In refuges, staffers become a rarer species

Cuts force federal wildlife sanctuaries in N.C. to rely on volunteers

Visitors attending nighttime field trips to hear red wolves howl will pay a fee for the first time. Students will miss annual outings at Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. And a visitors center built in 2002 will open only for limited hours, relying on volunteers for staff.

Such pinched services are the effect of mounting staff cuts at national wildlife refuges in North Carolina and throughout the Southeast, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services restructures to contend with flat budgets.

Cuts to the refuge system come at the same time that the Bush administration is proposing increases for other open spaces -- notably national parks. President Bush was in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia on Wednesday, emphasizing his recommendation to increase funding for the National Park Service to $2.4 billion, in preparation for the service's centennial in 2016.

But refuges would not fare as well under Bush's proposed budget, compounding several years of flat or declining investment.

North Carolina has 10 refuges to protect animals, birds and fish. Most are in Eastern North Carolina along the flyways of migratory waterfowl. Since 2003, the state's refuges have lost 10 permanent positions -- a 12 percent reduction. Nine more positions at five refuges are slated to go by 2009 through retirements and attrition.

The personnel losses mean scaled-back services, less upkeep on roads and other amenities and fewer wildlife surveys to gauge the health and diversity of animal populations.

"When you talk about cutting nearly a quarter of the staff out of North Carolina refuges, that is devastating," said Noah Matson, refuge programs manager for Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental advocacy group. "The entire system is in crisis right now."

The cuts are part of a broader restructuring plan at the 128 Southeastern wildlife refuges from Florida to Louisiana, which attract 11 million visitors a year. The Fish and Wildlife Service, faced with declining budgets, plans to phase out 87 positions in the Southeast in the next five years. That is on top of 68 positions abolished in the region over the last two years.

President Bush's proposed 2008 budget would spend $398.4 million for the national refuge system, an increase of 3.3 percent from current fiscal year, according to the Department of Interior.

Given projected flat or slightly declining budgets for refuges through 2011, combined with cost-of-living increases for staff and inflationary costs, the refuge system is having to shrink to maintain money for operations.

A budget like ice

"We've been doing more with less for a long time," said Mike Bryant, manager of the Alligator River and Pea Island Wildlife Refuges in Eastern North Carolina. "I think we've reached a point where we have to accept that we now will do less with less."

"It's almost like watching an ice sculpture melt slowly," Bryant said.

Tom MacKenzie, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Atlanta, said the refuge system has been competing for federal dollars with national priorities such as the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina relief and homeland security. Faced with shrinking budgets, the refuges developed a plan for an orderly reduction in staffing.

"Before we came up with the plan, we had been doing a hodge-podge of not filling jobs," MacKenzie said. "It made a quilt pattern of some refuges being better off than others."

The refuges, on public lands, try to provide as many free programs as possible. As staffs shrink, volunteer groups have increasingly stepped in to lead educational programs, but often charging a fee to offset costs.