SANCTUARIES UNDER STRAIN
THE WORLD’S LARGEST SET OF LANDS DEDICATED TO PRESERVING wildlife started with a five-acre scrap of sand and guano. In 1903, to protect a raucous rookery of Brown Pelicans from poachers, President Theodore Roosevelt designated Florida’s Pelican Island as the first unit of what would become the National Wildlife Refuge System.
Since then the network has grown to 568 refuges spanning 95 million acres. More than 200 of them were designated specifically to safeguard places where birds overwinter or rest and refuel during migration, including birding hotspots such as Cape May, in New Jersey, and Santa Ana, in Texas.
Some 59 million people visited a refuge last year. Amid so much natural beauty, it’s likely that few noticed anything amiss. Those intimately familiar with these sanctuaries, however, discern a harsher reality: The refuge system is shouldering a growing workload—more visitors, more land to manage, and more maintenance needs—while being chronically underfunded. As one result, since 2011, the system has shed more than 700 staff positions, even as it grew by 15 refuges.
“We are shutting down basic wildlife management and visitor services, but it’s been screened from the public so far because our dedicated staff keep doing the best they can with less and less,” says one refuge manager who, directed by officials not to speak with the press, commented on condition of anonymity. “In my 20-plus-year career, I have never seen the morale of refuge employees so low Our leadership doesn’t want to acknowledge what is happening.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which manages the refuge system, declined to answer questions from for this article, or to make refuge staff available for interviews. The agency instead sent a statement from Cynthia Martinez, chief of the system. “What makes the Refuge System stand out is the dedication of our managers and teams to wildlife conservation—their zeal for protecting America’s public lands,” she
