REFUGE NO LONGER

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) today released a letter protesting a decision by The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to expand a controversial give-away in which local farmers grow genetically modified soybeans and corn at Delaware’s Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge. PEER says the move is wreaking ecological havoc and violating the Service’s own policies.

“Plowing under high-quality grasslands to plant soybeans does wildlife no good and sets a terrible precedent affecting the entire National Wildlife Refuge System,” stated Gene Hocutt, the head of PEER’s Refuge Keeper program and a former long-time refuge manager. “Prime Hook is supposed to be a National Wildlife Refuge – not a national soybean patch!”

Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge covers some 10,000 acres but 500 of those acres are being used by local farmers to grow soybeans and corn. The farmers switched over to genetically modified crops in 2001. At that time, the Refuge took 150 acres (3 fields each about 50 acres in size) out of the farming program to participate in a regional Grassland Bird study. The study found rare plants and insects as well as unique birding opportunities. Despite those findings, the Refuge now plans to put the 150 study acres back into cultivation.

“The Fish & Wildlife Service dropped its fig leaf when it decided to give away even the little bit of acreage needed for the biological study,” Hocutt added, noting that data collection on natural plant communities and bird use will have to cease and the $200,000 spent on the study will be wasted.

PEER says the cultivation program violates Fish and Wildlife Service’s own rules.

Prime Hook NWR is located 22 miles southeast of Dover, DE, near the western shore of Delaware Bay. The refuge was established in 1963 to conserve an important segment of the Delaware Bay marshes, to protect migrating and wintering waterfowl habitat. The refuge is considered to have one of the best existing wetland habitat areas along the Atlantic Coast.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, “The goal of refuge management is to provide habitat for a diversity of native fish, wildlife and plants.”

Nothing is in their mandate about give aways to farmers to grow genetically altered foods.

Of course, the contamination and destruction of wildlife refuges is not new and not limited.

According to a report from Defenders of Wildlife, the large-scale threats facing the system are overwhelming the poorly staffed refuges. U.S. border and immigration policy is shifting illegal border crossing into sensitive desert habitats within Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in Arizona. A massive water diversion in California could completely alter the Sonny Bono Salton Sea NWR. Oil and gas wells in the McFaddin NWR have killed vegetation and polluted marshland habitat, while the Bush administration and many in Congress push plans to permit drilling in the Arctic NWR. At the Moapa NWR, a proposal to drill for water for Las Vegas may suck dry the refuge’s springs, which are vital for endangered species. Noise and habitat exclusion from a proposed jet landing field next to the Pocosin Lakes NWR threatens tens of thousands of swans, geese and ducks and the Navy pilots whose safety will be compromised by this ill-conceived plan to mix large waterfowl and fighter jets.

The report lists the ten most threatened Wildlife Refuges. “Each of these ten refuges, and the 535 other refuges in the country, is in a funding crisis,” says Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife. “Moapa Valley NWR has only a quarter of one staff person’s time to restore and protect its fragile desert springs for an endangered species. Nearly 200 other refuges do not even have staff.

In addition, the Humane Society points out that “…because most people assume that a wildlife refuge is a safe haven for wildlife, it may come as a surprise to learn that recreational hunting and trapping are now allowed on more than 300 of the 544 refuges within the National Wildlife Refuge System.”

When first established by President Theodore Roosevelt the sanctuaries were inviolate – no hunting or fishing allowed.

In recent years, however, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has reneged on that founding principle by increasingly opening refuges to hunting. In some states, hunting is now permitted on all refuges. In fact, in many states, USFWS refuge web sites promote not only hunting but also recreational trapping. They do this despite the dwindling popularity of hunting and indications that the public is increasingly concerned about the humane treatment of wildlife. Sources: PEER, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Defenders of Wildlife, Humane Society of the United States