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Wilderness Fellows BlogFinding the Miami Blue
When asked how I spent my summer, I say: drafting a plan to protect the Florida Keys Wilderness. That hardly ever fails to draw a “wow” – a feeling I share. And that’s before I add the kicker: I also helped biologists at the Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuges monitor what may be the rarest butterfly in the world. That’s the endangered Miami Blue butterfly, once thought to be extinct. But a small population exists in the Florida Keys Wilderness. Wilderness designation --the highest level of protection that federal lands can receive – helps the last remnant of this brightly colored species survive. Where is the Florida Keys Wilderness? It covers 4,788 acres in the southernmost part of Florida and includes 28 keys and mangrove islands that are within the boundaries of three national wildlife refuges: National Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge, Great White Heron National Wildlife Refuge and Key West National Wildlife Refuge.
What does monitoring the butterfly entail? You find the butterfly’s host plant (blackbead, Pithecellobium spp.) and count the number of butterflies you find at the point for two minutes. Then you repeat this at many points along the beach where the host plant is found. Why is the butterfly important? Like any butterfly, the Miami blue plays a role in the food web of its island habitat and contributes to pollination of nectar species.
An Unbeatable Opportunity
After three months, I’ve completed my work at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia and moved on to Monomoy Refuge in eastern Massachusetts. While humans should leave no physical trace in the wild, I hope I have left my stamp figuratively on Virginia’s proposed Assateague Island wilderness. For a conservationist fresh out of grad school, spending the summer in the tidal wetlands of the Mid-Atlantic, planning how to preserve their wilderness character, was an unbeatable opportunity. But its future character is not assured. The island ecosystem is constantly responding to tides and storm events. Sea-level rise and an increase in storm frequency will impact the island. The spread of invasive plants, such as phragmities, and animals, such as sika deer, is another potential threat. Car and trucks – the primary method of travel for staff − further threaten the island’s undeveloped quality. Some data I collected, such as the number of days spent mowing, fencing or collecting salt marsh samples on the island or the number of times staff or visitors used motor vehicles there (more than 1,000 in 2011) surprised refuge staff, who tend to think of the island as more untouched than it is. The exercise helped us brainstorm how wilderness character could be improved and why this matters. Reaching the proposed wilderness on foot takes a strenuous seven-mile hike over soft sand, through mosquitoes and under a hot sun. Still, some persevere. When the refuge manager found one tired hiker resting by a tree, he asked if the visitor needed help. The hiker shook his head, smiling. “No,” he replied. “I’m having a great day.” At times I wondered if the time and effort spent surveying wilderness character paid off for a place so little-visited. But knowing that a hiker or group of sanderlings or a sea turtle benefited from wilderness lands completely reaffirmed all the work that staff and I did.
Battling Invasive Plants on a 44,000-acre Refuge
One thing I learned for sure during my summer at Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge in Illinois: Managing a refuge of more than 44,000 acres comes with no lack of challenges. From managing food plots for migratory waterfowl during a record drought year to battling invasive species such as the menacing autumn olive shrub, staff at Crab Orchard have a lot on their plate. During my time at the refuge, I helped with projects including a bullfrog survey, a prescribed burn, invasive species removal and mist-netting for Indiana bats. However, my main focus was devising a plan to monitor the refuge’s wilderness character. The year 2014 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Protection Act, and wilderness character monitoring is part of an initiative to assess the condition of our nation’s wilderness areas. This will help federal land managers track how wilderness character changes over time and how their stewardship actions affect this change. Using this concept, Crab Orchard will be able to determine whether its wilderness is improving, degrading or remaining the same. I particularly enjoyed the hours I spent hiking Crab Orchard’s wilderness while conducting an invasive species survey. The Shawnee Hills wilderness, in dramatic contrast to the generally flat and featureless landscape of greater Illinois, is marked by deep ravines and prominent sandstone outcrops. Besides its natural beauty, it offers a powerful sense of solitude, unexpected for an area between the two densely populated cities of Marion and Carbondale. However, its relatively small size, at just over 4,000 acres, makes it more vulnerable to the negative impacts of surrounding land use. Unauthorized ATV trails and footpaths reach the wilderness from adjacent private lands, eroding fragile soil. Other unauthorized land uses, such as off-trail horseback riding and the building of permanent deer-hunting tree stands, also pose threats. Agricultural fields increase the presence and abundance of invasive species, such as Japanese honeysuckle, autumn olive and multiflora rose, which threaten its natural quality. It is because of constant threats like this that I am excited there is an initiative to monitor our nation’s wilderness areas.
Battlefield in the Aleutians
Wilderness Fellow for the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, I face some unique challenges. I have spent the past two months deciphering what makes this wilderness, and what kinds of things threaten that wilderness character. But there’s a catch: For now, I must rely on others’ reports to help answer those questions. Why? Because the Aleutian Islands that make up the Alaska Maritime Refuge are so remote and far flung that you can't just hop on a boat or plane and expect to arrive in wilderness a few hours later. In fact, scheduled plane trips are often delayed for days at a time because of extreme weather. This may be frustrating for our field biologists, but for me, it makes the wilderness seem a little wilder. Perhaps I'll change my mind at the end of August, when I finally get to visit the places that I have been researching, with the aid of our refuge research vessel, the Tiglax. After a week on Adak Island - part refuge, part wilderness, part military reservation nearly 600 miles off the Alaska Peninsula - I will hop aboard the Tiglax and ride home to Homer, picking up research at field camps along the way. This adventure can't come soon enough! Perhaps you’re wondering: Why do we need to monitor wilderness in a refuge that is so remote? Because we can’t tell, without monitoring it, that it’s not being threatened by human activity. Even in such a remote place, human impacts such as climate change, marine debris, oil spills and military base activity are widespread. Alaska Maritime Refuge is crucial habitat for some migratory bird species and marine mammals . Yes, its extreme remoteness protects it from some threats, like too many visitors making trails through the wilderness, but there are plenty of other activities that could degrade this very unique place. |
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| Driftwood at Chincoteague Refuge, VA |
| Credit: Taryn Sudol |
As I sat at the edge of the tide, I thought about collecting and letting go.
The Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge is located on the Virginia portion of the Assateague barrier island. There’s a trail that ends at the Atlantic seashore in northern Virginia. It is accessible by foot or bike but not by car. It is littered with seashells. I didn’t come here to beach comb but as I walked along a few shells caught my eye. I pick up black, amber, and deep amethyst colored bits. I sit at the wave’s break line and let the seawater rinse the sand off the shells. The waves push and pull the sand around my legs. I know if I loosen my grip just a little my small collection will tumble from my hand and disappear.
It’s within my first week as a Wilderness Fellow that I sit on the beach debating whether to take a souvenir. What has already become the defining characteristic of the Assateague barrier island is dynamism. The island has existed for thousands of years but has only survived by constantly changing form. It boils down to the sun, moon, and our irregularly shaped planet. The tides and littoral drift push and pull sand so that the island migrates –usually south and inland. Sometimes the island's migration is accelerated by storms and sea level rise or interrupted with seawalls and jetties. The islands, like anything really, are always responsive. A seawall or jetty deprives a different part of the island or a separate island of a sediment source. Starved, the island may contort more rapidly or ultimately thin and wash away.
People put seawalls and jetties on the shore in an effort to stabilize what is there. It seems that they want to hold onto what they’ve grown accustomed to. They’ve become invested in the landscape as it is, invested maybe through commerce, real estate, or memories. One of the biggest management issues the Chincoteague NWR faces is trying to maintain its current location for beach-access parking. The parking lot in place is continually overwashed with sand. The solution would appear to be moving the parking lot back or rebuilding it. The refuge has done so multiple times at considerable cost. Now, because the island is thinning, the parking lot is being squeezed out.
My first reaction is to abandon the parking lot and let the beach do what it wants. My favorite thing about the beach is that it’s never the same. You can’t come to the same beach twice. The waves crash in a slightly different pattern and therefore tug the sand into new contours. The weather can cause the ocean to be steely and powerful or glittering and playful. The sea foam can be so fluffy that it rolls in the wind or instantly dissolve with a hiss into the sand. As a local pointed out to me, the only thing constant about a beach is change. How can we ever capture it? The beach will consume the parking lots or tear down the houses at the edge or become something completely different from what you saw in your childhood.
Parts of the refuge are intended for recreation and thus the battle of the parking lot. But the northern part of the refuge is proposed wilderness where the intention is to let natural forces reign. Wildernesses usually have the inaccurate reputation of being pristine. To me, pristine is closely associated with unchanged. Yet the proposed wilderness for the Chincoteague Refuge will embrace change. The only permanence about the wildernesses is ensuring that natural forces are allowed to occur without restraint. I feel that sense of release knowing that the wind and waves may push the sand where it likes in the northern Chincoteague NWR. Whenever I may visit, I will know it for that one day but even then I’m letting it go and when I return it will be new again.
First Impressions
Kelly Pippins
July 5, 2012
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| Unimak Island, Shishaldin Volcano, Alaska Maritime Refuge |
| Credit: Vernon Byrd |
The Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge is arguably one of the most remarkable expanses of federally protected land in the United States. Extending nearly as far and wide as the contiguous lower 48, this refuge comprises most of Alaska’s islands, islets, emerging rocks and spires from Forrester Island in southeastern Alaska to the western reaches of the Aleutian Chain and about as far north as Barrow in the Arctic Circle. These land masses are home as many as 40 million nesting seabirds every year and provide a means of respite for other birds migrating between North America and Asia. Making up the northern-most ridge of the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Aleutian Island Chain is one of the more well-known units of this refuge. That is not to say however, that any of the other 4 units are any less spectacular. Beginning in 1970, hundreds of acres of land within each of these refuge units were congressionally designated as wilderness. As the wilderness fellow for the refuge, it is my primary task to complete a wilderness character assessment of these areas.
Prior to our first week’s training, I knew next to nothing about the “wilderness,” let alone the wildernesses of Alaska. Now, with only 3 weeks of work under my belt, I can confidently explain that congressionally designated wilderness areas are inherently complex. What does it mean to preserve and protect land in its natural condition? How do we define natural condition? Can nature be natural if we are constantly protecting it from change? How do you differentiate natural change from anthropogenic impacts? These kinds of questions plague every environmentalist. It is up to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to select the best possible answers for our nation’s wilderness areas according to the best available information. Ideally, the work of a Wilderness Fellow will help guide these agencies toward lawful and logical conclusions.
Unfortunately, I cannot yet claim to have ventured out to the vast wilderness of Alaska Maritime Refuge, but my research thus far and personal reports from the refuge staff have me wriggling in my boots to do so. Until my time on the Tiglax (Alaska Maritime Refuge’s research vessel and life support system for field camps) in early August, I write from a second hand point of view. From here, I can see that the wildernesses of Alaska Maritime Refuge are not only ecologically, geographically and culturally diverse in and amongst themselves, but they are also incredibly unique compared to wildernesses throughout the United States. In the lower 48, it is relatively easy to enjoy a wilderness area first hand. In maritime Alaska, visitor access to the wilderness is limited. Without a boat or plane (and a seriously adventurous attitude), these islands are virtually inaccessible. Rather than visitor use issues, this refuge faces issues regarding subsistence use by native communities, marine debris, and military refuse from World War II. My work here has clearly just begun.
