The Second Century

Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge, two-thirds of the way down the east coast of Florida, is no more typical than any other refuge, but it faces typical challenges and dangers. And because the refuge system started here in 1903, it seemed a good starting point for an article. I met refuge manager Paul Tritaik in his office on the last day of 2002, 14 hours before the beginning of the refuge system's centennial year. A centennial clock on his wall ticked off the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until March 14, the centennial day. If his refuge isn't typical, Tritaik is. Like every refuge manager I've ever known, he couldn't wait to get me out on the land. He is endlessly enthusiastic, endlessly patient with the public. No time for hunting, fishing, or much of a life outside the refuge. Long hours, lousy pay, lots of frustrations, lots of fulfillment.

Actually, "typical" national wildlife refuges don't exist. They all have different missions—from saving endangered wildlife and plants to producing waterfowl. Some take in entire ecosystems; others, just important scraps. National wildlife refuges include every major biome in our states and territories—from caribou calving grounds in the high Arctic to coral atolls in the tropical Pacific. Five hundred and forty units cover about 95 million acres, comprising the world's largest system of lands set aside primarily for protecting wildlife.

While the refuge system has been hugely successful, it has never realized its potential. From the day in 1903 when warden Paul Kroegel was hired (not by the federal government but by the Audubon Society) at $7 a month to patrol the Pelican Island refuge in his own boat, the system has been understaffed, underfunded, and underappreciated. Today our refuges are being ruined by exotic plants and animals and by political leaders eager to sacrifice habitat to extractive industry. The public has been easily distracted since September 11, but even when it pays attention, it sees only blurred distinctions between national wildlife refuges, national forests, and national parks. The national park system, 11 million acres smaller than the refuge system, gets about $16 per acre, per year. The refuge system gets $3. Two hundred refuges don't even have on-site staff.

Under a cobalt sky flecked with wobbling vultures and white pelicans so high they showed only when their wings flashed white in the fierce Florida sun, Tritaik and I walked along the elevated "centennial boardwalk" to be opened to the public on March 15. On each plank, in reverse chronological order, is inscribed the name of a refuge and the date it was incorporated into the system. We halted at 1980, when President Jimmy Carter's crowning conservation achievement—the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act—tripled the size of the refuge system in one day.

Many of the refuges that now provide some of the last best wildlife habitat had been cutover, grazed-out, eroded moonscapes when they were acquired—Necedah in Wisconsin, for example, or Piedmont in Georgia. When we reached the 1973 plank, I thought of my friend Bill Ashe, who, as regional supervisor for realty in New Mexico, had won his long crusade to get the Sevilleta refuge, 65 miles south of Albuquerque, into the system. It had been one vast, cow-nuked sandlot, so horribly denuded and weed-infested that he was criticized for going after it. Over the years, Ashe kept hearing about Sevilleta's recovery, but when he returned in 1998 he saw a profusion of wildlife and native grasses beyond his wildest dreams. We paused again at plank 1939—the year Bosque del Apache, also in New Mexico, was added. Seventeen sandhill cranes wintered on the refuge then; now the figure is about 18,000. Onward to 1936 and 1935, the depths of the dust bowl era, when J. Clark Salyer, the hard-charging, duck-adoring refuge chief, barnstormed the nation, adding 600,000 acres of wetlands and 50 new refuges in 24 months.

As we neared the roofed observation deck, it really seemed as if we were walking back in time. In front of us, a quarter-mile across Indian River Lagoon—still the most biologically diverse estuary in the country—lay Pelican Island. Often there are boats and jetskis buzzing around, but today there were only brown pelicans skimming low over the waves and a pod of dolphins herding baitfish against a mangrove-clad shore. Flights of endangered wood storks glided over and under us. It was a scene to boost the spirits of any wildlife lover who had ever imagined that humankind was a helpless victim of itself, destined to loneliness on a drab and sterile planet.

A century ago this island had been the whole refuge—only five and a half acres but providing the last brown-pelican rookery on Florida's Atlantic coast. Erosion and sea level change have shrunk Pelican Island to about 2 acres; but at this writing the refuge covers 5,376 acres of barrier island, most of it acquired in the mid-1960s, after the Indian River Preservation League (which became Pelican Island Audubon), Florida Audubon, and National Audubon foiled an attempt by the state to sell the land to developers from Miami. In 1903 the millinery trade had wiped out the island's large wading birds, and tourists were shooting brown pelicans for the hell of it. Today 16 bird species nest there: brown pelicans, great egrets, snowy egrets, cattle egrets, great blue herons, little blue herons, tricolored herons, green herons, black-crowned night herons, reddish egrets, wood storks, double-crested cormorants, anhingas, white ibises, American oystercatchers, and common moorhens. If a visitor ever touched off a gun, he'd be beaten senseless with spotting scopes.

Yet the problems facing Kroegel were minuscule compared with those facing Tritaik. In 1903 Florida was dominated by native vegetation, and developers nibbled at only the fringes. Today developers are closing in from all sides, and invasive exotics are strangling native ecosystems. Tritaik showed me huge Australian pines metastasizing into maritime hammocks; guinea grass choking out tidal marsh, high marsh, and palm hammocks; and endless stands of Brazilian pepper—looking like red hairballs regurgitated by giant cats onto land that used to bloom with a diverse array of native marsh and upland flora.

Removing the exotics seems impossible, but it's being done. A tractor with a cutting attachment brush-hogs the pepper, then refuge personnel paint the stumps with herbicides. Native plants regenerate fast from seeds still in the soil after all these years, but pepper seeds are in the soil, too. So crews have to return and herbicide the seedlings. Australian pines are chainsawed, logs burned, stumps herbicided. Guinea grass has to be sprayed; plow it, and you encourage the seeds; burn it, and you encourage growth. You can have a refuge untouched by short-lived, low-impact herbicides, or you can have thriving native ecosystems full of invertebrates, crustaceans, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds. But you cannot have both.

Not all the locals approve of using herbicides or cutting the Australian pines, which look "magnificent" to the ecologically uninformed. Still, Tritaik gets more support than resistance. Refuge managers aren't so lucky in the Midwest and West, where alien trees are cherished and vast tracts of public land, including refuges, have been ruined for wildlife because registered herbicides have not been applied in timely fashion. The biggest impediment to controlling invasives—after lack of funds—is chemophobic environmentalists. In Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, I have seen millions of acres of big-game habitat ruined by rush skeleton weed, spotted knapweed, and yellow star thistle—noxious weeds that could have been contained had not the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides obtained a temporary injunction against certain federal herbicide uses.