duck Stamp winner," said Bealle. "It may not mean a lot to most people, but to me it means a hell of a lot." 

Our friends over at the Rural School and Community Trust will be releasing the 2009 version of "Why Rural Matters," its 50-state analysis or rural schools. This is the fifth report in the "Why Rural Matters" series and will be the subject of a webinar to be held Wednesday. For full details, go here. 

The reports will help people judge how their states are doing when it comes to serving rural students. There's quite a variety in outcomes, that's for sure. For instance, the non-profit group reports that graduation rates for students in high schools with high levels of poverty range from 28% in Wyoming to over 90% in Nevada. In all, the report will measure states along 25 different indicators.

In a preview to the report, the Rural School and Community Trust reports that several states have emerged with "pressing rural education concerns. Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, North Dakota, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, New York, and Washington join several southern and southwestern states in facing crucial challenges related to rural educational policy and rural educational outcomes. California ranked high on indicators related to concentrated poverty and student and family diversity, as did Alaska, which had ranked high on diversity in 2007." 

Read about how the "Pink Ladies" revitalized Halstad! Kevin Bonham, in the Grand Forks Herald, has a great story about how women have been starting businesses like crazy in the Minnesota town. Now there are seven women-owned businesses among the dozen or so in the town of 600. Halstad's motto is "The Way Rural America is Supposed to Be." These days, that means rural America is getting a tad pink. 

Bonham lists the "Ladies of Halstad" (their designation) in a fascinating review of how small businesses get started. The first woman to start a downtown business was Dr. Joy Hollinhead, a dentist. A North Dakota native convinced her to open a practice in the state, and so she did. She recently put up a new $400,000 building on the town's main street. Roberta Hettervig re-opened the Halstad Cafe in 2005. It had been closed for a year, but Hettervig had grown up on a farm and knew how to cook. “If you can feed 12 people, you can feed 20, and if you feed 20, you can feed 40,” she said. Pia Thurland (above), a native of Denmark, opened Eagle Tree Feed Store and Horsemanship in December. She's married to a Native American who liked Halstad because it was central to his trucking business. She decorates her store with pictures of her customers' animals and with miniature hay bales.

“It’s really interesting that we would have so many businesswomen in a small community,” said Randy Aarestad, Red River State Bank president. “Other than the hardware store and the bank that are owned still by men, the private businesses are operated by women. It’s kind of taken on a flavor of its own.”

A traveling journalist can't live on interviews and Diet Coke alone. She needs fortifying music, and today's FM stations are awfully thin soup.