News
This week is Polar Bear Week - a great way to celebrate this iconic, magnificent, and unfortunately threatened species. Prior to my current job as the President of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, I served as the Alaska Regional Director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As part of that job, I was appointed by both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as the United States Polar Bear Commissioner.
The USFWS has recently opened up a public comment period for its National Elk Refuge (“NER”) Draft Bison and Elk Management Step-down Plan (“SDP”) and associated Draft Environmental Assessment (“EA”). Yesterday, The National Wildlife Refuge Association submitted their concerns with the SDP along with Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and Earth Justice.
The National Wildlife Refuge Association’s staff and board members recently attended their biannual board meeting in Olympia, Washington and a fundraising event in Seattle, Washington. They ended the trip with a visit with USFWS staff at Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. It was a very successful and productive trip!
Last week, supporters of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge in southern Nevada stormed Capitol Hill to ask lawmakers to continue the existing protections of this iconic refuge. The Air Force is proposing to expand their footprint into 1.1 million acres of the Refuge, essentially removing these acres from the Refuge System, totaling 5% of all refuge lands in the lower 48 states.
The Kudzu Team by Joe McCauley
On a recent September day, I joined Refuge System staff and one other volunteer, who happens to be my son, to combat kudzu at the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia. Kudzu is a highly invasive plant that if left unchecked will smother anything and everything in its path, and quickly. Over the past three years, the Refuge has employed the full arsenal of control methods to combat this species. These include mowing, hand cutting, herbicide application, prescribed burning, and, wait for it, goats! Turns out that goats love kudzu. This should come as no surprise since one of the early promotions for this introduced plant was as cattle fodder. It was also promoted by the Federal government to control erosion. If only we knew then what we know now about the potentially harmful effects of introducing non-native species. But what’s done is done, and Refuge staff continue to face the challenge head on, taking all the help they can get from volunteers and interns.
The spread of invasive species is but one of the challenges facing the Refuge System today and into the future. This is no time to shrink from our responsibilities to protect our planet and our life-sustaining natural resources.
Written by the Refuge Association’s own Joe McCauley, Regional Representative, Northeast Region
Photo: Kudzu at the Hutchinson Unit of Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge by Joe McCauley
We all know that our National Wildlife Refuge system provides some of the finest opportunities for viewing wildlife and the plants and other biodiversity that make up their habitats, but I would argue that it can be a serious mistake to head home prematurely after a day of hunting, birdwatching, or photographing, as refuges also provide some of the best sunset watching opportunities anywhere.
This is a question that was asked by many supporters of the National Wildlife Refuge System. We too wanted to know the answer. We checked in with national wildlife refuges along the Atlantic coast from Florida to North Carolina and the answer was similar. Refuges were spared the brunt of this storm and damage was minimal.
Invasive plant species threaten ecosystems across the US and, if left uncontrolled, can quickly degrade wildlife habitat. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has adopted various strategies for better addressing this threat and recently held several weed prioritization workshops across the Mid-Columbia River and Central Washington national wildlife refuge complexes.
