The North Carolina Forest Service will be conducting a controlled burn of about 30 acres within the nature preserve of a popular Wilmington park.

The burn is part of an ongoing effort to restore longleaf pine in Halyburton Park and will be conducted between January and early March, weather permitting, according to a city notice.

“The controlled burn is designed to promote longleaf pine and wiregrass — both fire-dependent species — reduce the risk of future wildfires, and improve habitat for wildlife,” according to the notice.

Funding for the restoration project comes through a 2024 Longleaf Stewardship grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Halyburton Park is a recognized North Carolina Natural Heritage site.

Message boards will be placed along 17th Street in Wilmington to alert the public prior to the burn.

EAST LAKE — Red wolf populations in northeastern North Carolina are still far from recovered, but there are optimistic signs that the highly endangered species now has a solid chance.

More wolves are breeding, more pups are surviving, coyote hybridization has been cut, and there are fewer mortalities from vehicle strikes and gunshots.

While still modest, those successes reflect increased community engagement and renewed commitment from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its numerous partners.

“It’s kind of a small crew, but we’re really dedicated to what we’re doing here,” wildlife biologist Joe Madison, North Carolina program manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program, said during a virtual meeting held Sept. 23 to provide updates on the program. “We want to make this work. We want to work with landowners to make this work. We don’t want to impose it.”

Madison said that only about half of the red wolves roam within Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge land. The population, as of August, according to Fish and Wildlife data, totals about 30 red wolves, including 18 collared adults as well as uncollared juvenile wolves and a few other adults. This population roams the designated recovery area, 1.7 million acres of public and private land in Hyde, Dare, Tyrrell, Washington and Beaufort counties. Red wolves have been seen in all five counties

It is the only known wild population in the world.

Red wolves had once ranged over wide swaths of the U.S. mainland, including much of the Gulf Coast and Southeast regions, but after years of overhunting and habitat loss, the animals were declared extinct in the wild and added to the Endangered Species List in 1967. Twenty years later, four pairs of captive wolves, offspring of wild stragglers captured earlier in Louisiana, were transferred to Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, headquartered in Dare County. Innovative management tactics led to steady population growth, reaching a height of about 120 red wolves by 2007.

In 2020, there were only about seven collared wolves.

But poor communication with landowners led to angry confrontations over wolves coming onto private lands, while coyote hunting regulations led to mistaken identities.  Political support and funding for the recovery program dropped precipitously, and more wolves were being shot, whether intentionally or by mistake. By 2015, proposals were introduced to drastically reduce or potentially eliminate the program. After a series of lawsuits by environmental groups, the recovery program was eventually restored.

As Red Wolf Recovery Program Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Emily Weller has acknowledged, the agency had to change the way it operated.

“Reintroducing a large carnivore into the wild had never been done before, and the focus of this program in the beginning was almost entirely biological,” Weller said, according to minutes of a management update meeting in September 2024. “But the social aspects, the community engagement, and human dimension — those were the cracks in our program’s foundation.”

Now the concept of “collaborative conservation” is viewed as critical to the survival of the red wolf, she said recently. 

“We cannot recover this species on our own,” Weller said during this week’s virtual update. “Our work depends on a pretty complex network of organizations, agencies, communities and individuals.”

That network includes veterinarian care at North Carolina State University and local veterinarians, staff with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, and assistance from numerous nonprofit and nongovernment groups.

“The science tells us what’s possible,” Weller said. “But it’s the relationships, the trust, the collaboration, that really determine what’s achievable.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service also now works with “Prey for the Pack,” a habitat-improvement program that engages with private landowners in eastern North Carolina wolf recovery areas in mutually beneficial habitat programming.

The Red Wolf Recovery Program also works closely with 52 zoo and wildlife centers across the country as part of the Saving Animals From Extinction, or SAFE, program, an initiative of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which currently cares for 280 captive red wolves. Part of the program’s goal is to increase the SAFE population to 400.

“They are a critical piece of this program in that they support the establishment of wild populations in maintaining genetic diversity,” Weller said.

Much care goes into choosing captive wolves to transfer to the recovery program in hopes of future pairing, as well as deciding which pups to place into dens with similarly aged pups for wild mothers to adopt, Weller noted.

“We rely on universities and academia for research and data to guide and base our decisions, and we’re using it constantly to adapt our management,” she said. “And then we need close coordination and communication with local landowners and community members to understand and incorporate their concerns and hopes for their community, as they have the most direct bearing on conservation and recovery, since they are the ones that live with the red wolves.”

Weller said that, other than a period of time when spending was frozen or restricted, the current funding for the Red Wolf Recovery Program had not been reduced.

Ultimately, she said, success will be when red wolves can be delisted — when they don’t need human help to survive — which is expected to take about 50 years, if all goes as planned.

Criteria that meets that goal include measurable thresholds: three viable populations, distributed to maximize redundancy and protect from catastrophic loss; one population of at least 180 and two with a minimum of 280 wolves, each with high gene diversity. Populations must be stable or growing for a decade with minimal human help and have a 95% probability of persisting for 100 years.

And finally, there must be long-term commitment that the sustainable populations can be maintained into the foreseeable future without Endangered Species Act protections.

“Red wolf recovery is about far more than just saving the species,” Weller added. “It’s about restoring ecosystems or landscapes to their natural balanced state and creating healthier environments that benefit plants and wildlife, including game species, and people.”

Every December, the red wolf program issues a release strategy for the coming year, that sets out a plan of how many captive wolves to release into the wild population that will best enable genetic diversity and sustainable growth. Changing conditions will be considered in any necessary revisions.

“It is also important to recognize that the ability to execute many of the releases is highly dependent on numerous on-the-ground factors,” according to the 2024-25 plan. “These factors include, but are not limited to, the ability to successfully capture specific wild Red Wolves, the correct timing of birth, and size of wild ad captive litters, to allow for pup fostering, and the survival of individual wild Red Wolves included in the scenarios.

“Given the myriad of factors that influence the different scenarios, the Service’s actions described in this strategy require real-time flexibility and the ability to adapt to changing factors on the ground and situations; thus, they require management discretion in the field to maximize the chances of success.”

Madison said that the team depends on having that flexibility to make judgment calls and adjust management tactics. During the update meeting, he elaborated on numerous and highly complex strategies that go into pup fostering, proper wolf-human interactions and handling — as little as possible — and wolf feeding – frozen, wild, small mammals like rabbits, raccoons, nutria and fresh frozen roadkill, like deer — and matchmaking (wolves are picky and fickle, too).

But Madison seemed quite pleased with the improvements in pup population survival, an obviously critical component of species recovery.

The pup survival rate to one year is typically about 50%, he said, but after two complete litters didn’t make it in recent years,  the recovery team determined that the likely cause was canine distemper.

“So this year when these pups were in an acclimation pen, and they were five weeks old, we went in the pen, recaptured them, and we gave them their first round of vaccines,” Madison explained. “Also, we implanted them with abdominal transmitters so we would be able to track them after they were released.”

So far, so good, he said. A family group that was released into the wild in May seems to be thriving.

“We may go into the season with a great plan, but then, you know, stuff happens out there,” Madison said. “And we have to adjust and make do with the best we possibly can.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that it will host an online informational meeting later this month to update the public on the Red Wolf Recovery Program.

The information session set for 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. Sept. 23 will include the latest on revitalized recovery efforts for the species, the status of recovery efforts in the eastern North Carolina red wolf population area, coyote-management strategies and planning.

Fish and Wildlife said the meeting is part of its continuing efforts to increase engagement with communities and overall communication and transparency regarding red wolf recovery.

Register for the meeting.

You can also submit any questions you have about red wolves or the Red Wolf Recovery Program using the above link.

“We will use these questions to shape our presentation. You will also have a chance to submit questions during the meeting,” officials said in the announcement.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed on Thursday listing the southern hognose snake as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The Center for Biological Diversity claimed the listing as a legal victory, but said the proposed listing decision exempts logging and herbicide use and fails to provide critical habitat for these snakes.

Southern hognose snakes live in the coastal plains of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, but they already have disappeared completely from Alabama and Mississippi, according to the center.

“It’s good that one of the South’s most distinctive and imperiled snakes will receive protections they urgently need, but I’m troubled by the loopholes in this proposal,” said the center’s Southeast director Will Harlan. “The Fish and Wildlife Service needs to remove the exemptions for logging and pesticides and designate critical habitat to give these snakes a fighting chance.”

The snakes are named for their distinctive upturned snouts, which help them burrow underground, where they spend most of their lives. When threatened, they will often puff up dramatically or play dead, opening their mouths and letting their tongue hang out.

Southern hognose snakes live in the longleaf pine ecosystem, a fire-dependent forest habitat that once covered 92 million acres in the Atlantic and Gulf Coast regions. By the 21st century, 97% of longleaf pine forests had been lost to forest clearing and fire suppression.

The snakes’ remaining populations are threatened by a number of stressors, including habitat loss, urbanization, climate change, collisions with vehicles, invasive species, disease, human persecution and collection for the pet trade.

The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2012 to protect the species. Despite agency scientists predicting that three-quarters of its populations would be lost in the near future, the agency denied protection to the species.

The center successfully challenged the denial in 2023 and required Fish and Wildlife to issue a new decision.

“We will keep fighting for these extraordinary snakes and their longleaf pine forests,” said Harlan. “These snakes cling to survival in uniquely Southern landscapes that are vital to our own health.”

EAST LAKE — In the sadder, more gruesome labor of wildlife conservation, a new count of dead wildlife on the asphalt of two strips of highway within Alligator River Wildlife Refuge continues to reflect the merciless decimation of living creatures by vehicular traffic.

A new report, “US 64 Roadkill Monitoring Survey Year One Interim Report,” released Aug. 13 by the nonprofit Wildlands Network, counted more than 5,000 vertebrates representing 144 species, as well as 1,050 snakes, 1,186 turtles, and 1,529 frogs dead alongside the highway or flattened on the pavement. The first year of the two-year study covered Aug. 1, 2024, to July 31, 2025.

“It’s pretty remarkable carnage, and we’re sure that’s an underestimate, because some things get removed by vultures,” Ron Sutherland, the conservation group’s chief scientist, told Coastal Review.

The updated information will be valuable to planning for proposed wildlife crossings under sections of U.S. Highway 64 and nearby U.S. 264, a need highlighted over the years by numerous vehicle strikes of critically endangered red wolves. Huge bear and deer that run into the road are also increasing hazards to human life, especially at night. 

Although the red wolf had once roamed much of the Southeast, the only wild population of about 30 red wolves, including about a dozen pups, is currently managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Alligator River and Pocosin Lakes refuges within a five-county recovery area in northeastern North Carolina, a good portion of which is intersected by the two highways. 

“One happy surprise is we didn’t see any red wolves,” Sutherland told Coastal Review. “One of the reasons we set out to do the project, one of our goals, was to keep the road clean of roadkill.”

Vehicle strikes, in addition to gunshots, have threatened recovery of the species.  Wolves have been known to be drawn to the highway to eat the dead animals, and tragically suffer the same fate as their would-be meal.

“Research is an important step in the construction of wildlife crossing structures,” the report states. “In order to be cost effective, it is imperative to know where hotspots of wildlife road-crossing activity occur so the sites can be chosen that are most effective both in mitigating wildlife road collisions and maintaining habitat connectivity.”

The study route was chosen to inform planning efforts by North Carolina Department of Transportation, Fish and Wildlife, and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission to develop proposals for wildlife crossings and fencing installations on U.S. 64, the report stated, “with the immediate goal” of reducing wolf strikes.

“We also realized that providing more recent roadkill data would be essential as a fresh baseline for evaluating any future wildlife crossings that were installed on the highway,” according to the report.

Earlier roadkill surveys along U.S. 64 were completed between 2008 and 2011 as part of the North Carolina Department of Transportation planning for a proposed 27.3-mile-long widening and bridge replacement project. The road-widening plans, which had included numerous wildlife crossings, have since been dropped, but construction of a replacement bridge connecting Dare and Tyrrell counties over Alligator River is underway. Construction plans include wildlife crossings and under-road tie-ins at both ends of the bridge.

Sutherland said that the survey team chose to drive at a less pokey pace, about 35 mph or so, and skipped weekend surveying, due to the increased amount of traffic now on the highway. Wildlife officers were informed about large carcasses such as bear so they could be promptly removed, and smaller creatures were scooped up and tossed into the woods. Not pleasant, but unfortunately dead animals along the road are not unusual.

“Overall, you know, I’ve had a lot of years of experience working down there and seeing the wildlife before we started the survey,” Sutherland said. 

While he wasn’t shocked by the continued high numbers of roadkill, he said he didn’t expect to see so many birds. In one period of time, after a rare snowstorm, the technicians found hundreds of deceased yellow-rumped warblers alongside the road, many of which were apparently struck while seeking patches of grass without snow cover. It may not prove Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but intelligence matters even for birdbrains.  As Sutherland noted, of the 68 different types of dead birds — totaling about 800 — there were only three crows, the geniuses of the bird world.

“We know how to keep all these other wildlife species from getting hit on the road, because you can build crossings under or over the road, with fencing to steer them to the right places,” he said. “And it works for basically everything, but the birds. That’s going to take some work to figure out.”

Last December, U.S. Federal Highways’ Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program awarded a $25 million grant to build crossings on U.S. 64 by Buffalo City Road, a red wolf “hot spot” in East Lake on the Dare County mainland where the animals often cross into the refuge. Wildlands Network teamed up with the Center for Biological Diversity, another conservation nonprofit, to raise an additional $4 million in private donations for matching funds, Sutherland said.

If all goes as hoped, Sutherland expects that construction of the crossings could start in late 2026

“It’s expensive because they’re having to raise the road up to be able to put underpasses underneath,” he said, adding that design details are still being worked out.

With the project construction including what he described as a kind of “big ramp,” there will be opportunities to also put small crossings and tunnels on each side for the little crawling, slithering and hopping species, hopefully allowing a total of six to 10 crossings.

“But that’s going to be kind of a win-win situation, because that way that at least part of Highway 64 is going to be elevated,” Sutherland said. “And with sea level rise and storms and hurricanes and so forth, it’s going to be a good for climate resiliency, too, to have the road elevated.”

RALEIGH – Nearly 40 years after the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service launched an innovative program to save the eastern red wolf from extinction, a nonprofit conservation group is challenging the agency’s prior decision to not upgrade to a more protective management designation, despite its outsized importance to the species’ survival.

Arguments were heard Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle for the Eastern District of North Carolina in a federal court case filed by the Center for Biological Diversity that contends the Wildlife Service acted unlawfully when it decided to continue classifying the critically endangered population of red wolves as “nonessential.”

“Judge Boyle is so engaged on this issue … that he’s really able to dig in at this extremely deep, detail-oriented level,” said Perrin de Jong, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, during an interview Thursday about the 90-minute hearing. 

Following listing the wolves in 1966 as “threatened with extinction” on what later became the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service about 20 years later established an experimental “non-essential” population of wild red wolves. and released four pairs into Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Carolina.

It is the only known wild population of red wolves in the world.

The intensively managed recovery program had promising success until about 2010, when management was scaled back. That was before court actions restored much of the program.

The Center for Biological Diversity had petitioned the agency in 2016 to reclassify the red wolf population as essential. The petition was denied in January 2023.

“The service is violating its duty to consider the best available science and the facts that have taken place since 1986 that affect the survival of the red wolf in the wild,” de Jong told Coastal Review.

In a request for comment on the case, a spokesperson for the U.S. Interior Department responded in an email Thursday that the agency does not “provide comment on active litigation.”

Mortality by vehicle strikes and gunshots have been an increasing challenge to the wolves’ survival, de Jong said.

Changing the classification to “essential” would extend more protective measures for the animals, he said, including allowing another layer of protection with a critical habitat designation.

The conservation group also is asking the agency to change their enforcement code to match a 2018 court ruling by Boyle that banned property owners from shooting red wolves unless they were threatening animals or people.

“The science indicates that the greater protections will result in greater conservation success, and inversely, lower protections result in higher poaching pressure,” he said.

The Wildlife Service is not disputing the conservation group’s argument that the agency has the authority to change the essentiality determination, the legal term for the classification, he added. 

“You could describe it as, ‘We’re not going to revisit the essentiality determination, because we don’t have to.’”

Today, there are believed to be 18 known red wolves surviving in the program’s five-county recovery area, in addition to unconfirmed numbers of wolves and wolf pups that do not have collars and have been born or fostered in the wild this year.

Updated data on the Red Wolf Recovery Program was not available on the Fish and Wildlife Service website, but a spokesperson said the new data is expected to be posted in early August.

Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

MANTEO — In the six months since the chaotic and seemingly random cutting in the federal government began, a terrible uneasiness has descended on the northeast corner of North Carolina, where all of the state’s nine national wildlife refuges employ neighbors and family members who live in the rural communities in which they’re located.

At least 10 Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuge Complex staff and five employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional Ecological Services office in Raleigh, so far, are believed to have voluntarily left their jobs, whether nudged by coercion or incentives.

With staff forbidden to speak with media, and ongoing legal challenges and limited public information creating uncertainty, no one appears to know what will happen to their refuges.

“I just found out we should be getting some staffing numbers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the next couple of weeks,” Howard Phillips, the Southeastern representative for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, a nonprofit advocacy and support group for the refuges, told Coastal Review, citing informed but unofficial sources. “The dust seems to be settling a little and (the agency) is starting to get a handle on where they stand.”

But Phillips, who retired at the end of 2020 as manager of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in Tyrrell County, says he fears that serious consequences are already baked into the refuges’ cake, no matter what the government decides to do. The lack of trust engendered by often abrupt, unexplained cuts of staff, research and budgets as well as the “crippling” brain drain of expertise, experience and local knowledge has only made the situation more problematic.

“Could the administration suddenly decide they want to hire everybody back and start doing conservation again?” he continued. “That would take at least six months, probably 12 months. They’d have to be trained.”

The stark reality, he added, is that without knowing the Trump administration’s timeline or goal in the current upheaval, it’s impossible to understand the long-term impacts and impractical to expect much to change, much less improve.

“I mean, they’ve just given no indication that they’re going to do anything that’s going to reverse the trend right now, which is down, down, down, down,” Phillips said.

An unnamed spokesperson from the agency’s public affairs office ignored Coastal Review’s request to authorize or facilitate a refuge staff interview, but responded to several questions about impacts on North Carolina’s wildlife refuges in a May 23 email.

“As part of the broader efforts led by the Department of the Interior under President Trump’s leadership, we are implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency, and government accountability,” the spokesperson wrote. “While we do not comment on personnel matters, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service remains committed to fulfilling our mission of conserving fish, wildlife, and natural resources for the American people.” 

Refuges in the coastal complex encompass nearly a half-million acres of farmlands, swamp forests and pocosin peatlands, intersected by rivers, streams, canals, lakes and sounds within the nation’s second-largest estuarine system.

The nine refuges — Alligator River, Pea Island, Mackay Island, Currituck, Mattamuskeet, Pocosin Lakes, Cedar Island, Swan Quarter, Roanoke River — are stretched along vast swaths of geography in the coastal plain that provide habitat for unique species and globally important ecosystems.

For instance, the critically endangered wild red wolves, the only surviving in the world, roam within a five-county recovery area based out of Alligator River, descendants of Spanish mustangs range free in Currituck, and thousands of migratory birds and waterfowl passing along the Atlantic Flyway overwinter every year at Mattamuskeet and Pocosin Lakes.

Mattamuskeet, the state’s largest natural lake, is undergoing an innovative and intensive watershed restoration project many years in the planning. And Pocosin Lakes, named for the Native American term for “swamp on hill” because of its boggy peat soil, has been studied by Duke University researchers for its ability to remediate carbon pollution. The refuge has also nearly completed an extensive rewetting project to restore the ability of the pocosin peat to absorb carbon dioxide and resist wildfires.

Two major wildfires in and around the refuge in recent decades have burned deep in the ground for many weeks, spewing tons of carbon back into the environment, with one smoldering for six months before it was finally extinguished.

Therein lies the dilemma — and the risk — to the refuges: What happens when there’s no one available to take proper care of the refuges, and to even continue the conservation mission?

Pocosin Lakes, for instance, with the recent retirement of former manager Wendy Stanton, no longer has a refuge manager.

“You know, with Wendy gone now, I don’t know that there’s anybody left at Pocosin Lakes that really understands that hydrology restoration and how it works,” Phillips said.

But it’s more than the upper-level staff, said Bonnie Strawser, president of the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society, a local nonprofit group that supports all of the eastern North Carolina refuges. It’s also the loss of staff that maintain buildings and trails, she said, as well as the biologists who monitor water and test soil.

Strawser, who retired in 2020 after 40 years with Fish and Wildlife as visitor services manager, said that the project leader for Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuge Rebekah Martin has designated acting managers in each refuge, but that’s in addition to their regular jobs with the refuges.

Martin is based at the agency’s Roanoke Island headquarters but is not authorized to speak to reporters. According to a 2023 article on the coastal refuges website, Martin oversees about 400,000 acres of habitat with more than a dozen endangered or threatened species. At the time, it said, the complex had 35 employees and more than 400 volunteers.

“We are currently down to 10 staff, and this is regular O and M — operations and maintenance — funded by general funding, refuge funding,” Strawser said in a recent interview. “Now that does not include firefighters or law enforcement, because they are funded through different programs.”

Strawser said that there were no probationary employees in eastern North Carolina, so no one had been outright fired. Some staff who agreed to resign under one of the agency’s two rounds of the deferred resignation program, she said, were quickly shut down and put on administrative leave for varied periods of time while collecting their salaries.

Cuts in both the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service will also hamper the agencies cooperative response to wildfires and disasters, including with the national interagency incident management teams. Strawser is a member of one of three teams in the southern area.

“I don’t know what in the world we’re going to do when fire season comes,” she said. “They stood down our team. It’s not going to be available, they said, at least until after July.”

As Strawser noted, a lot goes on behind the scenes to keep the refuges humming, including procedural processes to keep records and run programs, as well as have sponsors to maintain the “casual hire” personnel to respond to emergencies.

“But the Fish and Wildlife Service, because they lost so many people in the administrative positions, they don’t have anybody to handle the payments and the travel, so they can’t sponsor” for a team member, she said.

For the time being, the public many not notice much difference when they go to a refuge, Strawser said.

“The visitor centers are run by volunteers,” she said. “The public programs are conducted mostly by volunteers.” But there’s only three maintenance people for their nine national wildlife refuges.

“There’s been no talk of closing anything, but it’s just common sense there will problems if there’s nobody to grade the roads, if there’s nobody to do the mowing on the road shoulders, she said. “And if there’s no ‘daylighting’ of the roads, they’ll get overgrown, the sun won’t reach down, and the mud doesn’t dry out and the road is destabilized and before you know it, they’re not drivable.”

Mike Bryant, who was succeeded by Martin, had served as refuge manager for 20 years, from 1996 to 2016, and he witnessed decreasing support for the refuges from the federal government, he told Coastal Review in an interview. After retirement, he had also served as consultant for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, and was former president of the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society. Although he said he keeps in touch, he is no longer directly involved with either group.

Since about 2010, Bryant said there has been a steady decline in staffing.

“You have refuges where there were multiple people, and with some of them, there’s just one person left, and so that’s part of the story,” he said. “So it had nothing to do with the past 60 or 90 days, whatever it is now.”

But it’s not just mandated reductions in staff that threaten the refuges, he said. The management challenge is also an aging workforce that may not be replaced.

“You got over half a million acres of National Wildlife Refuge in multiple counties, and spanning across North Carolina to the Virginia border, with all kinds of infrastructure and management mandates and no staff to get those mandates done,” Bryant said. “They’re just wondering, how are we going to meet our responsibilities if we’re the only ones left? It’s a morale buster.”

After being fully staffed around 2003, he said it seemed as if the Department of Interior stopped prioritizing conservation and Congress slowly began losing interest in supporting the refuges.

“The Fish and Wildlife budget has so many facets to it, so many other responsibilities under various laws, endangered species and ecological services and all these other entities within the agency, fisheries and all those things, are all important,” Bryant said. “But Congress was never convinced to budget specifically for operations and maintenance of national wildlife refuges.”

Meanwhile, scores of new refuges came on line in the last 25 years. And rather than hiring more personnel, more work was heaped on less staff.

“I was hired in 1996 to manage Alligator River and Pea Island,” Bryant said. “Two years later, when the manager left Mackey Island and Currituck refuges, the regional office called me and said, ‘Hey, we want you to manage those two.’ All of a sudden, I had four refuges.”

Two years later, he was told to hire and supervise a new manager at Pocosin Lakes. Then staff was reduced, forcing him to share staff between the refuges. Next, Roanoke River was added to his responsibilities — along with the 90-minute drive each way. During all those years, he was bumped up just one pay grade.

Bryant said he gets why people get frustrated with the inefficient, cumbersome aspects of the federal government. But he remembers back when the Clinton administration had reduced both staffing and regulations, and not only succeeded, but ended up with a balanced budget.

“We went through all of those things without ever feeling like the sky is falling,” he said. Rather than taking rational steps to achieve efficiency, the interest now seems more in “just destroying the government, constantly degrading it, and yes, crafting corruption.”

“There’s a few bad actors, no doubt, always, in every organization everywhere, no matter what the enterprise,” Bryant added. “There was a rational process to deal with bad employees, grounded in policy. And the policy was grounded in regulation, and the regulation was grounded in law.”

The first official unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System was Pelican Island in Florida, established for conservation in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Today there are 570 refuges and 30 wetland management districts on more than 150 million acres entrusted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services and enjoyed by 69 million visitors.

Bryant is rooting for not just survival of the struggling refuge system, but its revival.

“I think we’ll recover,” he said. “I’m optimistic about that. But we’ll be deeply scarred.”

SWAN QUARTER — Turns out that those million big, invasive fish that were supposed to be swimming in Lake Mattamuskeet didn’t show up, as contractors conducting a mass removal project that began last year reevaluate the estimated population of common carp in the state’s largest natural freshwater lake.

“What we found is we’re not finding the carp numbers in the lake that we thought were there,” Kendall Smith, refuge manager at Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge, told the Lake Mattamuskeet Watershed Restoration Plan Core Stakeholder Team at a recent meeting.

“So far we have not detected any aggregations of fish. We are finding concentration, places where you find more fish than others, but nothing that would be considered an aggregation,” he said.

Smith explained that the refuge will continue to work with the contractor during the year to review other techniques, assess the issues with the carp’s habits and reproduction, and determine the next approach.

“We’re learning a lot about their movements, confirming whether or not they do activate in the wintertime or early spring,” Smith continued.

But reduction of carp, aggressive bottom feeders that are blamed for much of the lake’s turbidity, is just one of the multiple challenges being tackled. The team, made up of folks with local, state and federal expertise, including representatives from governments, nonprofits and landowners, is proving to be as resilient and adaptive as the lake itself.

“Like anything worthwhile, it’s the hard stuff you’ve got to pay attention to,” local farmer and former refuge biologist Kelly Davis told Coastal Review, “because the easy stuff works itself out, right?”

A member of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Davis, along with her late husband Blythe, for decades farmed 2,000 acres of farmland in Hyde County, of which about 150 acres drain into Lake Mattamuskeet.

In her observation, the lake’s biggest issue in restoring the submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, is the haziness of the water, to which the carp contribute by churning up the lake bottom.

“Whatever’s killing the grass,’ she said, “it’s sedimentation. It’s cloudy waters.”

 Often referred to as a jewel of Hyde County, Lake Mattamuskeet, the centerpiece of the refuge, is 6 miles wide, 18 miles long and averages 2 feet deep.

The 40,000-acre lake, expansive and often shimmering, is famously photogenic. Serene cypress swamps along its border could be described convincingly as habitat for elves and gnomes.

But its beauty belies its environmental vulnerability. It is situated on low land, surrounded by pocosin forests and rich farmlands, intersected by gated canals that drain water, sediment and nutrients into the lake.

In addition to nearby rivers, the vast Pamlico Sound, to the lake ecosystem’s benefit and detriment, contributes some of its marine life and waters, whether pushed in by wind-driven tides or flooding. 

Since the 1990s, the submerged aquatic vegetation in the lake had gradually then suddenly disappeared, depriving the hundreds of thousands of waterfowl along the Atlantic Flyway that had stopped over for food and shelter.

Once Hyde County’s community hub, the lake, the refuge and the long-closed Mattamuskeet Lodge, which the county plans to restore and reopen, is still supporting hunting, fishing and farming activities. And ducks, swans and geese still alight at Mattamuskeet, but now mostly at the seasonal duck impoundments created around the lake.

Since 2017, the stakeholder team has been focused on solutions to the lake’s water quality problems, including loss of SAV and persistent algal blooms, as well as flooding and drainage of the surrounding land.

Guidance for the work has been provided by a watershed restoration plan facilitated by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, in partnership with Hyde County, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. The Coastal Federation is the publisher of Coastal Review, an independent online newspaper that covers coastal issues in North Carolina.

Despite uncertainty with staffing and funding concerns related to recent cuts in the federal government, work at the lake and surrounding land is ongoing and planned for upcoming months, according to a discussion during the Jan. 30 team meeting in the Hyde County Government Complex.

Five projects, funded by a $16.86 million Regional Conservation Partnership Program grant awarded to the North Carolina Coastal Federation, are designed to enhance water quality within the Lake Mattamuskeet watershed.

Project planned are improvements in the Fairfield Drainage District including installing a pump station to reduce drainage into the lake and enhance crops, restoring 1,000 acres of wetlands on converted agricultural land, constructing a 4,506-linear foot living shoreline to protect a Natural Resources Conservation Service dike in Swan Quarter and other critical infrastructure, facilitating agricultural best management practices to mitigate discharge of agricultural runoff into the lake, and outreach to aquaculture producers in an effort to boost participation in oyster restoration.

The Coastal Federation is currently working to finalize a partnership agreement with the Conservation Service, according to the federation’s coastal advocate Alyson Flynn, the meeting’s moderator. She also said that the federation has contracted with consultant Jonathan Hinkle to assist in the design and modeling of the large-scale restoration projects.

Part of the work, which has a four-year timeline, with a potential 1-year extension, involves diverting, pumping and draining water on the land in a way that would avoid adding sediment or nutrients to the lake, a hydrology challenge to engineer and a problem when there may be divergent goals. Drainage improvements also include cleaning out major drainage canals.

 “We all agree that the lake is in poor health, and we want to help fix it, but what that looks like seem to change,” Flynn said in an interview, referring to the proposed Fairfield project. “And so, yes, by diverting that fresh water up into the north, we’re hoping that the lake water will naturally filter out through that designed wetland before it gets to the Intracoastal Waterway in the north, with the assistance of pumps.”

Davis, who attended the stakeholders meeting informally as an area landowner, said that water is affected by changes in sea level and by wind tide, and there’s no choice but to work with the conditions, whatever their whims.  

“There will be times where some of that water movement is hampered until the wind shifts and blows the sound back out, but that’s part of water management in Hyde County, or really on the peninsula,” Davis said. “Whether the water body is the Pungo River, the Intracoastal Waterway, the Pamlico Sound, or Lake Mattamuskeet, the whole idea is to try to get the sediment trapped somewhere before it hits that water. And as the water slowly move through wetlands, the slower you can move the water, the more time it has for the sediment to fall out, and the more what you’re sending to the water bodies is mostly just water.”

What is important, she added, is that all the projects’ stakeholders are engaged and involved — and patient.

“They’re big projects, but they’re also projects that should have decades of value. The projects don’t have to be perfect,” she said, adding that every challenge that is addressed at the time makes a difference. “Because the needs are now, and they will be in the near term and the long term, and the wind still blows the sound out.”

The manatee rescued from a Tar River canal last fall is healthy and back in the wilds of Florida’s Gulf Coast waters.

The 9-foot female is the first documented case of a successful manatee rescue in North Carolina.

The manatee, aptly nicknamed Pamlico, was released on Thursday at a popular “warm up station” in Apollo Beach on Florida’s Tampa Bay after being medically cleared by SeaWorld Orlando and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The discharge canal where she was released is a state and federally designated manatee sanctuary that includes The TECO Manatee Viewing Center.

Pamlico was found stranded last November at a Greenville Utilities Commission’s wastewater treatment plant outfall. She suffered from cold stress and boat strike-related injuries.

Her Nov. 18 rescue entailed a team effort that included officials with Fish and Wildlife Service, SeaWorld Orlando, Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, North Carolina Aquariums, University of North Carolina Wilmington Marine Mammal Stranding Program, N.C. State University’s Center for Marine Sciences and Technology and its College of Veterinary Medicine.

Pamlico remained in the care of SeaWorld Orlando’s manatee critical care facility until her release.

“This was an impressive team effort with organizations from North Carolina to Florida coming together to successfully rescue, transport, rehabilitate and release this manatee,” Fish and Wildlife Service’s Florida Manatee Recovery Lead Terri Calleson said in a statement. “We greatly appreciate the reports from the public as well as the heroic efforts of all of these partners who had a hand in helping return this manatee to the wild population.”

Fish and Wildlife Service staff were joined by those with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, SeaWorld Orlando and the TECO Manatee Viewing Center at Tampa Electric’s Big Bend Power Station in Pamlico’s release.

Manatees cannot survive for extended periods of time in water temperatures below 68°F.

Manatee sightings in North Carolina have been on the rise during warmer months, according to the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program.  

“As global climate change continues to create warmer ocean temperatures, this is creating more suitable habitat areas for manatees along the Atlantic coast, causing them to venture farther away from Florida,” Assistant Stranding Coordinator Alison Loftis said in a release. “However, this becomes a problem when water temperatures drop below 68°F. Water temperatures in the fall and winter can drop rapidly in North Carolina, trapping manatees in dangerously cold water and putting them at high risk of cold stress, as we saw in Pamlico’s case.” 

Feeding manatees or giving them water is illegal and may cause them to delay their migration south to warmer water. Manatees accustomed to being around people may lose their natural fear of boats and humans, which makes them more susceptible to harm.  

“There are ways that our communities can help protect manatees in North Carolina,” Loftis said. “Through valuable information collected from sighting reports, biologists can learn more about how manatees are using our waters and the best ways to protect them. Through community-based science, everyone can be part of manatee conservation by submitting manatee sighting information to researchers.” 

Reports of an injured or deceased manatee in North Carolina may be made by calling the 24-hour marine mammal stranding hotline at 910-515-7354.

Sightings of healthy manatees in the state may be submitted to the program. Submissions should include the manatee’s location and, if possible, photographs.

In observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and in recognition of the continued struggle for civil rights, Coastal Review will not publish on Monday, Jan. 20.

The recent reclassification of the red-cockaded woodpecker from endangered to threatened came some 25 years earlier than initially anticipated.

Wildlife officials attribute the downlisting, announced Oct. 24, to widespread, collective efforts between government agencies and multiple organizations that have worked to restore and manage habitat on which the small birds depend.

But some conservation groups argue that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision prematurely removes protections for the species because its habitat remains fragmented, which keeps the birds isolated to certain areas, making them particularly vulnerable in a changing climate.

The red-cockaded woodpecker was listed as endangered in 1970 following decades of habitat loss – largely longleaf pine forests – to logging, fire suppression, urban development and agricultural sprawl. Those practices stripped the nation’s Southeastern landscape of longleaf pine forests from Virginia to Florida to Texas.

John Doresky, Fish and Wildlife Service red-cockaded woodpecker recovery coordinator, said the downlisting “speaks volumes” to the work that continues to be done on the ground to recuperate the birds’ habitat.

“What it says to me is that the scientific advisory committee that was put together that developed the recovery plan, their vision of how we needed to move forward was spot on,” he said.

Here in North Carolina, ongoing collaborations between state agencies, Department of Defense installations, and numerous conservation organizations are actively restoring longleaf pine forests.

Last year alone, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission burned tens of thousands of acres for the sake of red-cockaded woodpecker habitat creation and restoration.

“The red-cockaded woodpecker is pretty nuanced in that it responds well to active management,” said Nick Shaver, the commission’s coastal eco-region supervisor. “If you create the habitat where it wants to be it will more than likely move there and that’s the reason for the success story. Lots of partnerships have been formed that benefit that critter and lots of land management has been done in the name of the red-cockaded woodpecker and they responded.”

Moving toward recovery

The downlisting means that protections are still in place for red-cockaded woodpeckers.

Under what is often called the “4(d) Rule,” which the Fish and Wildlife Service uses to issue regulations tailored to conserve a threatened species, land managers will continue to have to follow best management practices and rules established by state agencies, Doresky said.

But the rule somewhat loosens what have been historically restrictive land management practices, giving property managers some liberties they have not had these last 50 or so years – as long as the intention is to create old-growth forest habitat for the woodpeckers.

“Generally speaking, the protections remain the same as they were when (the woodpecker) was listed as endangered,” Doresky said.

Land managers will not have to go through some of the more laborious processes they did before to get approval to apply certain management tools such as prescribed fire and chemical applications.

For example, land managers who want to treat a landscape with chemicals have to ensure they’re not making an application of a chemical too caustic or apply it at the wrong time of the year.

Managers who choose to use prescribed burns or thinning to spur healthy pine forests with the goal of creating old growth, which is essential to red-cockaded woodpeckers, will not have to take as many cautions to protect and preserve each tree that has a woodpecker cavity.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers bore cavities into living pine trees, a process that takes the little birds, on average, about a year. These woodpeckers live in groups, or clusters, and help each other raise their young.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers prefer mature, longleaf pine forests that are generally more than 80 years old.

“Because the status is better we’re willing to accept some of those short-term potential risks,” Doresky explained. “We have enough tools now to stabilize and increase these activities in addition to these management strategies in the recovery plan. Once those are in place you’re really just waiting on time and you’re hoping that there isn’t some catastrophic event.”

Too soon?

Opponents of the downlisting say now is simply not the right time, particularly as the Southeast is experiencing more frequent, powerful coastal storms, sea level rise, and rising temperatures fueled by climate change.

According to an Oct. 24 Center for Biological Diversity release, Hurricane Helene destroyed 18 nest cavity trees in one area in Florida alone.

“The recovery of an endangered species is always something to celebrate but, in this case, it’s premature,” Ben Prater, Defenders of Wildlife Southeast program director, said in a statement. “It’s ironic that the decision to downlist has been made in the wake of one of the largest and most destructive storms to hit the Southeast in recorded history, fracturing crucial connections between red-cockaded woodpecker habitats. Decades of significant progress have been made to recover this species and manage habitats effectively — progress which could now be upended at a critical time.”

Defenders of Wildlife was among two dozen conservation groups that signed off on a 39-page letter in 2022 imploring the Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain the red-cockaded woodpeckers’ endangered status.

The letter, submitted on behalf of the groups by the Southern Environmental Law Center argued Fish and Wildlife had not justified downlisting the species

“While it’s encouraging that the service responded to many of our concerns by retaining more of the bird’s prior legal protections, the downlisting decision is still not based on the best interest of the species,” Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney and Wildlife Program leader Ramona McGee said in a 2022 statement. “The service has not met its own scientific recovery plan criteria to justify loosening protections for this imperiled Southern icon.” 

The letter was signed by organizations in North Carolina, including Audubon North Carolina, North Carolina Sierra Club and North Carolina Wildlife Federation.

“These beautiful birds are making an incredible comeback thanks to the Endangered Species Act,” Will Harlan, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “Decades of active management by local, state and federal agencies have paid off, but a lot more still needs to be done to protect the long-leaf pine forests these woodpeckers and hundreds of other species call home.”

The future for recovery

The red-cockaded woodpeckers’ new status is more than two decades ahead of when the scientific advisory committee that created the recovery plan for the species anticipated.

While that may be a testament to the effectiveness of the strategies included in the recovery plan, it’s no indication of when the woodpeckers could be delisted.

The delisting criteria for the species includes that they are no longer dependent on artificial cavity inserts, which are used to stabilize and increase populations. Inserts expedite the creation a tree cavity.

Cavities are critical to the red-cockaded woodpeckers’ survival.

“That, to me, is sort of the variable that makes the prediction hereafter almost impossible because almost every single population has false cavities that are sustaining these populations at probably 50%, maybe larger,” Doresky said. “So, trying to anticipate how long it will take for properties to get trees old enough and to no longer be dependent on those cavities that we put in, yeah, that’s a tough one.”

In North Carolina, multiple agencies are partners are working to expand longleaf pine forests, also referred to as stands, in the state by actively replacing what have been commercial loblolly pine forests, which are forests grown and harvested for commercial purposes, with longleaf pines.

But the longleaf pine is one of the more slow-growing pine trees, Shaver said, and they take decades to mature.

“You’re looking 50, 60 years for stands that we’re establishing right now to be mature,” he said. “But because of the vast effort of longleaf restoration that really kicked off 30 years ago, 40 years ago, those initial stands are going to be mature in 20, 30 years. The outlook is really good because the expansion of longleaf restoration across the southeast, as those trees grow up through time, it’s going to give more and more and more land for those birds to expand.”

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials have agreed to pause an algaecide experiment in Lake Mattamuskeet until next year.

Plans were in place to treat cyanobacteria, known as blue-green algae, using a product that the Environmental Protection Agency determined is toxic to birds in the 40,000-acre lake. The lake is within the 50,180-acre Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge.

The work was to take place in about 400 acres, or 1%, of the lake, starting this summer, continuing through the end of October, and resuming next April.

The Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed a federal lawsuit May 20 asking the court to issue a preliminary injunction to block the service from allowing the algaecide experiment. Following a hearing on the request in federal court in Raleigh, the Fish and Wildlife Service voluntarily agreed to pause its plans to move forward with the project in the eastern North Carolina lake.

“This is a great day for everyone who values Lake Mattamuskeet and all of the geese, swans, ducks and hundreds of other birds that gather at the wildlife sanctuary,” Ramona McGee, Southern Environmental Law Center senior attorney, said in a statement. “We’re all so relieved that these birds will not be exposed to toxic chemicals this year while the court reviews the legal problems with the Fish and Wildlife Service’s rushed and inadequate approval of this dangerous experiment.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed that it will not proceed with the experiment this year while all parties work through litigation, with the hope of reaching a decision by the planned April 2025 restart date. Late Tuesday, the court entered an order confirming the agreement and setting the schedule for briefing the case, the law center said.

“This agreement ensures that Lake Mattamuskeet and the birds that pass through it on their migratory paths will be kept safe from dangerous experiments with toxic chemicals — for now,” Defenders of Wildlife Senior Attorney Jane Davenport said. “We are confident that when the court decides the merits of the case that it will instruct Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure that the Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge is fully protected from such poorly designed experiments, as the law requires.”

Related: Lake Mattamuskeet algaecide pilot study tied up in court

“We’re glad that common sense has prevailed and provided more time to scrutinize this flawed plan,” North Carolina Sierra Club Action Director Erin Carey said. “We hope that closer review will prove that there’s no defensible reason why an algaecide that’s toxic to birds should be tested at one of this region’s most important bird sanctuaries.”

A representative in response for a request for comment explained Friday that the Fish and Wildlife Service does not comment on active or pending litigation.

Second of two parts. Read Part 1.

EAST LAKE — Before guardrails were installed about 20 years ago along U.S. Highways 64 and 264 in rural northeastern North Carolina, residents avoided driving at night in fear of striking a large animal and then sliding unseen into the abyss of a roadside canal.

Even now, with the barriers in place, locals know to drive with caution through the dark wilds of Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, scanning the edge of the forest for glowing eyes or sudden movements of creatures on night hunts — raccoon, possum, bobcat, fox, bear, deer, coyotes and red wolves.

Vehicle strikes are a serious hazard to humans and animals, but they can be especially devastating to the recovery of the endangered wolves that number only about 22 in the wild, 18 of which are collared and within the 1.7-million-acre management area encompassing public and private land in Beaufort, Dare, Hyde, Tyrrell and Washington counties.

When a wild red wolf is killed, the loss can destroy the cohesion of a pack, creating a negative impact on reproduction that is so critical to the species’ survival.

Last year, for example, in two separate instances, wolves from the same pack were struck and killed on U.S. 64, said wildlife biologist Joe Madison, manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program.

Madison told Coastal Review that one of the males and one of the pups were killed. “So that family group kind of got messed up, and we ended up capturing and placing the female for that family group back in captivity.”

With the loss of her mate, Madison explained, the female had started wandering to a different area and creating issues, such as getting into chickens that made her no longer suitable for the wild. “But it was going well until that mortality of the male and one of the pups, and then it kind of went downhill from there.”

After years of study in the early 2000s, the North Carolina Department of Transportation had developed plans to construct numerous wildlife crossings along U.S. 64 in Dare and Tyrrell counties as part of a proposed 27.3-mile-long road widening and bridge-replacement project. The department has since dropped the widening project, but $110 million provided recently by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allowed NCDOT to replace the 60-year-old Lindsey C. Warren Bridge over Alligator River. That $270 million project, which began this spring, will include wildlife crossings and under-road tie-ins at both ends of the bridge.

But it’s not enough, conservation groups say. Granted, more wildlife crossings would be costly to build in Alligator River’s swampy land, but considering the enormous investment that’s been put into the life of each red wolf in the interest of restoration of a unique species, these groups contend they’re worth it.

“That’s why one of the things we’re stressing this year is trying to make progress on getting (assistance from) NCDOT, who’s making great strides in the wildlife road crossings department,” Ron Sutherland, chief scientist at the nonprofit Wildlands Network, told Coastal Review recently. “We want them to try to put in for federal grants to build wildlife crossings and fencing on 64 through the refuge in particular.”

Sutherland had connected with an anonymous donor who recently pledged $2 million in matching funds for a grant to fund wildlife crossings in the refuge to protect red wolves, and the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity stepped in to help raise the match, he said in recent email.

“I’m working directly with NCDOT to try to bring a big proposal for U.S. 64 to Federal Highways, which can only happen if we have enough nonfederal matching funds to work with, he said, adding that the state would have to provide a 20% match to the Federal Highway Administration money.

Although the costs versus benefit of keeping red wolves away from vehicle tires is clear, he said, wildlife crossings through a refuge teeming with wildlife would provide plenty of benefits to every creature dashing, hopping, galumphing, scurrying, slithering or crawling across the highway.

“That stretch of Highway 64 through the refuge and through the Alligator River game lands, it’s got to be up there in terms of national priorities for reducing roadkill in terms of the sheer numbers of wildlife,” Sutherland said. “There were like tens of thousands of dead animals that they recorded in the DOT-funded study. And so it’s definitely not just the wolves, but bears and deer and bobcats and so many turtles, so many snakes … that I’ve seen dead on that road. Nobody wants to see that.”

According to the draft environmental impact statement for the then-proposed widening project, 36% of all crashes and 77% of night crashes on the two-lane road were because of animals. Five crashes occurred within a milelong stretch in Tyrrell County about a mile west of the bridge.

Between July 1996 to June 1999, the fatal crash rate for the project area was 4.13 crashes per 100 motor vehicle miles. After the guardrails were installed along the canals on U.S. 64, the fatal crash rate went down to 1.02 per 100 miles.

The proposed widening had called for about 11 overpasses or underpasses and dozens of smaller structures for amphibians, reptiles and small mammals. Four wildlife crossings that were installed decades ago off U.S. 64 between Columbia and Plymouth had been shown to be about 90% effective, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist had said in 2013. Designed with 6- to 8-foot-high fences at the road edge and both sides of the opening, the fence corrals animals toward underpasses, culverts or a bridge.

Travis Wilson, a biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission Habitat Conservation Division, said that the east and west sides of the proposed 3.2-mile Alligator River bridge replacement will be lengthened to accommodate culverts for fencing and wildlife passage.

Based on his years of monitoring the commission’s wildlife crossings, Wilson said he expects that all species will use the passages, although white-tailed deer tend to be more skittish.

“I have documented most every large mammal, medium-sized mammal, in North Carolina using culverts fairly frequently, from black bear to coyotes, on down,” he told Coastal Review.

If funding is found for additional crossings beyond the bridge, he said they would be designed in different sizes for different species. Vegetation at the crossings, and the fencing would need to be maintained, and some areas in front of passages would need a timber pole “bridge” over a canal.

“That’s really what the crossings are there for,” he said.  “It’s not for a single species — it’s to reduce wildlife mortality by vehicles … to make the highway more permeable to all wildlife.”

While the recovery team would welcome wildlife crossings, the staff’s focus will remain on keeping wild-born and captive-bred wolves who have been introduced into the wild away from any human interactions and activity whatsoever. The less habituated wolves are to humans, the better for both species. The staff also takes pains to minimize contact as much as possible, Madison said, and when handling is necessary, it is done as gently as possible, with voices low and no petting.

In addition to using a hand-held antenna to keep track of the collared wolves, which wear lightweight GPS devices on reflective collars, or for some, smaller VHF radio devices, there are more than 55 remote sensing cameras to see who is where and when.

GPS collars, which cost about $2,000 and weigh 1.3 pounds, cannot exceed 4% of the animal’s body weight. The VHF collars are lighter but don’t send points from satellites.

A red wolf known as No. 2191 was recently sighted in the Milltail area of the Alligator River refuge. Madison said that the young male’s fear of people gives him a better chance to avoid becoming one of the unfortunate number of casualties suffered by red wolves from too-close encounters with people.

Madison held a small radio telemetry antenna during a visit to the Milltail area in late April. A steady beep revealed that the wolf — or more specifically his GPS collar — was close but too far away to see without field glasses. The wolf was born at Wolf Haven International in Washington state, one of the 50 zoological institutions and wildlife centers that participate in the captive-breeding program that is critical to repopulating the species in the wild.

When 2191 — the animals purposely are not named — was deemed ready for life in the wild, he was transferred to Alligator River.

“They did an excellent job,” Madison said, referring to Wolf Haven, “because he wants nothing to do with people.”

After his arrival, 2191 was placed in an acclimation pen before being released on Jan. 29 to meet a female who had come into heat, “in the hopes that they could become a pair,” said Madison.

The good news is that it appears that the handsome wolf is the father of a litter of eight pups born in the refuge in May. It’s the third year in a row that the Milltail pack has produced a litter, and this was the first sired by 2191. The previous breeding male that had sired two litters was killed by a vehicle last year.

Madison said he understands why zoos and conservation centers name the wolves, but it’s against the recovery team policy. The studbook number that is assigned to each animal identifies them in sequence that is vital management information.

American red wolves once had an enormous range in the Southeast and along the Gulf Coast. But because of habitat loss and hunting, the population collapsed. The red wolf was listed as endangered in 1973 and declared extinct in the wild in 1980. In 1987, four pairs of captive-bred wolves were released at Alligator River refuge.

Innovative management practices, such as pup fostering and coyote sterilization programs, grew the population, and by 2010, there were about 130 red wolves in the wild. But politics and funding shortages led to management cuts, and the population plummeted to seven before a federal judge ordered the program to resume in 2021.

Starting over has had its challenges. When 11 captive-born wolves were released in 2022, three wound up dead from gunshots and five were killed by vehicles. In the last year alone, four wolves have been killed by vehicles.

Still, the new litters provide hope, and the restored pup fostering practice — where a captive-born pup is slipped into a wolf den with a litter of pups about the same age — has been successful. So has the renewed coyote sterilization program, which allows hormonally-intact coyotes to hold territory, keep out fertile coyotes and prevent hybrids.

From November until March, the recovery team is kept busy doing captures to collar older pups, perform health check on the mature wolves and sterilize coyotes. There are 16 pens in the Sandy Ridge area, each double-fenced, but only 13 are currently usable. Interns and other staff enter the pen to water and feed the wolves and check on them. At that point, the wolves either go to the farthest distance and pace, or they go to their den box. The never try to escape.

“They don’t want to come near you,” Madison said. “They’re very nonaggressive.”

The pens are especially useful in letting wild wolves visit the captive wolves and start making friends. Recovery staff can watch with the remote-sensing cameras for signs that courtship may be blooming. Once they’re let free, all bets are off.

“We’ve had bonded pairs that came from captivity,” Madison recalled. “They were bonded in captivity, had had previous litters together, they had a litter in the pen, and they still left each other when we opened it up. It was like, ‘Now that I have options, you ain’t it!’”

Sutherland said that he is encouraged that the red wolf population is rebounding and that wildlife crossings are a critical component in its recovery. Healthy numbers of red wolf packs also would go far in pushing out a lot of the opportunistic coyotes and raccoons that swooped into vacated wolf territories, he said.

As they’ve done out west, he said, wolves can keep other species in check not just by eating them, but also by creating a climate of fear that works for the good of the entire ecosystem.

“So that’s the value of having the wolves back,” he said. “Not only are they the only thing that seems to control coyotes, but they also do kill the raccoons and we think that’s important from the standpoint of bird populations.”

“The red wolf was a success story of the Endangered Species Act, and it’s been saved from extinction,” Sutherland said. Now the question is whether the program can rebuild, without the apex predator being plowed down on a strip of asphalt.

Note: Coastal Review will not publish Wednesday in observance of Juneteenth National Independence Day, a federal holiday.

First of two parts.

EAST LAKE — From a half-mile away, the red wolf was a blur on the flat farmland within Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Through binoculars, the young male was strikingly muscular, striding with confidence on the dirt access road, seemingly unperturbed by the spying humans.

“He’s a big guy — yeah, he’s close to 80 pounds,” said Joe Madison, manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program, while peering through his field glasses in late April from the cab of his truck. “If we got closer, he’d definitely start running, but I don’t want to do that.”

Madison, a wildlife biologist who has had earlier stints with grizzly bear and gray wolf management, is keenly focused on conservation and protection of the only wild red wolves in the world. He knows that the wolves’ instinctual fear of people is critical to their survival. The two biggest contributors to wild red wolf mortalities are directly related to interactions with humans: The first is intentional killing by gunshot or poisoning, the second is vehicle strikes.

After establishing cooperative programs with landowners and others in the community to prevent wolf shootings, officials with the refuge are now working with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and the North Carolina Department of Transportation on constructing wildlife crossings at both ends of the planned replacement bridge over the Alligator River on U.S. Highway 64 between Tyrrell and Dare counties.

The hope is that, beyond the bridge project, funding also will be available to build numerous crossings along U.S. 64, said Travis Wilson, a biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission Habitat Conservation Division.

“It’s kind of a standalone discussion on wildlife improvements in highway permeability improvements,” Wilson told Coastal Review. “It’s outside the scope of a highway project.”

The Center for Biological Diversity announced last week that an anonymous donor had pledged a $2 million match of other donations toward wildlife crossings across U.S. 64, which bisects the Alligator River and Pocosin Lakes wildlife refuges. If the additional $2 million can be raised by the nonprofit center and its supporters by the target date of Aug. 1, it could leverage an additional $16 million in federal funds.

Funding for $350 million in grants was provided in the Wildlife Crossings Program, established in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

A million wildlife-vehicle collisions occur in the U.S. annually, costing more than $8 billion and resulting in thousands of injuries and hundreds of fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration website.

A second round of Highway Administration discretionary grants will be opened this summer under the Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program with the stated mission of reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions while improving habitat connectivity for terrestrial and aquatic species.

Marissa Cox, the Western Regional Team lead with NCDOT’s Environmental Policy Unit, said that her team intends to apply for a grant, but it does not know yet what the total cost of the project would be. NCDOT is using information from the proposed — and since dropped — U.S. 64 widening project design plans to try to estimate costs for the structures, she said in an interview.

“It’s very competitive, and there’s not a lot of funding,” Cox said about the grant program.

During the first round, she recalled, the amount of project applications far exceeded the available funds.

Although Cox said there are about 26 wildlife crossings in North Carolina, Wilson said that when standalone structures are included, there are “dozens and dozens” of crossings.

As part of a wildlife stewardship memorandum of understanding signed in March 2023 with Wildlife Resources, NCDOT is currently compiling information and Global Positioning System data on all the crossings that it has committed to, designed and constructed, she said. The agencies are also finalizing a joint Wildlife Crossing Guidance document to be made available online.

With U.S. 64 and other less-traveled highways cutting through the 1.7 million-acre management area encompassing public and private land in Beaufort, Dare, Hyde, Tyrrell and Washington counties, the wildlife crossings could benefit not only the survival of the red wolves, but also the taxpayer who is supporting the recovery program.

A recently updated red wolf management plan estimated costs of $328 million over 50 years, and that does not include the millions spent over the decades since the wolf conservation program began.

The red wolf had once roamed much of the Southeast, but overhunting and habitat loss decimated its population. In 1973, the species was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Fish and Wildlife, the agency charged with implementing the Endangered Species Act, first listed the red wolf as endangered in 1967, and it was declared extinct in the wild in 1980.

As part of an effort in 1987 to restore the species in the wild, four pairs of captive-bred red wolf pups, offspring of the few remaining from the wild population captured earlier in Louisiana, were released at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

After a series of setbacks beginning around 2010 — with the wild population plummeting from as much as 130 to seven — the recovery program has been renewed and reinvigorated since 2022.

Currently, there are 18 known and collared red wolves and a total of about 20 to 22 wolves in the wild and 263 in the captive-breeding population.

Wildlife crossings have been studied, planned and – sometimes – built along roadways in northeastern North Carolina, but in coming years they are to be a more significant part of the focus on conservation of the fragile population.

“Wildlife crossings along one of North Carolina’s most dangerous highways are crucial to protecting the world’s most endangered wolf,” stated Will Harlan, southeast director the Center for Biological Diversity.

In a study done for NCDOT by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and completed in 2011, hair samples caught on a barbed fence were from 890 black bear crossings from March 2009 to March 2011 in the 147,432-acre Alligator River Refuge. The Virginia Tech study also found that 15 GPS-collared bears crossed the highway 99 times. In addition, 170 white-tailed deer, 200 bobcats and raccoons, and an additional 260 bear were caught on camera.

Surveys of roadkill from November 2008 to July 2011 showed eight deer killed. Between January 1993 and July 2011, factoring in historical data, there were 63 bear, 75 bats, 82 small mammals, 134 mid-sized mammals, 1,153 birds, 4,014 reptiles and 7,498 amphibians killed on the road. And in 2012, refuge biologists reported that 11 bear were hit by vehicles, not including those who ran off into the woods after being struck.

Data from the Virginia Tech study will be used to guide project estimates for crossings through the refuge, Cox said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, in its February red wolf recovery program five-year status review, said that between 1987 and 2013, vehicle-wildlife collisions resulted in 34% of all mortalities related to humans; and there were 11 vehicle-related mortalities between 2019 and 2023.

“This mortality level would be expected to increase as habitat becomes more fragmented by roads and with increasing human traffic that would be expected with increased development,” the report said. “Additionally, this threat would also likely increase with increases in the population size of red wolf.”

Madison said that there is now orange reflective material on the GPS collars placed on the wild wolves to increase their visibility at night. There are also roadside mobile electronic message signs to warn drivers on all the highways.

Any wildlife crossings that are proposed separately from an NCDOT project, which would absorb some of the costs, will “not be inexpensive,” Wilson said.

“We have been successful in putting underpasses in coastal North Carolina in various places,” he said. Swampy Alligator River, with its numerous roadside canals, “has its own unique features and soil conditions,” Wilson said.

“That’s a big part of the conversation, building in the soil types that are out there, the fill and the engineering that have to go in place there. And as you know, anything that becomes more complex, the dollar figures begin to increase with that complexity,” he said.

“When it comes to the mammals that we’re talking about, if your structure is designed correctly and located correctly, and you have appropriate fencing, then you’re going to have mammals find those crossings and use those crossings,” he said. “And once they start, they’ll keep using them.”

The crossings provide habitat connectivity, as Wilson explained it.

After the New York Times recently published an article about wildlife crossings that included video of wildlife using an overpass, public interest in wildlife passages nationally increased dramatically.

“My phone blew up with reporters and the public wondering when is North Carolina going to do these things. And it felt like I spent a year on the phone every other day explaining to people that North Carolina has been doing it for two decades,” Wilson said. “The documents are memorializing a lot of what we’ve done but also will be good tools to give to people who have interest.”

Next in the series: Wildlife crossings dovetail with red wolf conservation science.

A recently closed land deal years in the making just added nearly 3,000 acres to the Gull Rock Game Lands in Hyde County.

On March 28, after almost two years of discussions and negotiations, the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust purchased 2,926 acres — 4.57 square miles — of open marsh, pond pine woodlands and oak hammocks for $4.1 million from the Glenn R. Currin and Sue A. Currin Revocable Trusts.

After completing the sale, Coastal Land Trust officials immediately signed the property over to the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

“We don’t want to hold those big properties that have a lot of management responsibility,” said North Carolina Coastal Land Trust Executive Director Harrison Marks. “We don’t have the equipment or the staff, but Wildlife does.”

The process was long and complicated, Marks noted, and it required considerable patience on the part of seller.

“I would say that anybody that goes with a conservation transaction has to have some interest in conservation … It is it is something that’s very difficult for many sellers,” he said.

Marks described a process that includes negotiation, surveys and research, but the most complex challenge was finding the money. He said multiple funding entities came into play, each with different requirements.

“So we’re getting a little bit here, a little bit there,” Marks said. “That’s what we do best, is piece together something for a very high-quality project.”

The Coastal Land Trust said earlier this month that the acquisition was made possible with support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, N.C. Land and Water Fund, Fred and Alice Stanback, and the Eddie and Jo Allison Smith Family Foundation Inc.

The addition to Gull Rock Game Land is about 15 miles west of Swan Quarter. While the new parcel does not border the current boundaries of Gull Rock, it will still be considered part of the Gull Rock Game Land complex. The site is primarily marsh and is bordered by Spencer Bay, Germantown Bay and Rose Bay.

Although much of the property is only accessible by boat, an access road leads to a clubhouse at Willow Point that looks across Pamlico Sound to the mouth of the Pamlico River. The most prominent feature, however, is the 215-acre impoundment.

The impoundment, Marks said, was particularly important to the Wildlife Resources Commission.

“That was a big reason why the Wildlife Commission was interested in being the key holders,” he said, adding that an impoundment allows for management of aquatic plants that are favorable to waterfowl and shorebirds.

At this time of the year, the impoundment has little water, with only small pools and extensive mudflats, but shorebirds fill the mudflats and wade through the shallows. The drawdown of the water is part of the commission’s management practices, explained N.C. Wildlife Commission Coastal Plain EcoRegion Supervisor Nick Shaver.

“That is really valuable habitat to a whole suite of wading birds and shorebirds. We see that in all of the impoundments that we manage that way,” Shaver said. “Once the waterfowl migrate north, we begin to pull those water levels down.”

There is considerable work yet to be done on the property. A diesel-powered generator at one time ran the pump for the impoundment, but that pump is part of an aging infrastructure that will have to be replaced.

“It is quite aged and probably at the end of its useful lifespan,” Shaver said about the pump. “We have brought a tractor and a different pump out there to try to continue to get the last bit of water off of there.”

Wildlife Resources seeks to tap money available through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to upgrade the impoundment dike and pumps.

“The Inflation Reduction Act had some allowances for the Wildlife Commission to combat some climate change and sea level rise effects that we’re seeing at places like Spencer Bay and Willow Point. We are applying for that money this summer,” Shaver said.

For an impoundment in a marshland like Gull Rock, the rising waters of Pamlico Sound have had dramatic effects on managing habitat.

“When that place was built, you could just open up the gates and it would drain on its own with gravity. That is no longer the case. It has to be actively pumped out,” Shaver explained.

And, Shaver added, the impoundment is not only the new addition to Gull Rock where steadily rising waters have affected management.

“In Pamlico County (impoundments) are similar in that they’re way out in the sound, with no protection around them and virtually at sea level. We’re seeing the same effects there,” he said. “It’s happened in a very short amount of time. Those impoundments were built in the 1960s.”

The impoundment area will not be available to hunters this year. A better pumping system and a higher dike are only part of the needed infrastructure work. Duck blinds in the impoundment cannot be used in their current condition.

Also, Shaver noted, when a property is added to state game lands, the commission must adopt new rules.

“It takes us a year to put a rule in place to manage these properties. One of our goals is to create not only high-quality waterfowl habitat, but (also) a high-quality waterfowl hunt on the impoundment,” he said.

Although the addition to Gull Rock represents a substantial increase in game lands available for hunters and sportsmen, for Shaver the acquisition represents more. To him, it’s a legacy for the public.

“Land acquisition is certainly one of those hallmarks in your career that you can look back on and say, ‘We were able to preserve a piece of property for the public.’ Everybody benefits, from the species and habitat to the public that gets to use it forever,” he said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shared this week its plans for a $27.25 million allocation announced in March 2023 for restoration work in the Albemarle-Pamlico region.

Funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, nature-based solutions projects are sustainable practices that use natural features or processes to reduce carbon emissions and improve climate adaptation and resilience. The proposed projects are for nine units of the national wildlife refuge system and on state-owned game lands in northeastern North Carolina.

“This investment prioritizes projects that promote coastal resilience and climate adaptation, addresses invasive species threats, and provides for additional data collection needed to support successful natural resource resilience,” officials said.

Service Director Martha Williams announced the plans Thursday at Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge in Knotts Island.

“These projects allow for significant progress towards restoring rivers, coasts and wetlands, and improving ecosystems that have been subjected to flooding and other extreme weather events,” Williams said in a statement. “With increasing shoreline erosion, saltwater intrusion and loss of habitable environments, the Inflation Reduction Act gives us the resources needed to implement nature-based solutions which will have lasting benefits to nature and communities for generations to come.”

Living shorelines are planned for Swanquarter National Wildlife Refuge in Hyde County, Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge in Carteret County, Currituck National Wildlife Refuge and Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge, both in Currituck County, and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge in Dare County.

Living shorelines reduce wave action, trap sediment and help protect marsh and wetland habitats. The nature-based solution can reduce the severity of storm surge during severe weather events and improve water quality in nearshore waters.

Projects at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in Tyrrell and Dare counties will focus on upgrading water-management infrastructure to reduce the impacts of saltwater intrusion.

Funds earmarked for Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge in Hyde County are to focus on improving the lake’s water quality and water management capability by redirecting water runoff.

Projects at the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in Hyde, Washington, Tyrrell counties will focus on restoring peatlands.

The work planned for Roanoke River National Wildlife Refuge in Bertie County is to remove barriers that isolate the Roanoke River from its floodplain.

North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission will receive $5 million to invest in Goose Creek Game Land and Gull Rock Game Land. The projects will focus on on shoreline protection, improvements to water quality, climate resiliency, and wetland impoundment upgrades.

“The Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine System is home to some of the most climate vulnerable counties in the nation and is particularly susceptible to sea level rise and changes in storm intensity and frequency,” Mike Oetker, regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region, said. “We will continue working with partners to ensure we are good stewards of this significant investment, using nature-based solutions to increase resiliency in our communities and water-management infrastructure, as well as provide clean air and water for the community and local wildlife.”

For more information about the Service’s Inflation Reduction Act-related efforts, visit the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s website.

New Hanover County beaches could again mine sand from nearby inlets to nourish their oceanfront shores under a proposed law recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

The bill would exempt a handful of federal coastal storm risk management projects on the East Coast from a rule that prohibits local governments from tapping sand sources they have historically used within the Coastal Barrier Resources System.

The proposed law would apply only to projects that have been pumping sand from borrow sources within the federally protected system for more than 15 years. Those include Masonboro Island at Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach Inlet at Carolina Beach, an inlet in South Carolina and one in New Jersey.

H.R. 524, introduced by Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C., in January 2023, would also return the use of federal funds for projects that use sand within a Coastal Barrier Resources Act, or CBRA, unit to nourish adjacent beaches outside of the system.

“This legislation allows these beaches to continue to use their historic borrow sites for protection from storm damage, maintain their natural ecosystems, and protect our local economy,” Rouzer stated in a press release following the House’s April 11 passage of the bill.

The bill is now with the Senate environment and public works committee.

Proponents of the bill argue that allowing projects that had for years used sand within the system to nourish nearby beaches reduces costs and ecological impacts.

“It’s an opportunity to recycle sand. It’s an opportunity to reduce potential environmental impacts. And, it’s an opportunity to reduce federal and local expenditures,” said New Hanover County Shore Protection Coordinator Layton Bedsole. “I think Wilmington had been in compliance 20 years before CBRA was written and we haven’t encouraged development in sensitive coastal locations like inlet shoulders. That’s a major tenant in CBRA.”

Congress passed CBRA, pronounced “cobra,” in 1982 to discourage building on relatively undeveloped, storm-prone barrier islands by cutting off federal funding and financial assistance, including federal flood insurance. The act was also established to minimize damage to fish, wildlife and other resources associated with coastal barrier islands.

Last May, Matthew Strickler, deputy assistant secretary for the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Parks, expressed the current administration’s objections to H.R. 524 in his testimony before the House natural resources committee.

Using federal funds to move sand dredged within the system to an area outside of it “is considered counter to CBRA’s purposes,” he said referring to the Coastal Barrier Resource System, or CBRS.

“While some of the sand taken from CBRS units for beach renourishment activities may return to the unit over time, the overall impacts of dredging in these areas protected by CBRA are detrimental to coastal species and their habitats,” Strickler said.

But proponents of the bill argue that years of monitoring these inlets prove otherwise.

“We’re in a situation where Mother Nature brings sand down our beach into an engineered borrow site and then we recycle it back up on the beach in the next three or four years. That’s ideal. We’re recycling rather than mining. We’ve got consistency that works for us that we can work with,” Bedsole said.

December 2023: Sand nourishment to begin in Wrightsville Beach

Wrightsville Beach was using the rich, beach-quality sand routinely pumped from Banks Channel and placing that material on its ocean shore for roughly two decades before CBRA was enacted.

In the mid-1990s, the Army Corps of Engineers permanently allowed the town to use Masonboro Inlet as a sand borrow source, shielding the town from ongoing debates over the interpretation of the law as it pertains to whether sand within a CBRS unit may be dredged and placed onto a beach outside of a CBRA zone.

By 2019, then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt determined that federal funds could be used to pay for dredging sand with CBRS units and placing that sand on beaches outside of those zones for shoreline-stabilization projects.

A year later, the National Audubon Society challenged Bernhardt’s interpretation in a lawsuit filed against the former secretary, the interior department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The organization argued the interpretation “vastly expands potential sand mining projects” within areas protected in the system.

The Biden administration overturned the rule in 2021 and Audubon agreed to drop its lawsuit.

The new interpretation forced beach towns that had historically used sand from CBRA zones to look offshore.

Facing exponentially higher costs and an offshore borrow site scattered with old tires broken free from an artificial reef, the town was given an emergency exception by the Corps to get sand from the inlet. That project, which pumped roughly 1.04 million cubic yards of sand onto Wrightsville’s beach, wrapped in mid-March.

The cost to use sand dredged from the inlets is substantially lower than pumping sand from an offshore borrow site.

The last time Carolina Beach tapped the inlet borrow site for sand to place on its ocean shoreline the bid tab was $5 a yard.

“The current project came from the offshore borrow area, as it has, was $11 and some change a yard,” Bedsole said. “It just costs more to go offshore.”

Bids are expected to go out this spring for Carolina and Kure beaches’ nourishment projects, which as of now will use sand from an offshore borrow site.

How that sand might affect the channel Carolina Beach used for years as a sand source has raised concerns among beach town officials.

“We have pulled sand out of that inlet for pretty much my entire life,” said Carolina Beach Mayor Lynn Barbee. “We know what the environmental impacts are. They’re very minimal. We haven’t seen any sort of erosion because of taking that out of there. We haven’t seen any impacts to wildlife, ever, so it’s hard to see what the harm is. What we’ve been doing in the inlet is the borrow pit fills up and we pump that sand out every three years onto the beach and then it drifts back in and fills up and we pump it back out. That seems intuitively better than going out offshore and basically running a sand mine underwater and disturbing what was natural out there.”

Another issue, he said, is how sand pumped onto the beach from the offshore site may affect the inlet, one heavily used by boaters and offers the fastest route for first responders to get into the water.

Barbee said the town has seen “unprecedented” shoaling in Carolina Beach Inlet since it began using the offshore borrow site.

“We have really struggled to keep that open,” he said. “We’ve seen the cost to keep the inlet open go up. If in fact our theory is correct, where else would that sand have come from if it wasn’t introduced from the offshore borrow pit. You’re introducing a new sand source into the traditional system. Certainly, anecdotally, we didn’t have this problem, we do something different, now we do have the problem. It doesn’t seem like it’s a huge leap.”

Barbee said the hope is that the bill will become law before the next project begins.

“If not, we have three more years of these elevated costs, and then we’re just putting more and more sand in the system, and the worry is that when does it become too much?” he said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a final land protection plan Tuesday that is to guide the expansion of the Roanoke River National Wildlife Refuge.

The plan for the Roanoke River refuge is one of four land protection plans the Department of the Interior officials announced this week that will “allow for the voluntary conservation of up to 1.13 million acres of wildlife habitat in North Carolina, New Mexico and Texas.”

The Biden-Harris administration said its America the Beautiful Initiative is investing in the National Wildlife Refuge System, which Fish and Wildlife Service oversees. The initiative calls for the conservation of at least 30% of lands and waters by 2030.

In addition to the Roanoke River refuge, plans were released for the Aransas and Big Boggy national wildlife refuges, both in Texas, and the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas-New Mexico border.

Officials said the release of the final land protection plan is to guide property acquisitions “but does not add acreage to existing refuge ownership.”

“The National Wildlife Refuge System and the tremendous work of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service play an invaluable role in providing vital habitat for wildlife species, offering outdoor recreation access to the public, and bolstering climate resilience across the country,” Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

The Roanoke River National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1991 to protect the forests in the Roanoke River floodplain, and is considered to be the largest intact, and least disturbed, bottomland forest ecosystem remaining in the mid-Atlantic region, according to the department.

The refuge currently is 21,313 acres and has an acquisition boundary of 33,000 acres.

The plan approves expanding the acquisition boundary to up to 287,090 acres of floodplain habitat along a 137-mile stretch of the Roanoke River, from Weldon in Halifax County to the mouth of the river at the Albemarle Sound.

As part of the expansion, Fish and Wildlife Service will work with willing property owners to expand refuge boundaries through fee title or voluntary easement acquisitions and establish a 287,090-acre Conservation Partnership Area for state, local, private, and federal partners to “work together toward a common vision for conservation.”

Acquisitions for the Roanoke River refuge will be within Bertie, Washington, Martin, Halifax and Northampton counties.

The expansion is “to protect the integrity of the floodplain forest and to benefit rare and at-risk species, including Atlantic sturgeon, cerulean and Swainson’s warblers and bald eagles,” officials said. “Wild turkeys, wood ducks, mallards and white-tailed deer that make eastern North Carolina a recreational paradise will flourish with more land set aside for protection.”

The nation’s wildlife refuges have taken a federal funding cut that is expected to shutter more visitors’ centers, diminish wildlife management capabilities and further trim an already wafer-thin force of wildlife officers.

With just hours looming before a government shutdown, the Senate on Friday approved a resolution to fund about 30% of the federal government through Sept. 30.

President Biden on Saturday signed H.R. 4366, a short-term measure that keeps government agencies open and operating for now.

But officials worry how a $14 million cut to the nation’s wildlife refuges will further hurt that system’s resources that are already stretched to the limit, particularly at a time when managing natural lands is gaining recognition as a way to adapt to climate change in some areas of the country, including here in North Carolina’s coastal region.

Mike Leahy, National Wildlife Federation’s senior director of wildlife, hunting and fishing policy, told Coastal Review last week the deep funding cut was unexpected, but not necessarily a surprise.

“We were hoping for at least flat,” he said Thursday. “But for them to take a 2.6% cut when we’re already heavily underfunded is going to create additional problems.”

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has operated the system for years with pared-back staff, leaning on volunteers and partners to help with the management of refuges, “but they can only do so much,” Leahy said.

“I think you’re looking at visitor centers that will either continue to be closed or operating on limited hours or be closed if they have been open. You’re looking at less habitat, which is the whole purpose of the refuge system, and certainly less law enforcement and monitoring of refuges,” he said.

About seven states currently have refuges that do not have wildlife officers.

Since 2010, the refuge system has lost 16% of its employees, or about 800 people, leaving about 2,500 to operate and manage 95 million acres spread throughout all 50 states. The system also includes 755 million acres of marine refuges.

In comparison, the National Park Service holds 85 million acres and operates on a budget of more than $4 billion with more than 29,000 full-time-equivalent employees, according to information Leahy provided.

“This is really about long-term elevation of the refuge system and meeting its needs,” he said. “We recognize it was all Congress could do this year to fund the government at all, so we’re happy the refuge system is getting funding along with other federal land and conservation programs. But, long term, the refuge system tends to get overlooked, forgotten and doesn’t have the same support within Congress and the public as the National Park system, for example, which are super important and terrific, but the refuges play a really important role too.”

Refuges – there are more than 550 – are targeted toward the needs of wildlife species and are protected areas utilized to maintain and recover endangered species and provide havens for migratory birds and waterfowl.

Refuges are public lands that may be used for hunting, fishing, wildlife observation, photography, environmental education and interpretation.

They are in rural areas, and sometimes hard to reach, like the 19.6 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, as well as urban areas within 25 miles of cities with a population of 250,000 or more.

North Carolina is home to nearly a dozen refuges, most of which are located in the mid- to northern coastal plain.

But faced predominately over the past several years with a budget that is either flatlined or reduced, refuges in this state have had their share of woes.

Budget cuts several years ago forced the temporary closure to the public of the Walter B. Jones Sr. Center for the Sounds at the 110,000-acre Pocosin Lakes Wildlife Refuge. The Red Wolf Education and Health Care Facility was also shuttered for a time.

“That’s atrocious that the public lands and public assets held by all North Carolinians and Americans were closed,” North Carolina Wildlife Federation CEO Tim Gestwicki said.

Gestwicki said he was “mad as hell” about the cuts to the refuge system, particularly in the face of a system that is seeing an uptick in visitors and one that he said is important to climate vulnerable coastal areas of the state.

“It’s some people in Washington that are looking at a ledger sheet and saying, “Oh, let’s cut here, let’s cut here,’ with no idea what those ramifications are,” he said. “Why the Fish and Wildlife Service continues to be on the low end of the totem pole of these other public agencies is kind of a mystery since they’re the only agency that has the mandate to oversee wildlife species and can expand wildlife refuges. Misguided, misguided, misguided.”

North Carolina is home to about 500 different species of greatest conservation need, which are those species of declining or rare populations, that need help recovering in order to keep them from being state or federally listed.

Gestwicki said the refuges in the state’s coastal region are the gatekeepers of climate change and rising seas, particularly since state legislators last year adopted a bill that strips protections for an estimated 2.5 million acres of isolated wetlands.

Isolated wetlands, which include Carolina bays and pocosins, are not directly connected to any body of water, but are hydrologically and ecologically valuable because they recharge groundwater and can store vast amounts of water during coastal storms.

“Nobody’s going to be filling up wetlands in our wildlife refuges,” Gestwicki said. “(Refuges) are places for our citizens to hunt, fish, enjoy wildlife and, more importantly these days, to reap the ecological benefits of these public lands.”

Natural lands like those in refuges have been highlighted in the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s recently released Priority Climate Action Plan, which identifies natural and working lands as places that can permanently store atmospheric carbon and substantially offset greenhouse gas emissions.

Gestwicki said the budget decrease will leave roads in some of the refuges in disrepair, habitat restoration projects pushed aside, cut back on monitoring of some species, and affect law enforcement.

“I don’t know how many of the visitor centers can remain open,” he said. “I don’t know how much of the statutory duties can well be accomplished. You can only squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. I can tell you that the numbers (of visitors) are expanding, but I can also tell you that if visitor centers are closed, if roads are closed, if commodes are stopped up, that diminishes the experience dramatically. This is our big backyard and stewarding these resources, stewarding these assets is the responsibility of Congress and what Congress is showing us is a direct opposite of stewarding. They’re cutting that and that’s a slap in the face, in my opinion, to the American people and the taxpayers.”

The North Carolina Coastal Land Trust announced Thursday that it had recently purchased more than 400 acres on the waterfront in Pamlico County through a partnership with the National Wild Turkey Federation, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, and North Carolina Division of Coastal Management.

The Coastal Land Trust then transferred the land to the state to expand the Goose Creek Game Lands.  

The property lies along N.C. Highway 304 and Lynch’s Beach Road between Bayboro and Vandemere.

Coastal Land Trust officials said it hosts excellent habitat for wild turkey, white-tailed deer, black bear, and other wildlife with extensive forests of mixed pine-hardwoods and pocosin wetlands along with longleaf pine ridges.

The property also has more than 4 miles of frontage along the Bay River, Smith and Newton Creeks. Smith Creek is designated as a primary fish nursery area and Newton Creek and the Bay River are considered Shellfish Waters. The water bodies are all classified by the state as High Quality Waters and Nutrient Sensitive Waters.

Officials said the developable property has deepwater access on both the Bay River and Smith Creek, less than 8 miles from the Pamlico Sound. The land is now conserved.    

“This coastal waterfront property was prime for development. We are so appreciative that the seller, the Bate Land Company, L.P., was willing to work with us to conserve it for its wildlife, water quality, and scenic values,” said Janice Allen, Director of Land Protection for the Coastal Land Trust. “We also thank the National Wild Turkey Federation, Wildlife Resources Commission, and Division of Coastal Management for partnering with us to conserve this special place on our coast.”

The National Wild Turkey Federation raised $50,000 to help with the conservation of the Bay River property.

“Our organization believes that the most effective way to benefit wild turkeys on a scale that makes a difference is to contribute to habitat improvements and conservation,” said Luke Gibson of the Neuse Chapter of the National Wild Turkey Federation. He added, “Contributing to the Bay River Tract acquisition made sense to us since it will permanently conserve wild turkey habitat and make the land available to the public for hunting.”

“We were pleased to partner with the Coastal Land Trust and Wildlife Resources Commission on this coastal conservation effort. When a funding opportunity through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s National Coastal Zone Management Program became available for coastal habitat protection, we jumped on it. The 400-acre Bay River Tract rang all the bells and whistles of the program and we were able to secure $500,000 towards its acquisition,” said Division of Coastal Management Policy and Planning Section Chief Tancred Miller. “We especially thank the folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who administer this funding program for working so diligently with us to bring the project to closing.”    

Additional funding for the purchase of the Bay River tract was made possible thanks to the North Carolina Land and Water Fund, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Stanback, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission will manage the property to improve habitat for native wildlife to include prescribed burning, thinning of forest stands, and creation of wildlife food plots,” said Wildlife Resources Commission Assistant Chief and Land Acquisition Manager Ben Solomon. “The land will be added to the Goose Creek Game Lands, and in the future, will be open for public hunting.”

Plans to phase out during the next decade single-use plastic products on public lands — places like the Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras national seashores — are in the works, and while optimistic, conservation groups have their concerns.

Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced Thursday the department-wide approach to reduce plastic pollution and a “first-ever effort” for the department to factor the climate crisis into all operations. The announcement came during the White House Summit on Building Climate Resilient Communities, which was broadcast on YouTube.

“Everyone here today understands these simple truths. The climate crisis is real. It’s happening now. And it’s uprooting lives across our country,” she said during the summit. “It is abundantly clear that even as we transition our economy toward a sustainable future, adaptation and resilience must be core pillars of our collective climate response.”

Haaland signed her Secretary’s Order 3407 on World Ocean Day June 8, 2022, directing the department “to reduce the procurement, sale and distribution of single-use plastic products.”

“I issued a secretary’s order to phase out the sale of single-use plastics on interior-managed lands by 2032. Today, we are telling you how we’re going to get it done,” she said.

Each bureau has sustainable procurement plans outlining approaches and schedules to phase out single-use plastic products such as plastic bottles and bags, and to implement improvements like the installation of water bottle filling stations across interior manage lands.

Related: Interior order phases out single-use plastics on public lands

“Our department is also taking a concerted look at how we operate and make decisions about the future in the face of the climate crisis,” Haaland continued, adding that it should be part of every decision.

That look includes four new department manual policies “to strengthen and enhance mission critical decisions and activities” and also reflect the department’s “commitment to using science, indigenous knowledge and landscape-scale management as the foundation for departmental decisions,” she said.

The department has adaption and resilience projects across the country.

In northeastern North Carolina, Haaland said the department is working with partners and local officials to “advance transformational peatland restoration work. Healthy forested peatlands offer some of nature’s best carbon storage while protecting coastal communities from threats like sea level rise, flooding and wildfires, but extreme climate fueled conditions combined with increased wildfire risks threaten these essential ecosystems and the communities and wildlife that depend on them.”

To advance nature-based solutions, more than $27 million from the Inflation Reduction Act has gone to restoration efforts for the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary, which Haaland said is to fortify communities against the “mounting impacts of climate change.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners have restored 37,000 acres of peatlands already at Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, over half of the project’s goal.

Related: Refuge exudes natural diversity, wonders of pocosin lakes

“By restoring the natural hydrology and regional peat soils. The department is ensuring that communities and local habitats can enjoy the region’s countless ecological services from clean air and water and soil to storm flow resilience long into the future,” she said.

The plans Haaland announced Thursday are in support of the president’s executive order that called for federal agencies to take actions to reduce and phase out procurement of single-use plastic products to the maximum extent practicable.

Interior officials said that the plans published Thursday will be updated in 2024 to include additional details on where and how single-use plastics will be eliminated.

Since the signing of the secretary’s order last year, officials said that national, wildlife refuges and conservation lands have been installing water bottle filling stations, increasing recycling, and working with concessionaires to reduce sales of single-use plastic bottles and use of plastic utensils, bags, straws and other plastic products.

Cape Lookout National Seashore Chief of Interpretation and Education Nate Toering said Friday that the seashore is already ahead of the curve on eliminating single-use plastics in many areas throughout the park.

“We have worked closely with park partners to achieve this. For example, Eastern National, who runs our park stores, switched from issuing plastic bags with sales, and instead offers inexpensive reusable bags for purchase,” Toering explained. Adding that service providers such as Island Express Ferry Service have transitioned to selling water and other drinks in cardboard boxes and cans instead of plastic bottles.

“So, while there is always room to improve, Cape Lookout is well on its way toward achieving this goal. With over 50 miles of beaches and already tackling a never-ending marine debris problem — including lots of plastics — it’s a relief to know that we’re at least becoming less of the problem and more of the solution,” he said.

Coastal Carolina Riverwatch Executive Director Lisa Rider told Coastal Review Friday she feels that phasing out single-use plastics is achievable, but it will take a long-term commitment and accountability from decision-makers on all sides of the political spectrum.

“Plastic waste and pollution are industry problems that have burdened consumers for generations. I am hopeful that government intervention and sustainable procurement practices set by the Department of the Interior will show progress in pollution prevention. I am hopeful that this effort will further support industries that provide alternatives to single-use plastic products,” Rider said. “With all that said, the burden remains on us consumers and constituents to hold decision-makers, now and in the future, responsible for protecting our quality of water and life from plastic pollution.”

Oceana Campaign Director Christy Leavitt said in a statement Thursday that “Today our national parks are one step closer to being plastic-free.”

The organization “applauds” Haaland’s “commitment to phase out the sale and distribution of single-use plastic products in national parks and other public lands” but, the department should “implement the plans more quickly.”

“The National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and other bureaus of the Interior Department should immediately phase out the most problematic plastics, including plastic foam food and beverage containers and plastic bags. Protecting our national parks from plastics is an important step toward a plastic pollution-free future and can’t come soon enough,” she said.

A longtime advocate for ending plastics pollution, Bonnie Montelone said she has been studying plastic pollution since 2008, “when this topic was just starting to capture the global conscience.”

She is founder and executive director of Plastic Ocean Project, a Wilmington-based organization working to end plastic pollution.

Though plastic production and use has nearly doubled from 245 metric tons to nearly 470 metric tons since then, Montelone continued. “We are at the tipping point of real change.”

Montelone added that another federal agency, the Department of the State, is taking strides to end plastic pollution, as well.

She attended the launch Sept. 20 of End Plastic Pollution International Collaboration, or EPPIC, in New York City, a new public-private partnership.

With $15 million from the Department of State, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the Aspen Institute and The Ocean Foundation’s Plastic Initiative, both based in the U.S., and Searious Business in the Netherlands were able to initiate the multistakeholder effort.

“We know all too well the devastating impacts of plastic pollution on our planet. The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to finding real solutions to this global crisis at home and abroad. EPPIC will create the stage to motivate ambitious commitments and actions to combat plastic pollution,” Jose W. Fernandez, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment said in a statement.

EPPIC aims to spur global action on plastic pollution by supporting projects worldwide to make the full lifecycle of plastic more sustainable, starting with efforts to change the design and use of plastic products. The EPPIC will build on established partnerships and networks to avoid duplicating efforts, the website said.

“Recognizing the need to change the design and use of plastic products in order to make plastic’s full lifecycle more sustainable, the federal government is now supporting collaboration with governments, businesses, civil society, the philanthropic and NGO communities,” Montelone said.

Though this is encouraging, Montelone said, if consumers understood that every time we buy food or drink packaged in plastic, we are voting for more of the same.

“But more importantly, if we took a look at that plastic and said, ‘I’m going to be eating and/or drinking the chemicals from this packaging and when I’m done with it, the environment, whether in a landfill or not, is going to also consume those chemicals,’ people might reconsider,” she said.