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Michael Field
No full textMichael Field oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
Michael Field discusses growing up in Maine, where he went to college, and the experiences he had while working for the Randolph Mountain Club in New Hampshire.
Name: Michael Field
Keywords: Camping, Environments (Natural), Hiking, Public access, Writing, Biography, Climbing, History, Maintenance, Mountains, Geology, Crag Camp, White Mountains1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Michael Field
Date of Interview: August 6, 2010
Location of Interview: Randolph, New Hampshire
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Brief Summary of Interview: Michael Field was born January 20, 1948 in Portland Maine. His father mainly sold insurance and his mother was a housewife. Growing up in rural Maine, a lot of his time was spent doing outdoor activities such as wandering the woods and going to the family cabin on the lake. He grew up in Phillips, Maine and went to school there until his parents decided to send him to Exeter. He went to MIT then, to graduate school and eventually got his Ph.D. in geology at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He worked as a caretaker for Crag Camp in the summers of 1957 and 1958. He discusses how he got the job and how he had never been to the White Mountains before this. He talks about what a typical day was like for him, some of the people that came up, his experiences in general and he shares some stories about his time there like the one he calls ‘The long Day’ and his 42 mile hike. He really enjoyed his time at the RMC and he remembers being at Crag Camp thinking, “Right now is a really good time.”
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Mark: Well the first question is easy; can you say and spell your name for the transcriptionist?
Michael: I’m Michael T. Field. M I C H A E L T. F I E L D.
Mark: Thanks. And today is August 6, 2010 and we’re in Randolph, New Hampshire and the voices you might hear on the tape would be Steve Chase or Mark Madison. And Michael the next question is almost as easy, where and when were you born?
Michael: I was born in Portland, Maine on January 20, 1938.
Mark: Ok and what did your parents do?
Michael: My father did miscellaneous things. He worked for the state for a short while but then he worked with his father, which is something that’s always staggered me. I can’t imagine any body working with their father.
Mark: And then…
Michael: But his father—mostly sold insurance. There was also a real estate dealing and in his time his father had worked for the bank and the railroad and the steamboat line and had his finger on almost any place where there was a buck to be made. My father mainly sold insurance. My mother was a classic housewife.
Mark: As a young boy what outdoor activities did you do?
Michael: When you grow up in rural Maine, everything is outdoor activity. And then when I got big enough to wander in the woods, I wandered in the woods with some friends and my brother. And we also had a family cabin on the lake and we spent a lot of time there. 3
Mark: Okay and where did you go to school?
Michael: I grew in the town of Phillips in western Maine, so I went through school there. That was a time where you could go from kindergarten through high school and be with the same kids all along the way, there were about 15 in each class.
Mark: And then how…?
Michael: And then my parents thought I should go somewhere else for school, I don’t know if they were right or not but they sent me to Exeter for a few years. You want to go on from there?
Mark: Sure go ahead.
Michael: After that I went to MIT and then graduate school, Caltech, although that didn’t work out so well. And then I dropped out for several years and then I went back and got my doctorate at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This is all in geology.
Mark: In geology, okay. We just had a geologist here earlier. A generation removed from you I think.
Michael: Dyk Eusden?
Steve: Jonathon…
Mark: Jonathon…
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Steve: Gourley.
Michael: Nope, don’t know him.
Mark: He’s a young guy.
Steve: He’s the next generation past Dyk.
Michael: Oh.
Mark: All right and then are you married obviously?
Michael: Yes.
Mark: Do you have any—when did you marry, that’s one of our questions?
Michael: Which time?
Mark: I don’t know. Question writer. (Laughing).
Michael: I got married in 1969 and had two children.
Mark: Okay.
Michael: And I got married again in 1997.
Michael’s wife: ’97.
Michael: ’97.
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Mark: We didn’t mean to put you on the spot. We ask everybody the same question so there’s some consistency. What eventually brought you to the RMC to work for the Randolph Mountain Club?
Michael: One of the teachers at Exeter had been told to find somebody for Crag Camp. And, you know, I’d written a couple papers about hiking in the woods, he’s like “I’ll try this guy.”
Mark: What year…?
Michael: That’s how I got it.
Mark: What year was this Michael?
Michael: ’57.
Mark: 1957 and how old were you at that time?
Michael: 19.
Mark: Okay. So what did you do for the RMC?
Michael: I was caretaker for Crag Camp in the summer of 1957 and I went back again in the summer of 1958 because I liked it so much.
Mark: Okay, same place?
Michael or Mark: Crag Camp, both times.
Mark: What kind of experience prepared you for the job?
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Michael: I don’t know if they asked if I had any experience for the job, they asked if I was interested. Hiking and camping, I don’t think they asked about living in log cabins with wood stoves so, which I had done.
Mark: And you wrote some papers on hiking, so you were well set up.
Michael: Yeah.
Mark: Had you visited the camp before you went to work there?
Michael: No.
Mark: How did you envision the camp would be?
Michael: I’d never been to the White Mountains before.
Mark: Really? What did you think it would be like before you saw it?
Michael: I can’t remember.
Mark: That was a long time ago.
Michael: It’s been erased of what actually happened.
Steve: Did you know it was a cabin?
Michael: Yeah.
Steve: The reason we’re asking that question is someone said, someone a few years ago would’ve got the job at Crag and thought it was just going to be a lean-to and then when they got to Crag they went “OH MY GOSH, LOOK AT THIS PLACE!” 7
Mark: All right.
Michael: They don’t hire caretakers for a lean-to.
Steve: Yeah, right.
Mark: What was a typical workday like at the camp for you?
Michael: Typical work day back in ’57, ’58 typical day was nobody showed up.
Mark or Steve: No body showed up.
Michael: And it’s amazing, sometimes two or three days. For the whole summer, I bet I was alone almost half the time. Which makes your schedule very easy if you want to take a long hike the next day. All the people that came were fun.
Mark: Do you, do you remember any particular groups or people that came through that got stuck with you over the years?
Michael: Well there are two categories, the teenage kids from Randolph that came again and again so I got to know them. And then there were other people hiking through. I don’t remember anybody unusually good or bad.
Mark: That’s probably good.
Michael: I remember one that was quite disorganized which she; she’s kind of a separate story.
Mark: Would you want to share that story with us?
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Michael: Uh—it’s a long story because she was part of a day—it’s called the long, I call it ‘The long day’. (Says, “I’ll check that again” and looks in his journal.) July 24, ’57,
I didn’t leave until eleven in the morning. I mean this day continues until about midnight. So I went up Madison and then down the Howker Ridge Trail, just over the top of Madison at the top of the Howker Ridge, one of the longest trails up this side of the mountains, I ran into this group of 10 campers, they said “Hey mister, where are we?” You might ask that half way up the Amphibrach Trail but at the top of the Howker Ridge Trail, well they were almost up. I went down there through a cloud burst, went to the post office, then over to Chris Goetze and Brian Underhill, they were the trail crew. They stayed in a place, a cabin next to I think it was Anna (name). Okay then I went back up the road a couple of miles. I didn’t want to go straight back up to Crag Camp so I took Lowe’s Path up to the Log Cabin. It was raining for most of the trip. I started off again up Lowe’s Path but after stopping at an intersection I got turned around and took the Randolph Path instead and didn’t realize my mistake until I was well along and I hate to turn around so I just kept going.
Steve: Did you go left or right there?
Michael: I was going up you know…
Steve: Yeah.
Michael: …eventually ended up at Crag Camp.
Steve: Okay.
Michael: So I went to the right, headed in the direction of the Perch.
Steve: Yeah.
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Michael: Yeah went up to the Perch and then started back on the Gray Knob Trail. And I was almost to Gray Knob and I came up behind a woman, who had taken the Randolph Path instead of Gulfside. She was with a group of people, they went this way and she went that way and nobody seemed to care. Anyhow, she walking really slowly, you know usually if I come up behind someone walking slowly and I don’t have far to go I change pace, you know. But she was going so slowly, so I said okay see you at Crag Camp. Okay we’re not to Crag Camp yet and half way from Gray Knob to Crag Camp is the spring where Crag Camp gets its water. There was a man and two boys who’d been there the night before and the boys had been playing in the stream and knocked the hose out cutting off the water supply at Crag Camp, which is not really, I knew how to fix it, it’s not real easy especially when the trees are wet. That summer they put in a new waterline, replaced the iron pipe that, Rolf Goetze may have told you about with the sections of PVC pipe, three to four hundred foot lengths. The way to fix it was to stick the hose back into the stream and then you walk four hundred feet down to the next junction, take out your jackknife cut it out and wait until the water gets going again then you shove it back together and that’s the, four hundred feet down is the level so you only need to do it that one place. And it’s a tromp through the brush all the way and as I said it was raining earlier. Okay I went back to Crag Camp—and there were a few more people. The woman eventually showed up but of course she did start worrying a little bit about her group, they didn’t seem give a damn about her. So I thought okay, this is long before the days of radios and okay I will run over to Madison Hut and tell them, it was only forty minutes but you know it’s work and then I had to come back. At Madison Hut the place is packed so I yelled at the top of my voice “Any anybody here know so and so?” Eventually somebody came out of the crowd. I don’t remember what we arranged for how they would meet again but anyhow I went back to Crag Camp. [There was no problem with her staying, as there were plenty of extra blankets.] The day’s not over. Okay so I got her squared away along with a half dozen people. Everybody goes to bed. About eleven o’clock at night there’s a landslide somewhere; you wouldn’t believe how long those things can go on. And after it finally stopped, people were in bed but they weren’t asleep yet, I got up and said I think I’ll step outside and take a look somebody said, “Make sure there’s something to step on before you step outside.” I couldn’t see 10
anything. There was a relatively new slide right below Crag Camp that had come down two or three years ago, and I was sure that was it. Though some days later I went down to the slide and that wasn’t it, it was something up on the headwall and I couldn’t tell for sure and tried to look at pictures I took then and pictures I took later, never knew for sure but boy that was a landslide and it just went on and on and on. And that was the end of the day that started at eleven in the morning at Madison.
Mark: Now that was not a typical day.
Michael: No.
Mark: (Unintelligible).
Michael: No that was one of my two long days.
Mark: Did you have any favorite hikes or paths when you were up there?
Michael: Favorite spot I think is Adams 4.
Mark: Okay.
Michael: Do you know what I mean?
Steve: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah.
Mark: That was your favorite spot?
Steve: That is nice.
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Michael: Yeah. Anything above tree line.
Mark: Okay. Did you have any encounters with wildlife while you were caretaker up there?
Michael: Not even mice.
Mark: Really.
Michael: I know other caretakers have told stories about trapping hundreds of mice, I had some squirrels around. When you’ve got just a plain roof like at Crag Camp, when a squirrel runs across the roof it sounds just like a squirrel’s running across the floor. It’s up there and you’re looking down. Nothing bigger, not even a skunk or a raccoon.
Mark: What was the best part of the job?
Michael: It was all really nice you know a lot of times in your life you look back and say “Oh that was a really good time.” I remember being at Crag Camp and thinking “Right now is a really good time!” And there aren’t many times in your life you can say that. Well it was a good bunch of people, a handful I had some issues with. There were kids from the valley that came up regularly that was nice cuz I knew them.
Mark: Right, right.
Michael: And the other people that came by were complete strangers were also very nice you know we swapped stories.
Mark: What was the worst part of the job?
Michael: I don’t think there was one. Hauling stuff up was certainly work but I found out after I got in shape that with a sixty-pound pack, it took two hours.
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Mark: Do you have…?
Michael: Of course know I look back and say “I used to go up there with a sixty pound pack.” Then my inner voice says, “What did you weigh then?” Well it’s about the same. (Everyone laughing).
Mark: Did you have much contact with the AMC or the Forest Service when you were up there?
Michael: No I remember running into a, I remember running into a ridge runner once on top.
Mark: Okay.
Michael: But that was after my brother was working for the Forest Service in Gorham. AMC, I remember once in some kind of crude looking guys came in and slouched down on the couch in the middle of the day and said, “Any of the goofers leave some lemonade?” [AMC employees used the term “goofer” for any hiker that was not one of them.] So they must have been AMC.
Mark: Did the time you worked in Randolph affect or shape your career or lifestyle decisions that came later?
Michael: Don’t think so, you know, I’d run around in the woods before and I ran around the woods after, it was—very nice time but I don’t know, don’t think it bent me one way or another.
Mark: What was your most dangerous or frightening experience?
Steve: You didn’t ask me that?
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Mark: We ran out of tape.
Steve: Yeah we did.
(Mark laughing)
Michael: I think I was above tree line once and a thunderstorm came in but passed over quickly—I even survived the day I tried to wear myself out but I did survive.
Mark: Do you recall a humorous experience?
Michael: Once there was some project on, so there was a bunch of other people up there, the trail crew and Klaus Goetze and a few other people; they were building something, I forget what. But somebody decided we should have a square dance at Crag Camp, it was all guys. It was hilarious. (Everyone laughing). I did learn something then that I’ve seen repeated a couple of times, if you are going to have a really, really great party, have people work together on a project for a day first. This is probably why the old barn raisings were so much fun.
Mark: Do you have any advice or anything you like to tell others about your time working in the mountains?
Michael: No because it’s changed. There are a lot more people, there’s no stove. How can you welcome people in out of the rain when there’s no stove, I mean they’re out of the rain, but.
Michael’s wife: Tell them about your cooking.
Michael: Gee you didn’t ask that.
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Mark: We only have some questions; we don’t have all the questions. Tell us about your cooking, what did you do on that stove?
Michael: It’s the first time I’ve been by myself cooking for myself so I’m, I was not frightened of it, I looked at as an opportunity. And if I woke up and it was you know cold, gray, pouring rain, okay, time to bake stuff. I’d fire up the stove and practice baking cinnamon rolls and what not.
Mark: That’s great.
Michael: That was usually when I was alone, but it’s cozier when there are a bunch of people. There was one time we had a whole bunch of people and everybody would, they just wouldn’t come and go off, they would hang around during the day and so since I had the stove going to dry everybody out, I said “Oh this is a good time for baking.” And there was some guy there that was washing dishes like crazy and I kept putting dishes on the pile and at one point he said, “Wait a minute, I already washed this one.” The stove at that time had the oven, and also the water tank on the back, and we changed the valves on the side to change which way the smoke goes up and suddenly you’ve got ten gallons of boiling water.
Mark: Do you have any other reminisces you like to share that we didn’t ask about?
Michael: I did hook up a shower. Let’s see—there was a left over piece of the PVC piping.
Steve: We used black pipe.
Michael: What.
Steve: Was it black?
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Michael: Black, yeah black, vinyl.
Steve: Heats the water real good.
Michael: Well there was also, there was a big copper tank up there and hope it’s still around somewhere, it was too good to throw away. The old water system had been so leaky they had a tank to store it in and leave that in the sun all afternoon, just fine or you could use the water tank on the back of the stove if it’s not too hot. And then you just get the suction going, zoom down the trail about a hundred feet to where I had the shower set up. I introduced a few other people to it. I can remember their faces glowing when they came back “Fantastic, that’s great!”
Mark: Yeah that was wide open, we’re still into wide open, anything else?
Michael: Tell you about the, the end of the, tell you about the long hike. At the end of the second summer, I figured I must be in as good as shape as I’m ever going to be, maybe I’ll take a long hike. So I left early in the morning, said goodbye to people sleeping on the porch and had left for Mount Washington. Mount Washington would be about a quarter of the way, and continued on down the Crawford Path to Crawford Notch.
Steve: (Unclear, speaking low).
Michael: Okay. Then I went down on the road for a few miles and came back up on the Davis Path; boy that’s a nice path, I can still remember that. It was made for horses so the grade is wonderful; I was a little tired so I appreciated it. I can still remember it. And then about the time I got back above tree line, it started to go dark. I was getting a little tired but then I went around Mount Washington. It was quite dark, the fog was coming in—and went along there, I had cached a flashlight at Edmond’s Col, which turned out to be a good idea.
Mark: Yeah. 16
Michael: And, at Edmond’s Col I was pretty tired, you know, at Gray Knob I thought I’d just go in and sleep for a minute and then I hear people moving around and thought oh well I don’t want to disturb them. So I got back to Crag Camp around midnight, said hello to the people sleeping on the porch. (Everyone laughing). As I measure on the map, it was 42 miles.
Mark: That’s a lot.
Michael: Along the crest of White Mountains.
Mark: That’s pretty good.
Michael: And uh—I had a little something to eat after I got back and then threw-up. (Everyone laughing). The next day some friends arrived from Maine to stay a couple days and then take me back home. We went up on Mount Adams, but I was pretty slow.
Mark: Yeah, I bet. That’s a great story. Anything else you want to share?
Michael: Oh and, I don’t if it was later or at the time I was thinking, “Let’s see, I’m walking at night, in bad weather, above tree line, I’m exhausted and now have violated every rule that’s on the sign at the tree line.” But when you’re that age, you can do it.
Steve: Yeah but you were a caretaker so it that was all right.
Mark: Anything else you want to share with us Michael?
Michael: I don’t know what they do now a days in a place without a stove.
Mark: Well the critical piece of furniture was the stove.
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Michael: At that time, there were few enough people; very few people came. Now I know if you’re burning wood you have to have somebody there so people don’t cut green trees next to the camp. So in my spare time I’d wander around in the woods, there’s a fallen tree and there’s a fallen tree. When a bunch of kids came up from the village I say, “Okay well it’s wood gathering time, let’s bring them back.” And it was no problem getting enough wood for that day and more and of course the kids thought it was fun. Good thing about kids.
Mark: Do you have any questions?
Steve: Nope, I’m good.
Mark: Well Michael thank you very much. This is an excellent oral history, we will; I enjoyed all your stories. I like the long hike one.
Michael: Yeah.
Mark: Forty-two miles
Jay Eisenhart
No full textJay Eisenhart oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
During the summer of his college years, Jay Eisenhart worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service doing the Rampart Dam Survey in Alaska. He then became involved with trapping, hunting, and farming.
Organization: FWS
Name: Jay Eisenhart
Years: 1960-1979
Program: Unknown
Keywords: History, Biography, Employees (USFWS), Trapping, Hunting, Bird banding, Farms and farming, Rampart Dam Study, Yukon River, Yukon Flats, Mount Schwatka, White Mountains, Native Land Claimis Settlement Act1
National Heritage Team of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Oral History Program
Subject/USFW Retiree: Jay Eisenhart
Date: July 19, 2009
Interviewed by: Mark Madison
Mark Madison:
Well the first question we start with is the pronunciation and spelling of your name, that's an easy one.
Jay Eisenhart:
Yeah, Jay is easy! Eisenhart, like Eisenhower but its Eisenhart.
Mark Madison:
All right, and we are interviewing you outside Middlebourne, West Virginia. And the interviewer is Mark Madison and today is July 19, 2009. And thank you for agreeing to do this, we appreciate it.
Well let's start with your education, where did you go to school?
Jay Eisenhart:
I don't know whether you want it all or not, but anyways I went to, well we had 6th grade in a 2-room school and this is outside of Albany, New York. And after you got to 6th grade you had to go into the city, and so that was 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th that I went to Mill, and I went there for 6 years. I had the same teachers; I had the same homeroom teacher for 6 years. After that I went right out of that and went to Cornell for 4 years.
Mark Madison:
And what did you study at Cornell?
Jay Eisenhart:
Wildlife Management, I mean that was my major.
Mark Madison:
And then what did you do after you graduated from Cornell?
Jay Eisenhart:
I went to Alaska.
Mark Madison:
This is the good stuff? And what did you go to Alaska to do?
Jay Eisenhart:
Well I was not a person that would just go to Alaska and find a job, no. I had connections, and I had a summer job with the Fish and Wildlife Service and it was for the Rampart Dam Study because Senator Gruening wanted to dam the Yukon River. 2
Mark Madison:
Do you remember about what year this was Jay?
Jay Eisenhart:
Yes, 1960; I was 25 years old and I was raring to go, 25 years old live like I could do anything. And that's where I met Jim King right away, and for 4 summers I did the census Okay, they wanted to dam the Yukon River and that the Yukon Flats, that floods oh 300 miles or something like that up and down the Yukon River. And this is where ducks nest, millions of ducks or thousands of ducks, and so we did the census there. And so for 4 summers I worked there and Jim King was pretty much the boss, but then Cal Lensink; and maybe you know who he was...
Mark Madison:
Sure, very famous.
Jay Eisenhart:
And so we worked together, and then other college students, well it was 4 years of that. But what I did, okay so I did that for 3 months out of the year. But gee-whiz, come September boy I was on my own and I said, "Well I'm going to be a trapper because I know I could do it!" Or I said I could do it. And I got along very well with people in Beaver, that's where I stayed was in Beaver, which is on the Yukon River. And the first year I couldn't trap because I was not a resident, but I walked over that trap line and... Well there were these two old Sweden boys over there and they were retired, well they were old men, they were from Sweden and they called them the Sweden boys. But one was a Norwegian, Victor (unclear), and Victor told me, "You go out there and there's you a trap line right there, nobody but those Indians aren't going to, they won't know." Even then, in 1960, or '61 or '62, they won't know. And so I went in 1960, well it was '61. But I walked the whole trap line, they said, "There are 5 cabins out there, you can go right out and walk them. There's a 50 gallon lard can, you've got a little bit of rice, a little bit of flour, a little bit of a sugar, and there's a stove in every cabin, and you can do it." And so I made a little toboggan about 5 feet long and I pulled it across the river and I went, and then I came back to Beaver. This was in the spring of the year, in March and April...
Mark Madison:
What were you trapping?
Jay Eisenhart:
I didn't trap then, I'm telling you this is the first year and I wasn't a resident and I couldn't trap, but I wanted to investigate. And I did, I walked all the way up to the fifth cabin, and then there's Mount Schwatka up there, and that's in the White Mountains, that's between the Yukon and Fairbanks. And I said, "I'm going to climb it, I'm going to climb it!" And I did, and I went up there and up on the top of that mountain. Somebody had been there, some surveyor. There's the Victoria Mountain and there's Mount Schwatka, between the Yukon River and Fairbanks, the Victoria is higher but Mount Tuwaka in a haystack is like this; Victoria Mountain is rounder. I climbed it and up there there were all of these 3
wires sticking around there where somebody had a little think like that, and I said (unclear) I don't know when, sometime. But I was smart, I took a little bottle with me, a little mayonnaise jar, so I wrote a note in it and I made a beacon, I made a little pile of rocks and I put it in there saying I'd been there.
Well now you're not the one but Roger Kaye, do you know him?
Mark Madison:
I know Roger well, yes...
Jay Eisenhart:
Yes, because he was up there at the last cabin hunting sheep and doing stuff like that. But anyway, I did, I climbed that mountain? What else did I do... The next year I was a trapper, yes sir.
Mark Madison:
And what were you trapping that second year?
Jay Eisenhart:
When white men gets the fever he kills whatever he can kill, and not people of course! Game laws, forget about them!
Mark Madison: So you trapped anything?
Jay Eisenhart:
Well you did because nobody cared, nobody cared. The only thing was beaver because you had to tag them, you had to tag beaver. You could catch, I don't know, I think it was 20 and then it went up to 25, or it was 25 and then down to 20. Yeah mink, well mink and martin that was the main thing in the wintertime. See trapping season... Well my birthday is October 25th, and I think well you, you get freeze up. The Yukon River doesn't freeze until Election Day, but I was on the other side of the Yukon River. I was over on Beaver River and October 25th pretty much you need to get going, and I would try and get going. And that's when you want to catch martins because that's when their fur is nice and they run around early. So its martin and mink, that's your moneymaker. You catch a fox here and there. I was there for 19 years and I caught about 6 wolves, and you're never going to make money on a wolf but it's a big deal that you get a wolf, oh you got something! And the same thing with a wolverine; yeah you catch a wolverine sometimes. And then you get to Christmas time and then well that's about the end of winter trapping. And the first of February, well then you can catch beaver but it's a too cold, it so cold I cut a whole in the ice and it was like 4-feet thick and everything. But I'd stay in beaver for a week or so, and then go back and then get some beaver, and I'd get 20 beaver or whatever it was. And then ratting time, then ratting time, boy oh boy, then the sun is starting to shine and you'd go out and you'd catch them with traps! They'd put up these push ups on the ice and I had some good dogs and I'd say, "Gee" and they'd get the idea and yeah, head for that ratting house over there and oh, go for that one and go for 4
that one! I'd go around and plug the holes on them and take the shovel with me and jam the hole on that rat house and sit back in there and... Well that was difference with a rat; when you're trapping rats you had to go everyday. When I was catching those martins and I would make that trip, when I'd head for the home cabin that was 5 cabins in a row, it would take me I just said 17 days; it would take 2-1/2 weeks to go from one end of the trap line and back to the other end, and that's what it was. But those martins would freeze, you'd catch them and their dead in about a couple of hours or something, but that's the way it was. But with a rat trap you had to go every day, well you want to get the lot of them. I had one year, because I shot a lot of rats, but first you catch them in the trap, and when you catch them in the trap you eat them, but you can't them all because there are so many of them. And they're so good, you'd stick them in the oven and you'd roast them. It's just like a piece of pork, they're greasy all over and oh my, they're pretty good! And then after that when you can't... Well all of the push-offs fall in because it's warm in May, and then you walk along on the ice and you shoot them but... Well when you start shooting them, you get holes in them and they're no so good. And then after awhile, when you've got a lot of them, you've got a lot in the canoe and you're shooting (unclear). That's all there's to it, there's good ones and bad ones. But see when I talked this way... See my sister, I have a sister, she's just a couple of years younger than me, she was a librarian and she worked in Ketchikan mostly, but as a librarian in the school, and she would have her summers off and so she would come up. And I would talk to her like this and she said, "Jay you don't say January, you don't say February, you don't say April. You would say it's break off time, it's goose season, it's ratting time, it's King Salmon time, it's silver time..."
Mark Madison:
You have a different calendar.
Jay Eisenhart:
"It's moose hunting time, its wintertime trapping." And that's the way it went.
Mark Madison:
And you did that for 19 years?
Jay Eisenhart: Yes. That's the way people thought, and it's so different now, I know it is. When I went up there nobody had a chainsaw, nobody had a snow machine. Everybody lived in a log cabin and everybody had five or six dogs tied up, and they had some kind of a... They were some out on rinky dink sleds but they'd get out and get a load of wood. This is what they knew how to do and this is what they could do. But since then by the time I left there wasn't a dog damned there! And what with the welfare and that business; that's the first they did was they brought out, they had some of these things like those 4-wheelers so they could run around in the summertime, run around. And then of course they wanted a snowmobile so they could go out on the trap line, well all right (unclear). But boy you drive that thing into overflow; I don't if you know what overflow is, but if you get water underneath the snow. If you've got a dog that dog knows it, he says, "I don't want to get in that stuff!" And if you do get in it the dog would say, "I'm going to get out 5
of here, I'm going to get out!" And if you drove a 4-wheeler in there and it's 30-below or something like that and all of the small metal parts on it are 30-below, and as soon as you hit that water you're going to get stuck, it won't go anyplace. But that's what Beaver is now. Well they've all got telephones now, and I talk to them.
Mark Madison:
You mentioned muskrat hunting and so on; we have one of Cal Lensink's rat canoes in our museum, actually Alaska sent it down. Where did you learn to do all of this? You did learn how to handle a sled in Albany probably, did you just learn from the people up in Alaska?
Jay Eisenhart: Well it's hard to explain it; but I can't tell you about my father, I can't tell you about my uncles and aunts and everything. But I could adapt, that's all there is to it, I'd just say okay. When I was in high school kid right there around Albany and I could catch some opossums and muskrats, and there were red foxes there and I could catch them right there amongst all of the farms and stuff, and I just knew I could do it. And my father was a bird hunter, he was good with a shotgun, and he didn't care a thing about deer or anything like that, he didn't have a rifle. And I'd get out there and I just said, "Well gee whiz, I can to." There's a thing that... Somebody, Moses Cruickshank, and somebody recorded what he wrote, and whether you've ever gotten that I don't know. But Moses said to me, it was just about when I was going to leave, he said, "You're the last white trapper." And a white trapper, and some of them --- well I mentioned the Sweden boys, okay one's Norwegian and one's Swedish, but jeeze that was a Fin up there and there was French Jim, and there was (unclear), well he was a Fin. But there were white people up then in the 1920's when things were hard, and there were single white men, they would come in and they would take a couple of looks at what the Indians were doing and they'd say, "Well I believe I can do this." And they'd outdo the Indians. And I didn't say then, and maybe I, I don't know whether I ever said before I came back here, but I can outdo these guys. But they had all of the experience, they knew it, but they had a wife and five kids, I didn't. And the white trappers didn't have it and the white people came in and put steamboats to work. It was before my time because the steamboats were burning oil when I got up there. I just said, "Yeah, I can do it," and I did it. And then after 19 years I said, "Well, okay I've got this nice fish camp up here." "And I've got, oh gee whiz, I built that home cabin two or three times and I've got six line cabins, big cabins up there. What's left? What are you going to do? Are you going to just stay on here and go to the pioneer's home?" And the other thing is right in Beaver, right in town there; there was a time when... Oh gee whiz, I don't know when this was, in the middle of the '70s, "Red Power! Red Power!" These young kids were growing up and geeze by then now I'm 40 years old or something, and these kids boy I watched them when they were born or something like that, "Red Power! Red Power! Let's kill the white men!" There I was one day, they were doing that and I was walking up, I did, "How about right now." And they kept walking. But it was getting that way because there were murders there, that they would just... A little bit of this, this is homemade wine, I'm drinking homemade wine but they couldn't take it. Whatever it is about Indians, they can't take booze. I saw it, and I know it and they can't. And it would happen, it would happen very easily. Well, that 6
was part of it, and I said there's nothing more to do and things are just getting worse and worse. It was very nice in 1960 when I went there, and 19 years later it wasn't. The young men were not saying, "I can do better than my grandfather." Or, "I can do just as good as my uncle did." They didn't say that. They said, "Gee whiz, Uncle Sam's out there, he's going to take care of all of us Indians."
Mark Madison:
So where did you go after Alaska?
Jay Eisenhart:
After?
Mark Madison:
After you left Beaver? Did you come here?
Jay Eisenhart:
Yes, I've been here, it will be 30 years on the first of September. Yes I've been here, I came right down here.
Mark Madison:
And what did you do here in West Virginia?
Jay Eisenhart:
I said, "I'm going to do what the old-timers did, right here." The same thing I said in Alaska!
Mark Madison:
Another great frontier!
Jay Eisenhart:
And I had 2 ponies, and then I had 2 more ponies, and then I had mules. I had cornfields all up there, right up here where's he's got all of that, I plowed up all of his yard, I plowed it all up, I plowed it all up. But it was a little big different, in Beaver the Indians they said, "Yes, gee." They sort of liked it. But when I got here and started doing that stuff with the mules people laughed at me. Not in my face but they said, "Gee whiz, what kind of jerk?" I said, "Well, I'm going to do it, I don't care. Yeah, I was born in New York, well I was born in Connecticut but I claim New York..." And people can, well people can if they're raised right. And I was raised right, I had a good father and I had good aunts and uncles and I had a good mother and a good sister. And yes, people can do that, and people still do it in China and they do it in India. Africa, nope I have no use for those Africans, they can't. But you can get an Indian that just is as black as you ever saw, and he can go out there. And there are people that are doing that, and they're... Gee whiz, this is not what you want.
7
Mark Madison:
But I do have a few questions; do you have any memories from those first 4 years when you were doing the bird banding? What the techniques were like? What actually the day-to-day involved? I know it was a long time ago...
Jay Eisenhart:
Well, Cal Lensink organized the thing, and he draw out all of the Yukon Flats and he drew all of these little squares. And the first way he drew them was that there were 4-square miles, and so Jim came in the summer and all the residents were there, but they would land us out in a float plane. But 4-square miles was too much, but we did that for the first year, and then after he cut them down to 1-square, which we could cover. And so we would fly out, and sometimes there would be two of us in a square mile and sometimes there would be one in 1-square mile and the other one over 3 miles. And we would just have, well we had a rat canoe (unclear), and so this little thing where you can paddle around and portage it. You can carry it; the thing weighs 30 pounds or 35 pounds. So that's what we had, we had (unclear) and a little paper to write down on, a little coffee and a sandwich or something if you wanted it, then we'd sit around and wait. And we'd go back to Fort Yukon, that's where we worked out of, Fort Yukon. And that's what we were doing; Cal did all of the figuring out of what we saw.
Mark Madison:
Did it help stop the dam? You said at the beginning you were doing this because of the dam proposal?
Jay Eisenhart:
Well, there were a lot of reasons to stop the dam; there's was a lot more than that. (Unclear) Bob Bartlett was the other one, but Groening was the one that wanted the dam and Egan was the governor. No the dam wasn't popular.
Mark Madison:
What about Roger Kaye, when you first met him he was hunting out there?
Jay Eisenhart:
I never met him.
Mark Madison:
Oh okay, but his name came up earlier in your oral history. He was there before you was he?
Jay Eisenhart:
I'm 73 years old, and not many people were there before I was, he's not one of them. No, he wrote me a letter, and somehow or other, because that letter he wrote to my sister, I have a sister in Vermont. And Ron Inouye, now does that mean anything to you?
Mark Madison:
No. 8
Jay Eisenhart:
Well he's Japanese, and he was in Fairbanks and he was one (unclear)... too long of a story. But anyways, somehow or other Roger Kaye, I don't know if he's a politician or just a writer, a newspaper writer, but he found out that Inouye knew my sister. Well anyway, he wrote a letter to my sister and she forwarded it to me, and then I found out that Roger Kaye had been out on my trap lines somehow or other.
Mark Madison:
I see, yeah, later on.
Jay Eisenhart:
Yes, but then he ran into trouble. He was out; those Swede boys that I'd talked about, Victor Innolov, because the whole trap line was abandoned after I left my part of it. But I didn't have their home cabin, which was up above where I was, and that was abandoned. And Roger Kaye, well he landed an airplane... But anyways, he used it and he trapped, which was all right because I talked to him on the telephone and I said, "What about the Indians?" Because the Indians in Beaver, they have that whole trapping line. He said, "Well it wasn't on there." And I said, "Well yeah, okay." But anyways, he used that cabin and he left some grub there, he left some traps and stuff there. And then it turned out a couple of Indian boys from Beaver got over there and they took all his stuff from there! And then when I talked to him I said, "Well who was it?" And he said, "That was Sammy Blackitt and the other one." I didn't know who the other one was but I knew Sam Blackitt, I knew who that was, but this Indians kids. And so they went over in their snowmobiles and so they'd catch a few beavers or something, and whatever anybody leaves there they'd take it. And that's about what I know about Roger Kaye. Well he was, he was up, he'd fly a plane up there around my fourth and fifth cabin up there. That was his sheep hunting areas, he was up in those White Mountains there, he was sheep hunting. And he could see the cabin, because there's a plane... When I was there trapping (unclear) sideline because there's a couple of lakes down there that are pretty close to the mountains, and people would land there and they would set up a camp and then they'd walk up to the mountains. So he landed there and he saw my cabin and then he went over there, and I'd left a note in it and I said, "I'm quitting this trap line, I'm never coming back." And so he saw that and so then he got my name and knew who I was and all of that; there's one connection right there. He was sheep hunting, but I killed some sheep up there. From Beaver right on the Yukon River, when I went up the following year okay I'd go 19 miles downstream in a big boat which I built, I had a 35-foot boat, I traveled down with 5 dogs or 6 dogs and a corn mill and everything. I'd go 19 miles downstream and 50 miles upstream and had my own cabin, and then I had 5 cabins in a row. And it was about 40 miles from the first cabin to the second, third, fourth, fifth it was about 40 miles, so I had to go 40 miles, and I'm sett
Carl Madsen
No full textCarl Madsen oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
Carl Madsen would do research as a student at the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center before joining the Service in 1967. He is known as the father of the Private Lands Program.
Organization: FWS
Name: Carl Madsen
Years: 1967-2004
Program: Migratory Birds
Keywords: Employees (USFWS), History, Biography, Wetlands, Biologist, Military, Habitats, Land acquisition, Nest, Predators, Farm Act of 1985, Restoration, Easements, Crops, WaterfowlOral History Cover Sheet
Name: Carl Madsen
Date of Interview: March 2, 2000
Location of Interview: Shepherdstown, WV
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 37 years (1967- 2004)
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Wetland and Habitat biologist, Division of River Basin Studies, Fergus Falls, Minnesota; GS 7, 9, 11 Wetlands Office, Devils Lake, North Dakota; Wisconsin Wildlife Enhancement Office, Stevens Point, Wisconsin; Wildlife Biologist, Region 3; Migratory Birds Program Mid-Continent Mallard Management Unit; GS 13, Fergus Falls, Minnesota.
Most Important Projects: Private Lands Program
Colleagues and Mentors: Bob Stewart Sr., Lucille Stickel,
Most Important Issues: Egg programs; Predator Management to help increase nests; wetland destruction of prairies
Brief Summary of Interview: Mr. Madsen grew up knowing he wanted to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service after reading an issue of the Weekly Reader. He would do research as a student at the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center before joining the Service in 1967. He worked with the Service during several reorganizations, and is known as the father of the Private Lands Program. He talks about the various positions he held and offices he worked at, noting the he knew working at the Regional Office wasn’t his cup of tea, programs started, and issues that he faced.
Keywords: USFWS employee, history, biography, wetlands, biologist, military, habitats, land acquisition, nest, predators, Farm Act of 1985, restoration, easements, crops, waterfowl.
Mark Madison:
This is Mark Madison, the Service Historian on March 2, 2000 at NCTC in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and today, I’m conducting an oral history with Carl Madson, M-a-d-s-o-n.
Carl Madsen:
s-e-n
Mark Madison:
s-e-n, I’m sorry. M-a-d-s-e-n, and then, Carl, the first question for you would be when and how did you enter the Service?
Carl Madsen:
Well, I began as a student at Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in the spring of 1965. I worked for Bob Stewart, Bob Stewart, Sr., not Jr. and Harold who were doing a wetland classification study. I worked with them there for the summer, then stayed on until January 1, then did some research for my graduate work back at Michigan State University. I went back to the University and then came back and was hired by the Service full-time in September of 1967 and went to Fergus Falls, Minnesota as a Wetland Habitat Biologist. At that time, we called it WHP, whips. We were in the Division of River Basin Studies, and we did a lot of the work surrounding the wetland destruction of the prairies. In fact, I remember, the Department of Agriculture was still paying for a subsidized drainage of wetlands and were providing technical assistance to drain. Even before that, back to my earliest recollection,
I suppose at age four or five as a youngster, and I want to say living in Wisconsin and not growing up, because I’ve never grown up and don’t ever intend to grow up.
Mark Madison:
Where in Wisconsin?
Carl Madsen:
In Racine County, southeast Wisconsin. Mark Madison:
I’m from Wausau personally.
Carl Madsen:
I went to school in Stevens Point, and I’ve been to Wausau a few times. So anyway, we lived kind of on the edge of town, and we could never figure out if we had a small farm or a big garden, but next to that was a nice wetland and small woods, and I spent an inordinate amount of my time there even as a pre-schooler and all the way through my grade years and so forth, and there was a time, and I don’t remember what grade I was in, maybe about sixth grade or something, remember the old Weekly Readers?
Mark Madison:
Oh, yeah.
Carl Madsen:
There was an article on that Weekly Reader about going north to Van Dyne, had this crew of the Fish and Wildlife Service going north, and I read that thing, and I kept that thing until it was wore out to nothing, and I said, “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to work for that outfit.” I think that, so I’ve known what I wanted to do ever since grade school.
Mark Madison:
That’s great.
Carl Madsen:
And known about the Agency since then from the Weekly Reader. About, would have been about 1980, there was an old guy in Minnesota who, he said, one day he said, “Here, I just found this going through some stuff.” He said, “I thought you’d like to have it.” It was a copy of that Weekly Reader from 1950.
Mark Madison:
Wonderful.
Carl Madsen:
And going north to Van Dyne, and I said, “Well, it’s probably not safe in my hands.” I sent it down to Patuxent to the Migratory Bird Office. I don’t know whatever became of it, but sometime in 1950 that Weekly Reader was out there, and I came across it again. I says, “Yeah, this means something to me.”
Mark Madison:
That’s great. Did the Service live up to your expectations?
Carl Madsen:
I’d do it all over again. So what’s this, 2000, and I started in ‘67, so next fall will be 33 years full-time with the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mark Madison:
Wow!
Carl Madsen:
If you put the military time, and I had a little time with the Forest Service and with the temporary time in the northern prairie, I think I have over 36 years right now. I could retire, but it’s still fun. I look forward to going to work every day, and I have since the day I started. I wake up in the morning, and I’m anxious to get going, get to work, and maybe to a fault. So there’s the old saying, and maybe I’m guilty of that, “if you are what you do, what are you when you don’t,” and there’s a little bit of fear I have of leaving this job and, because I’ve become this job and, but I have a lot of other interests, and I’ll do fine when I do decide to retire.
Mark Madison:
Sure.
Carl Madsen:
The thing I like now is there’s a lot of bright, young people coming in and I can kind of give them the experience of the years and let them do the heavy lifting and heavy learning, and let them get going, and we really do attract a lot of bright, young people. I’m glad I’m not competing with them today for a job, because they’re really, that part is really increased over the years. I think when I first started in the Fish and Wildlife Service, it was basically all white males. I don’t know of any women that were in the field. We had women secretaries and that sort of thing.
Mark Madison:
Yeah.
Carl Madsen:
I started in Region 3, and I met Lucille Stickler early on, and I see her pictures on the wall up there.
Mark Madison:
She’s a hero here.
Carl Madsen:
Yeah, and other than Lucille, I’m sure there were some women in the field. I didn’t know them, I never saw them, and it was all males, and all white males. I never saw a minority. Of course, that’s changed, and not probably changing fast enough, but it is changing, and every time I see some of our people over there talking about, it’s still, where are we going with this and how fast will we ever get to where we are. It’s an interesting process and kind of exciting to see that change and to see people with other attitudes coming in, picking up, and learning the business. That’s kind of nice.
Mark Madison:
How did your career go from Fergus Falls? Where did you go after that?
Carl Madsen:
Remember we said we were in River Basin Studies in wetlands and that was a division that was mostly, that is now Ecological Services Division, River Basins were, and they were doing studies with the Corps of Engineers in the mid-west. They’re doing the big dams in the Missouri River and that sort of thing, which they were working on, and we were doing wetlands working with, for, and against Department of Agriculture in their drainage efforts and others who would drain, and remember that in 1962, the Accelerated Wetland Acquisition Program was authorized, where we spent our Duck Stamps for, quite a small, Duck Stamp proceeds for acquiring small wetlands, primarily in the prairies, and the goal there was to buy the nucleus brood areas, acquire some other wetlands around it with easements, and then fill in the other opportunities on private lands with whatever we could. Well, we got going real good with the acquisition program, and if you look back on that today, now some nearly, what, 40 years later, it’s got to stand as a monument that’s never been equaled in the conservation field probably anywhere in the world. I mean, there’s been hundreds of millions of dollars spent to buy land. We’ve bought hundreds of thousands of acres of land and hundreds of thousands of acres of easements, and it continues to move forward. But we were very slow at getting started in the private lands pickups in between that, and that was my realm from early on. I’ve never been a game warden, never been a refuge manager, always been kind of out there trying to do what we can without a budget, without authority, without legislation, and we were able to do a few things, but it was a pretty slow step. I think people who wanted to do something, we sometimes found a way to do it. From Fergus Falls, I spent two years there, and then in 1969, I moved to the Wetlands Office in Devil’s Lake and spent three years there, and grade-wise, I started, I came out of Michigan State with a Master’s Degree and started as a GS-7, which was for the unheard of salary of 5,000 and even less, and to start at 2500 or 15,000, a nice house, and you could rent a house for 100,000, two FTE’s, go do something someplace.” He says, “You guys decide wherever you want to go,” and he left the room, and after a lot of discussion, it was decided that they would put these two positions in Fergus Falls and hire two people to go out and see what they could do on the land, and we kind of decided that what was needed was filling in some habitat on those private lands between what we were already doing with the Acquisition Program. I was selected for that position. That was a Grade 13, and when I left Stevens Point and came into the Regional Office, I was a 12. I was there for five years and then went on as a 13 and continue as a 13 to this day, so I’ve been a 13 for more than 20 years, which is fine with me. And so we did that count and stuff there for 10 years, and we worked within the egg programs and tried to tickle a few changes there and worked with the legislative process and the various farm bills, got our foot in the door here and there. We tried some predator management to increase nest success. We did some habitat developments on private lands, but again, really without a budget, and we scrounged money from wherever we could through whatever partnerships we had, and it was in the mid-80's, the early ‘80's where Ducks Unlimited formed their field office in Bismarck, North Dakota, and they joined us then with funding and with engineering services to do projects. That kind of jump started the Private Lands Program, which we were doing in three counties in western Minnesota, wetland restorations, grassland restorations. We had some other funding that came to us then from the Service, and we started to do these things, and then when the ‘85 Farm Act was passed, the Service was given a role in that, and it took us a couple of years to get in gear, and we started private lands coordinators in each region, and I think Region 3 was the first one to do that, because I was called in there to help set that up in the Regional office, and we named an individual to be the Farm Bill Coordinator in each state, and I mean, that was in 1987, and then people started getting going with doing various things in various states around the country, but probably in the prairie states jumped out ahead of that first. North Dakota comes to mind as one that got pretty aggressive there because of some of our people that were really innovative and jumped on this quickly, and so the Private Lands Program now was going, what we now call Partners for Fish and Wildlife. It started off being called Partners for Wildlife, which was a good name. It didn’t reflect any agency. It didn’t reflect what we did. It just reflected that it was a partners program. It wasn’t, because in one part of the country we might do wetland restoration, another part we might do tree restoration, another part grassland restoration, and whatever. When they changed it to Partners for Fish and Wildlife, I was a little dismayed about that, because I consider wildlife to include fish. I consider wildlife to include insects, amphibians, reptiles, and if we say partners for Fish and Wildlife, I look on that as a division more than a unity thing, which is what it was intended for, and should we have a Partners for Wildlife, a Partners for Fish and Wildlife, or a Partners for Fish, Wildlife, Insects, Amphibians, Reptiles and compartmentalize all those, or Partners for Wildlife was a more umbrella term. Also, when you say Partners for Fish and Wildlife, it’s almost like you’re bringing the Agency name in there, and when you’re selling and you’re first meeting someone and you want them to join Partners for Fish and Wildlife, it’s like asking them to jump in bed with the Fish and Wildlife Service. On the prairies that’s not a real, it’s a big leap for someone to do that, and so if you have just this Partners for Wildlife, wildlife was already a leap for them, and so I hope we go back to Partners for Wildlife someday.
Mark Madison:
Let’s talk about that a minute, because you spent most of your career in the mid-west, it sounds like.
Carl Madsen:
Yes, yes.
Mark Madison: Did you see changing perceptions about the Fish and Wildlife Service over the 33 years, and has it been a tough sell?
Carl Madsen:
Really, really not. I can go off almost any place in the Dakotas right now, western Minnesota, and the Fish and Wildlife Service is usually not held in high esteem by farmers and ranchers. They fear endangered species. They fear regulation of wetlands. They don’t like land acquisition because it takes land off the tax rolls and removes land that they might buy. But the other side of that is they love land acquisition when they want to sell land. They complain about our easements, but when they need some cash, they love our easements, and they take our cash. We’re doing more easement work in South Dakota now than we have ever done.
Mark Madison:
Sure.
Carl Madsen:
And we’ve got more people lined up at the door to get in the program than we have dollars for, and we have more dollars now than we’ve ever had, and so they say well they don’t like it, but still they come in, they like to do business with us, but they don’t like us, and one thing that I found the same now as the same then is the Agency, as a group, is perceived as an outsider someplace. It’s this big, bad brother thing. One farmer, many years ago, told me, he says, “We used to hate you guys until we got to know you,” and I think that was the hallmark of the Private Lands Program. It’s a one on one thing. Our relations, in the agricultural community are very personal. They’re one on one. People buy their machinery from someone they know. They sell their grain to someone they know. Typically they buy their vehicles from someone they know, and they do it very personally. They don’t respond well to postcards or mailing things or television ads and just send off and do it. You’ve got to get to know them personally, and that’s been a hallmark of the Private Lands Program, also of the Wetland Acquisition Program. The appraisers that have been out buying land have established a very personal relationship with the people they have worked with and, but still it’s not, it’s only a minority of people that we’ve worked with, but almost all of them, once we’ve worked with them, are friends and allies, although they don’t go to bat for you on everything. Endangered species is a very hard sell out there yet, and there’s a strong property rights feelings and private ownership of property and any threats that are perceived to be pretty serious.
Mark Madison:
Yeah, those are always problems with farmers and ranchers. Is there some places of conservation, though, you do find common ground with farmers? Is it easier to get them to agree to, for example, to waterfowl propagation or something?
Carl Madsen:
Our easiest sell is if we’re working with livestock operators. We have grass. They value grass, they need grass for livestock grazing and for hay, and they also need water in conjunction with that grass, and that’s really what the prairie and wildlife is about is water and grass. That’s our easiest sell is to restore or develop wetlands and improve or restore or protect the grasslands on which livestock graze, and that’s a very compatible common ground thing that’s throughout the Dakotas. There is a growing trend toward more grow crops and less diversified agriculture, less livestock in the eastern Dakotas. I think North Dakota is probably further advanced in that than South Dakota is, and I’ve never been able to figure out exactly why. But as the farms get larger, there is less livestock. There is more interest in rural crops as opposed to small grain and hay and the diversification farming. There’s more pressure on removing obstacles like wetlands and grasslands and other habitats, and that trend has been growing slowly over the years, and I’ve seen it, for example, in 1970, there were almost no soybeans in northwest Minnesota and in South Dakota, the whole state of South Dakota. Today we have over 4,000,000 acres of soybeans in South Dakota, and that’s made a big impact on land use and farms are big and getting bigger. I’ve seen that over the years, too. People buy out their neighbor and others. One farmer, where there used to be two, and those trends are going on. I was visiting with a farmer the o
John L. Brooks 03/22/2007
No full textJohn Brooks started out in refuges before having a severe car wreck. After the wreck and his position was cut, he ended up working as a Wildlife Inspector and eventually moving into law enforcement. He shares the locations he worked and several stories of his time with the Service.
Organization: FWS
Name: John Brooks
Years: 1981-2000's
Program(s): Refuges, Law Enforcement
Keywords: History, Biography, Employees (USFWS), Law enforcement, Management, Pet trade. Andy Pierce, Operation Rockfish, Songbird investigation, International Affairs, Endangered species, FLETC, Terry Grosz, AuthorJohn L. Brooks 03/22/2007
MM -- … and the last name is spelled B R O O K S. And John, usually the first
question we ask is -- how did you come to work with the Fish & Wildlife Service?
JB -- I started as a Refuge Manager Trainee in Moiese, Montana, at the National Bison
Range. I received a cooperative education student program grant, if you will, from the
University of Montana. I attended the University of Montana between 1976 through 1981.
So I believe in 1977 I started working for the Service at the National Bison Range for that
summer, and that was my first exposure to the Fish & Wildlife Service. From there I went
back to school to finish my degree in wildlife management. The following summer I was
detailed to Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Medicine Lake, Montana. So I got
an idea of what prairie wildlife was like. And it was very, very fascination experience for
me. I’d never experienced anything like that [indecipherable] habitat, all four species of
grouse, everything. And then that fall, because they wanted concurrent duty stations, I drove
from there down to the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was very cold.
How can I … I was not accustomed to -- being from California, but I dealt with the
dynamics of the elk, gave interpretative tours, did all the jobs of an assistant refuge manager,
and then went back to school. Now, because of these summer jobs, and because of that fall
quarter that I took off, I did miss some class time at the University of Montana, so that’s
why I graduated in 1981. My final duty station as a cooperative student was at … I’m
sorry, was the National Elk Refuge. That’s when I graduated. In ‘81 I was picked up full
time by the Service as an Assistant Refuge Manager at Des Lacs National Wildlife Refuge
in North Dakota -- Kenmare, North Dakota. Enjoyed it enormously. Unfortunately, a week
after … into the job, I had a very serious car accident, and was in the hospital for a month.
Broke my wrist. Broke my legs. Glass in my eye. I was really in bad shape. So, it was at
the same time Reaganomics had taken over, so my position was cut. So, here I am thinking
‘alright, I just spent my whole life trying to get this job and now it’s gone; what am I gonna
do?’ And I was really, really depressed at that time. But the Service came through. And
they said ‘look, you know, let’s try to find you something somewhere else.’ So, back then
we had area offices. So I went to … it was not Fargo … must have been … I can’t recall
the name of the city …
MM -- Was it …
JB -- Minot … I’m sorry?
MM -- It was in North Dakota?
JB -- It was in North Dakota. It wasn’t Minot. It was sal… the capital …
MM -- Bismarck?
JB -- Bismarck. Thank you very much. So I went to Bismarck and worked in the area
office. And I was able to work with all the different programs at that time. And when it
came to working with law enforcement, I really didn’t work with them. There was just a
special agent for the whole state, and he basically gave me a summary of what law
enforcement does. And he mentioned the wildlife inspector program. And I had recalled
seeing something in National Geographic magazine at one time -- it was a front cover and it
had these foxes or something, and they talked about endangered wildlife and stuff. And I
remember thinking ‘wow, that would be really cool to do [indecipherable] endangered
wildlife.’ So when he brought it up I said ‘yeah, yeah, I want to do that.’ So I applied for
the job in Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas, and Brownsville, Texas. I received the job in Dallas/Ft.
Worth and then I started my career in law enforcement. So I drove down there, took up my
first position. Although I have to say, my heart still was in the refuge system. I really
wanted to be a refuge manager, but this was the next best alternative. I was there for three
years, I believe, and while I was there the other two inspectors and I, we had the highest
seizure rate in the nation, as far as for stopping endangered species from coming into the
country. I learned a lot about international trade, about people who pass through customs --
what they bring. I was amazed. And I recall the first time I seized something on my own
after being trained. Was a lady coming in with a pair of sea turtle boots. Customs
inspector called me over and said ‘this lady has some sea turtle products.’ And so I looked
at them and I identified them as spring sea turtle. I advised her what the laws were, and that
it was illegal to bring in. And she was all ‘if I’d have known, I never would have done this.’
And I believed her. And I said ‘well, it’s okay. Do you have anything else?’ She goes
‘oh, no. No. That was it. Believe me, I never would have done this if I would have
known.’ I said ‘okay. Well, if you just want to sign this abandonment form, you know,
we’ll get this taken care of.’ And I could see out of the corner of my eye the customs guy
looking at her, and he was raising an eyebrow. And he said ‘wait a minute.’ He said ‘open
that bag.’ And opened the bag, and there was another pair. And I just looked at her and my
mouth dropped. I couldn’t believe that she lied to me. That was the first time I was lied to -
- and it was the last time I really trusted anybody. Unfortunately, I lost my innocence at that
point. So we went on. The other inspector became a special agent. I stayed there until ’84,
then I applied for the special agent program, because I couldn’t get back into the refuge
system. And I was accepted. And so I went to Glynco, Georgia, where we have our
criminal investigative training. And that was in 1984. And I was a class of 16. At that time,
that was the largest class the Fish & Wildlife Service had put on for special agents, really
beefing up their force. Congress had mandated a minimum of 112 agents for the nation. At
that time, we had like 160 or something like that -- not a lot. Met other agents-to-be from all
over the country, all different walks of life, different professions -- state wardens, refuge
officers, college students. And we had a really close group; it was called the ‘wolf pack.’
Sixteen weeks there; learned everything about criminal investigations; learned everything
about Fish & Wildlife laws. And then took off to Columbus, Ohio. That was my first duty
station. Was issued a gun; that was the first I ever had a gun. And it was overwhelming, I
have to tell you this, when I was holding this, I could just feel the power. I said ‘wow, I
really have a lot of power here, and I can’t take this for granted, that I have the power of life
and death, so to speak, and the government, the Service is entrusting me with this and to do a
good job.’ And I wanted to do the best job I could. When I arrived in Columbus, I had my
supervisor, Andy Pierce, show me around, got me places to, you know, got me familiar with
the area, and pretty much went to work right away. And I recall thinking that I was over my
head. It was just so much. I mean, I went from a biologist - where I was comfortable; I
went from a wildlife inspector - where I was the best; and now something and I’m just a
number and really not comfortable. Because my whole essence was not about law
enforcement -- it was about conservation. Come to learn out … come by … I come to find
out later that the law enforcement component is just a great integral part of what
conservation is all about. It took me about, oh, I’d say a year, for one day I just woke up
and said ‘you know what, I can do this job.’ And I never looked back after that. But I do
recall my first assignment, there was an operation called Operation Rockfish taking place. It
was a special operations investigation, multi-states in the east coast, state officers, federal
officers; we all got together for a big briefing and were going to take down these people
who were trading illegal fish. We all had our assignments, and I was the only federal agent
on my team, with state officers. And these state officers had tons more years experience
than I did. And I remember thinking ‘okay, I’m in charge.’ And I did not let them see the
fear. I stepped up to the plate and took charge, and went, you know, followed my training,
and everything went by the book. But I remember thinking that was really scary -- really
scary. So after Columbus, Ohio, I transferred to Newark, New Jersey. And at that time
they didn’t have any agents there. The agent had gone off on maternity leave. And it’s a
big port of entry -- a sea port of entry, and I had port experience as an inspector, and was a
new agent, no one really wanted to go there because, as with most people in the wildlife
field, Newark isn’t their idea of a place to go. So, being from the city I didn’t have a
problem with that. But the other thing was cost of living -- real expensive. I didn’t have a
problem with that either. I’m single -- it was an adventure to me. I said ‘I’ll go.’ And in
my mind - if I go now I’ll never have to do this again.
MM -- Do your penance.
JB -- Do my penance, exactly. So, went there. We had a great team there of inspectors, and
myself, and the supervisor. I worked everything from migratory bird enforcement,
throughout the whole state -- down from Cape May all the way out to the Pocono’s area; lot
of import/export, seaport stuff; we did the training video for the Fish & Wildlife Service
called An Invasion Techniques -- which highlighted the techniques smugglers used to bring
things into the country, to help other inspectors and agents around the nation; we did a
‘canned hunt’ investigation -- is where people were taking captive-raised wildlife like tigers
and lions and whatnot, shoot them in a cage, pay 20,000 and then take their picture with it
to say ‘I went to Africa’; to fire arms investigations with ATF; parrot smuggling. It’s quite
interesting. The highlight of my career in Newark, I would have to say, would have been a
songbird investigation we had. People back in that area who were trading in songbirds –
cardinals, bullfinches, siskins, everything of that nature. So I paired up with a state officer;
we did a quasi undercover operation where I was the undercover agent and he was the
uniformed officer. And I would go in and I would question people and I’d see what they
had. And I looked more like a college student back at that time, and also, at that time, a
black officer in the Fish & Wildlife Service was unheard of. So, these people didn’t think
that I was an agent, or an undercover agent, so it worked well. They had their inclinations,
but they just did not … no way it was going to happen. So, we busted so many people, and
the state was able to realize about 12,000 in fines from that, to where that industry was
pretty much shut down. I was feeling really good about that. And back at that time,
Columbians were heavily into drug trafficking. And there were some Columbians, in that
area, who also were dealing in birds. I’m feeling like I am invincible at this time, so -- I
went after the Columbians. And gave them a call, set up a meet, was going to meet in New
York City, but at the day they set the meet up, I couldn’t do it. I had to go somewhere else.
Now, these people didn’t know who I was or what I looked like over the phone, so we sent
another agent in, in my place -- and the state officer went with him undercover, just for
backup -- could be sort of some dangerous people. So they went to this building, that
turned out to be an abandoned building. They knocked on the door [indecipherable]
nothing happened. So they called me and said ‘you sure you have the right address?’ Said
‘yeah, that’s the address.’ So, we figured they just backed out on us. But then the state
officer received a phone call from one of his informants that said ‘they were waiting for you
across the way. And if a black man would have shown up they were going to take him out.’
So, I used that opportunity to call them back and say ‘hey, I was there, where were you
guys’ you know, ‘you gave me the wrong address.’ And he’s like ‘ah, well, we were
there.’ He’s totally confused now, just had him totally off center, ‘cause I was going to go
after them again. I actually felt complimented that he was going to put a hit on me ‘cause I
was doing my job. But, that became a little too much for the state officer, so he backed off.
He said ‘it’s too much.’ So that died, unfortunately. From Chicago … I’m sorry, from
Newark, New Jersey, I went Chicago – Chicago, Illinois. And pretty much the same thing –
waterfowl, Lacey Act cases, bear gall bladder was a big thing out there. And I had also just
come back from the International Police Olympics, which was in Australia that year, and I
made a lot of contacts internationally with the other wildlife counterparts. And while in New
Zealand I was talking to one of the officers and he says ‘you know, we have a really big
problem with bird smuggling here. People are laundering birds from Australia here,
sending them to the States.’ And I said ‘yeah, we know. There’s a couple of people were
looking at, yadda yadda.’ And he says ‘well, could you make a phone call for me.’ And
I’m like ‘okay, wait, I’m not here on official business -- can’t do that.’ I did it anyway --
made a call. The guy was … the person he was looking at … Let me back up. I told him, I
said, ‘you need to try undercover techniques, that’s the only way you’re going to get in to
these people.’ And I outlined some ways that he could do this. That’s when he asked me if
I could make a call. So I called the guy and I said ‘yeah, I’m from the States, you know,
blau blau blau.’ Throw out some names and he says ‘well, I know this person and that
person.’ He threw out some really … some people that we had been looking at and hadn’t
been able to tie into some of the bird trade. Tony Silva was one of those persons. And so,
that really piqued my interest. And he said ‘I will send … I’ll set you up, send you some
birds back. Right now, this is how we’ll do it. You give them to Tony. This, that, and the
other.’ And I said ‘okay, we’ll meet.’ And of course, I didn’t, because I didn’t have
authority to do that. I just didn’t go. And when I came back I brought it to the attention of
management. And our special operations unit was actually working an undercover case on
him at that time, so they incorporated my case into their case. We were able to catch Tony
Silva, and several other people that were smuggling birds from that region of the country …
of the world. And it turned out to be very successful. And that’s just networking, just
networking. So, I feel good about that. So after Chicago, I decided to go into the
Washington Office as a senior special agent. Now, at this time in my career, I don’t know -
- 10 / 15 years on, did I want to go back to school. I really had considered, and actually
applied for, the Kennedy School of Government, to receive a degree in public
administration. But I also applied for this position in D.C. in a newly formed branch of
International Affairs. International Affairs totally appeals to me. So I applied. I got the
job. So I decided not to go back to school. And from there I was able to take trips to
Bangladesh, India, England, several other countries, giving lectures on wildlife law
enforcement techniques, training, this, that, and the other. And it was a great experience. I
did outreach with the local schools, inner city schools in DC, schools for the deaf, I mean,
everything. And not bragging -- someone’s looking at this -- but at that time, if you
mentioned law enforcement in the Fish & Wildlife Service, that was synonymous with John
Brooks. Because I was everywhere. Everyone knew law enforcement because of what I
was doing. I was trying to actually bring us out of the closet, if you will, and bring us more
into the fold of what the Fish & Wildlife Service was doing. That we were an integral part.
And it worked.
MM -- Probably meant the end of doing special operations though, isn’t that
right?
JB -- Yeah.
MM -- Your face was well known after giving these talks …
JB -- Yeah.
MM -- … and so on.
JB -- Yeah, exactly. But I had no problem being in the public and I was totally happy that
way.
MM -- We’ll edit that out.
JB -- Okay. But from one of the trips I took to India, I received some information from
their authorities about this product called shahtoosh. And shahtoosh is a wool developed
from the Tibetan antelope. It was actually NGO’s that came to me first and they were
looking for help, because they were not getting help from their government. They said this
animal is endangered, it’s going to extinct. This thing is really making the rounds around
the world. It’s selling anywhere from 8,000 a shawl. We need to stop this. So,
they took me to some stores, we asked some questions, I did the field test because I …
shahtoosh is basically … it’s like a cashmere scarf -- but it’s better than cashmere. It’s so
fine it will pass through a wedding ring; you can put it in and it will go all the way through.
It’s that fine, and it’s that warm, and it’s that light. It’s really a powerful product. So, I
looked into it. We talked to their equivalent to the Secretary of the Interior over there, and
he acknowledged that there was a problem. I was there with CITES - the United Nations
counterpart in the wildlife arena. And we had a meeting with the Indian government, and he
acknowledged that there was a problem. But what he said was, he said ‘this is a very touchy
situation, in the fact that this product is being made in the province of Kashmir.’ And
Kashmir, if you know anything about the history in that area, was very disputed between
Pakistan and India -- who owns it. They really want to be with Pakistan. But if they were
to go in and actually break this up, it could have caused an international incident -- a war -- a
nuclear war, for that matter. So he had had a meeting set up with the weavers from that area.
They were actually coming down. He asked us to sit in, so we did. The weavers came in,
they told us this very lame story about how kids walk out in the spring and they
painstakingly pick the wool from the … shedded wool of these Tibetan antelopes off the
bushes, and they bring them back and they weave them into this shahtoosh shawl. Well,
where the animal occurs is in the Tibetan plateau, there are no bushes -- first of all. They
don’t come down anywhere near there. And we had already had information that they’re
slaughtering these things -- with automatic weapons. So what it turns out is that, from our
investigation, is that Tibetans were killing the animals, trading with the Kashmiris for
firearms and tiger bone. The Kashmiris would weave it into the shawl and then take them
into the interior to sell them throughout the world. The tiger bone would be sent up to
China and sold as medicinal products. So two endangered animals were being affected by
this. So, after they told us the story, we listened and then we said ‘look, CITES does not
allow this thing to be exported. CITES [indecipherable] one animal we will not let into the
United States.’ And I said ‘when I return back home I will make everyone aware of this.’
And they got really angry and they stormed out of the meeting. So, … But when I got back,
I had talked to one of the other agents in the D.C. Office and he had already received
information from France that this product was circulating. And he had some names and
some places where he believed that these products were going to. So we sent out leads, and
around that same time I was about to be transferred to San Diego. So I actually followed up
on all the leads myself. And because of that we were able to shut down that trade. And that
animal, I have no doubt, has been saved from extinction because of that case. It would be
extinct by now. So …
MM -- That’s a great story.
JB -- So, San Diego. After that I went to San Diego to get experience in habitat cases --
endangered species habitat cases, which is very difficult to work. It deals with development
pretty much, and you have to basically prove that the impact of this development has pushed
this endangered species out; several of those cases, and also border crimes, with again, some
bird smuggling, reptile smuggling, and things of that nature. We, the other agent and I, have
effectively shut down the bird trade on that border and pushed it east towards Texas. We
had cases where we were seizing birds a 100 at a time, 90 at a time, and worked well with the
Mexican government to try to get coordination on both sides, just to make sure these things
weren’t going to be traded unlawfully. And, as a result of that, we started a repatriation
program, because what currently … what had happened at that time was birds being brought
into the country would go to quarantine for 45 days and then Fish & Wildlife would give
them to Agriculture to auction them off. And it just didn’t seem right, because now, even if
I was that smuggler, I can go back and buy my bird -- which is not illegal. It just seem
Bill Butler
No full textBill Butler oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison. After leaving Alaska, Bill went to Washington D.C. as the aviation manager for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mr. Butler started out as a pilot/biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, where he and his wife would spend 12 years there before moving to Washington, DC to become the National Aviation manager for FWS.
Organization: FWS
Name: Bill Butler
Years:
Program: Refuges
Keywords:History, Biography, Aircraft, Biologists (USFWS), Employees (USFWS), Migratory birds, Waterfowl, Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, Pilot, Aviation, Alaska, Aviation Manager in Washington, DCINTERVIEW WITH BILL BUTLER
APRIL 16, 2004 BY DR. MARK MADISON
NCTC SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV
MR. BUTLER: Hi, my name is Bill Butler. I am 59 years old. I was born in Memphis, TN on December 27, 1944.
DR. MADISON: When did you started working for USFWS?
MR. BUTLER: It was later in life. We moved from Memphis to Cleveland to Chicago and finally to California where I went to high school and college. I was always interesting in flyways. I actually saw a copy of Flyways while I was in high school. I began to be fascinated with becoming a pilot/biologist. But I didn’t really realize that dream right away either. I went to college first at University of California at Davis. When I graduated from there, I went into the Navy and became a pilot. When I got out of the Navy I went back to college and got a master’s in wildlife at Arizona State and went to work for the Bureau of Reclamation. But I still had in my mind that I wanted to be a pilot/biologist. After working for Bureau of Reclamation for a few years I talked to by wife about becoming a pilot/biologist. There aren’t that many of those jobs. I got the Conservation Directory. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that but is has all of the natural resource agencies in the country. I looked in that and found all of the ones that may have pilot/biologist positions and I wrote letters to them. It took about a year and it became pretty obvious that I was going to have to go where pilot/biologist positions were located. A job came available in Bethel, Alaska on the Yukon Delta NWR. I applied and it was in 1982 that I got a job as a wildlife pilot/biologist on the Yukon Delta NWR. We went up there and I stayed in Alaska for about twelve years. After three years on the refuge, I worked on Canada geese, and a position came open in migratory birds to develop goose surveys throughout the State. I applied and was fortunate enough to get that job. I worked up there for total of about twelve years. When we first went to Alaska, my wife wasn’t all that enamored with the idea. But we spent twelve years and she decided that she needed to leave. I was really reluctant to go because it was kind of a lifetime dream to get a pilot/biologist position like that in Alaska. We decided to start looking for jobs and the position of Aviation Manager in FWS came open. I decided to apply for that in 1994 and I was fortunate enough to get it. We moved to Washington, D.C. and basically I’ve been there ever since functioning as the National Aviation Manager for FWS. As part of that I continue to work with migratory birds and continue to conduct surveys and be responsible for the central Ontario strata in the breeding pairs survey. I’ve also continued to do some winter waterfowl surveys.
MR. MADISON: That’s great.
MR. BUTLER: In some ways it’s been a… I’ve been able to stay in touch with the biology as well as move into more of the oversight and management of the aviation program.
MR. MADISON: Well, let’s trace that evolution. When you first went up to Yukon Delta, what was it like in 1982?
MR. BUTLER: Well, it’s been a long time ago now. I can remember after looking for that type of job for a year. My wife and I sat down and discussed it. I told her that if I was really ever going to realize this dream we would have to go to some place like Alaska. She said it would be okay. If I could find a job, she would go with me. If it was something with, I mean, Bethel is 400 mile east of Anchorage. It’s a native community that is about 50% Upik Eskimo and 50% white. It’s very much like moving to a third world country. The interesting thing about that is that as soon as we put in into our mind that we were going to get a job like that, she said that if this is what it would take, we’d go together. The funny thing about it was that I didn’t have a float rating when I first went up there. I had gotten accepted for the job and had given them my application. They called me and told me that I was going to be de-selected because I didn’t have the float rating. I called up the Assistant Director of Refuges. I think his name was John Redforn. He told me not to worry and to go get the float rating. If I could get it, I still had the job. I went to the Salt and Sea. There was a J-3 Cub floatplane at the Salt and Sea. I went there and in two days got the float rating. I called them back up, sent it to Personnel and we were on our way to Alaska. In the interim there, when my wife knew we were going to Bethel, the Refuge Manager sent us the local paper. She applied for a job in the native hospital in the Strept Surveillance Program. She had a degree in Bacteriology. She was actually accepted for her job in Bethel before they finally accepted me, which I thought was kind of interesting. Anyhow, we both went to Bethel and I would say that it was one of the best experiences we’ve ever had. I think she would say the same thing. We were getting to know the native culture. We were in Bethel for three years before we moved back to Anchorage, but it was a wonderful experience.
DR. MADISON: Now, you were flying up there. Would did you have as observers when you were there?
MR. BUTLER: When I started the project with Migratory Birds, to do the goose surveys I worked with a Biologist up there whose name was Bill Eldridge. He was my observer for ten years. He and I together probably conducted one of the more consistent goose surveys that’s ever been developed and done. In the ten years since I left, they have continued to do that survey and I think now they are using the data as part of the management information they use to manage Cackling Canada Geese. When I went up there it was a very interesting time because goose populations in the pacific flyway were at their lowest level in history. They managed them using winter ground counts. In the mid 1960s the winter counts of Cackling Canada Geese were over a million birds. In the year that I got up there, 1982, that count had dropped to forty-five thousand. It was a subsistence species for Upik Eskimos. When I got there they would egg nests every spring. They would drive geese into traps. Even today, they still mostly live a subsistence lifestyle. It was a particularly satisfying because people’s lives, essentially, depended on our management of these geese. It was very satisfying to participate in a program that improved the information to manage the population. And over the time I was there for then years, the population went from the forty-five thousand estimates to over a quarter of a million. Now, I think it’s fully recovered. I am not sure what the most recent estimates are.
DR. MADISON: That’s great! What was it like, flying in Alaska?
MR. BUTLER: It was very enjoyable. Even now, in the lower 48 flying is a much more complicated situation from the standpoint of airspace, and just rules and regulations. In Alaska, it’s still…well here’s a good example. When I moved from Alaska down here, flying even in the Washington, D. C. area, I was used to flying in Alaska where it’s not exactly by the seat of your pants, but you learn to fly by the terrain; the rivers, the mountains and it was much tougher down here. When you look down on the ground here, all you see is highways and towns. It took me anyway, a much longer period of time to get used to it. I had to start flying by instruments in the D. C. area! It was hard to tell where you were, and you had to be very careful that you were where you needed to be, particularly after September 11, 2001. One that was really dramatic…there are no power lines in Alaska. We fly at 150 feet. We fly along rivers. In Alaska, there was one power line that I became aware of. It was down by Homer. I actually flew under it without knowing it! It was up the side of the hill about 500 feet. You just never think of power lines there. Here, it’s like your mindset has to be, “There IS a power line, everywhere you fly!” It’s the same as there is always a car in my rearview mirror down here. If you change lanes, you might expect for one to be there. That was a different mindset. It makes the flying less enjoyable. You could really concentrate on flying the country you were in. Here you have to be aware; there is much more danger from other aircraft. So the flying in Alaska was truly enjoyable.
DR. MADISON: What was the work like when you became Aviation Manager?
MR. BUTLER: It was totally different in a sense. I mean, as a pilot/biologist one of the attractions other than the flying, is that you are very autonomous. This is to the extent that I can’t think of any other job in the government that offers you that kind of autonomy and ability to make your own decisions. When you move into a position like the National Aviation Manager, there are many more things…the decisions you have to make and the people you have to deal with, it’s a little more political. And while I have enjoyed it, nothing was more enjoyable that the pilot/biologist position that I had in Alaska. But I’ve been able to maintain…and it’s fortunate that FWS allowed me to continue to function as a pilot/biologist while assuming the management responsibilities of the National Aviation Manager. That has made the job that much more enjoyable. There are some aspects of this job, like; I’ve been intimately involved in trying to get a new survey airplane. That’s been a very satisfying part of this job. If you can successfully do that, you will have made a contribution that benefits the Service and all of the other people that are flying the surveys. That’s been the satisfying part of it.
DR. MADISON: How have the planes changed since you started?
MR. BUTLER: Interesting enough, the planes haven’t changed so much as the equipment, or the electronic; GPS type capabilities that are now available. When I first went to Alaska, even in my twenty-five year career, it’s a good change. In Alaska there weren’t a lot of aides to navigation. When I first went up there, you learned the terrain and you flew based on your knowledge of the area. There were a few ADS stations on the coast. If you can imagine, you fly from Anchorage across the Alaska Range west, it’s about 430 miles to Bethel. And it’s another 120 miles when you are on the Bering Sea. Go another 400 miles and you’re in Russia! There were a couple of ADS stations where you could get bearing off of and they could help you find where you were. About that time Loran, which is was actually used to navigate boats came into vogue. It really enabled us. Just think about it; it that location at the mouth of the Yukon River, 500 miles from the nearest city of any size, we were able to use Loran-C to accurately fly transect lines. One of the problems with Loran however, was that the reception change. There was a 230-mile change in latitude on that coast. The error would increase in this Loran system so that when you were halfway through your survey, all of a sudden you might be a mile or two off. But, it was a quantum leap, compared to what we did before. The early guys flew their transect lines basically by lining up with mountains and things they could see. I don’t know, to this day, how they did it. When you get lost at 150 feet, or if at least, you lose track of your transect line you’ve got to climb up to 5,000 feet find yourself and go back down. With the advent of GPS you are able to fly to with several hundred meters of accuracy in a place as remote as the Yukon Delta. It’s revolutionized the quality of information you can collect from an airplane. When you have guys like Jack Hodges who have written computer programs, where the computer is hooked up to your GPS and your intercom system. In real time you record observations; species and group size and get a coordinate, a position of that observation that’s accurate with 100 meters. One of the things we did on the Yukon Delta; the native lands were part of the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act. Even within this FWS, which was about nineteen million acres, which by the way, is about the size of Pennsylvania, there were only about 13 staff people. One of the things that the new technology allowed us to do was to get really accurate distributions of these species that were really important to the native communities. We could look at what the relative importance of these native lands to the various species, versus the refuge lands. It was really important information to the natives and to us, to help manage those populations. They’ve started to incorporate that into the North American Breeding Pair survey. They are starting to use the point locations to relate… if you think about thousands of miles of basically featureless terrain, how do you relate the distribution of observations from the air to various habitats? The early way was that you had sixteen-mile segments. If the smallest unit of accuracy is a sixteen-mile segment, it’s hard to relate it to the highly accurate satellite habitat maps. But now that we have this capability to do accurate point locations you can really start using aerial surveys. You get highly detailed maps over thousands of miles of featureless terrain that can be compared to satellite habitat. It’s revolutionary, no doubt about it.
DR. MADISON: Yeah, this has come up again and again; Jack Hodges and some of the technological changes. Let me ask you another question. I ask it of all pilots. [End of side A] ….any close calls when you were a pilot?
MR. BUTLER: Well, I don’t know if I’ve had…I had one engine failure in my career. It was a pretty interesting story. It was shortly after I went to Alaska that I started flying a standard Beaver, which was a radial engine and a very good airplane. I had several situations where the engine began to run rough. I always had enough altitude that before we had to do an emergency landing, we got it going again. I went back to our maintenance people and we’d talk about it. They would recommend that I do certain things, and I kept trying to do that. But nothing seemed to work. Finally, I was taking off from a field camp at a place that was called Konogiak. It’s about 120 miles west of Bethel. It’s about a 2,500-foot long lake. I initiated the takeoff. We got about 300 feet in the air and the engine quit again. That time we weren’t high enough and we couldn’t restart the engine. Fortunately, there was a slough right below me. It was basically just a straightforward emergency landing. In other words, I landed in the slough and taxied back. But this time I said, “Hey, I’m not flying this plane again until you guys figure out what’s wrong with it!” It turned out to be a kind of insidious thing that was kind of difficult to detect. The magnetos had gotten wet at some point in the past and it resulted in an intermittent loss of power. You couldn’t, even though they had me…you do power checks before takeoff. We did power checks and never detected anything. What the rust did was that somehow intermittently short out the points in the magneto. When that happened the engine ran rough. When the engine ran rough it would plug up the spark plugs. As long as it happened to you and your were 5000 feet in the air, by the time you descended a little bit, you could get the engine going again. But when it happened at 300 feet, you couldn’t. So that was…it wasn’t really a close call, it actually helped my confidence. I realized, ‘Hey, you had an engine failure and you were able to handle the emergency. Nothing happened to you or the people with you, or the airplane.’ So from that standpoint it was a good learning experience.
DR. MADISON: Speaking of learning, and as someone who has been in the field a long time, what advice would you pass on to people just entering as pilot/biologists?
MR. BUTLER: I have a lot of young and aspiring people. I guess the advice I have for them is what you put into mind is going to become your experience. If you really want one of these jobs, put it into your mind. Write down your goals, and then every action you take after that will take you one step further to getting one of these positions. I really think it’s true. There are not that many people who have the interest and ultimately get the experience required. If you really want it, and you put it in your mind, you can get it. I have seen people do it. John Solberg is a good example. He got on permanently with the government as a Secretary in Alaska. He always used to talk to me about becoming a pilot biologist. After getting on permanent, he got his own pilot’s license and ultimately became a pilot/biologist. It’s a wonderful career, and like I say, if you really want it, it’s there to be had.
DR. MADISON: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned in your career?
MR. BUTLER: I guess, I mean it’s to really enjoy what you’re doing. I mean, really appreciate it. When I left Alaska…I can remember with I first went up there and I first got the job it was a situation where, and it’s rare in my life when I’ve felt this, I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and go to work. You need to cherish that kind of feeling because they don’t last that long. I would just remind that once you’ve achieved it, enjoy every minute while you’re doing it. We are in one of the few jobs, and I think the people that have them truly love the work. It’s something that we need to appreciate.
DR. MADISON: That’s great! Your thirty minutes are up! It goes really fast doesn’t it
K. Duane Norman
No full textK. Duane Norman oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
While in college, Mr. Norman served as a student aide at Bear River National Wildlife Refuge working on the botulism research program with Dr. Wayne Jensen. Upon graduation he went to work in Woodsville, Massachusetts as a fisheries research biologist. In refuges, he would take up flying while working with the Wetlands Acquisition Program in North Dakota. Mr. Norman would retire as Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program.
Organization: FWS
Name: K. Duane Norman
Years: 1956-1983
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Biography, Biologists (USFWS), Employees (USFWS), History, Wetlands, Waterfowl, Wildlife refuges, Aircraft, Aviation, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge, Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Frank Bellrose1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: K. Duane Norman
Date of Interview: April 19, 2006
Location of Interview: Shepherdstown, WV
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 27
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Student aide at Bear River National Wildlife working on botulism research project; Fisheries Research Biologist at in Woodsville, Massachusetts; Assistant Manager at Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge; Refuge Manager at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Illinois; Wildlife Biologist working on Wetlands Acquisition Program; worked on Refuge Acquisition Program in Atlanta; Flyway Biologist in Washington D.C.; Pacific Flyway Biologist in Portland; Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program, from Portland.
Colleagues: Dr.Wayne Jensen, Frank Bellrose, John Koerner
Brief Summary of Interview: While in college, Mr. Norman served as a student aide at Bear River National Wildlife refuge working on the botulism research program with Dr. Wayne Jensen and upon graduation went to work in Woodsville, Massachusetts as a fisheries research biologist. He then moved on into refuges and would take up flying while working with the Wetlands Acquisition Program in North Dakota. He would make serval more moves before retiring as Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program. He shares several stories of his time flying and a memory of Frank Bellrose, whom he felt was interesting to work with.
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Mark: It is April 19th, 2006 and we are at the National Conservation Training Center with Duane Norman doing an oral history. And the other person in the room is Mark Madison. And Duane we usually start with the first question, how did you come to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
Duane: How’d I come to work?
Mark: Yeah.
Duane: Man that was about the only place you could be [unintelligible].
Mark: [laughing] What was your background before you came to work for Fish and Wildlife Service?
Duane: You mean during my school time?
Mark: Yeah, what you studied?
Duane: I went to what is now called Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which happened to be my hometown, and took up game management; graduated in ’56. And before that, the year before I worked as a student aide on Bear River Refuge.
Mark: Oh yeah, Utah.
Duane: Yeah, with Wayne Jensen working on the botulism program, research program. And then…
Mark: What year would that have been?
Duane: 1955.
Mark: ’55 okay.
Duane: And in ’56 I graduated with a degree in game management. And the only job available was with Public Health in Denver, or, and then I was offered the fisheries research biologist in Woodsville, Massachusetts which I took.
Mark: Good choice; Cape Cod’s nice.
Duane: Yeah. I worked with the sea scaup research. I was the first one to observe the spawning of the sea scaup in the wild, which is pure luck I guess.
Mark: So how the heck did you go from fisheries to migratory waterfowl?
Duane: Well I wasn’t a very good sailor. We had the Albatross, which is…
Mark: Research Vessel.
Duane: …research vessel, long and narrow like a sea [unintelligible]. Of course we were on eight hour shifts, more or less, at sea anchored out, you know.
Mark: Right.
Duane: And sit there and just roll and roll and roll.
Mark: So you thought planes would be more comfortable.
Duane: I said, no I’ve got to get out of this. So I talked to, I don’t know who it was, Salyer I think, and I wrote a letter to him in D.C. asking for any opening in refuges.
Mark: Right.
Duane: And Forest Carpenter got a hold of me and asked me if I would go out to 3
Sand Lake Refuge in Columbia, South Dakota. “You bet!” So I was assistant manager there for roughly a year and a half. And then I went to Chautauqua, you know in Havana, Illinois as the refuge manager.
Mark: I didn’t know we had a refuge called Chautauqua.
Duane: Oh yeah.
Mark: In Illinois?
Duane: Yeah, it’s right on the Illinois River, the Illinois Natural History Research Center is there, with Frank Bellrose; I worked with Frank.
Mark: Okay. So how long were you at Chautauqua?
Duane: Four years. Then Harvey Nelson called me and he says, “How would you like to go to North Dakota as a wildlife biologist?” Well that wasn’t very keen, I wanted to stay in management, but I went on up there to work in the Wetlands Acquisition Program. And at that time I took up flying; could see the land and the potholes much better, so I got my private license up there. And transferred down to Atlanta in the Refuge Acquisition Program and that was more or less a dead end; they weren’t acquiring any refuges, or adding to any of them, so. Don Smith, who took Fred Glover’s place, asked me if I wanted to come up there and be flyway biologist; jumped to the fact.
Mark: You had enough of Atlanta.
Duane: Yeah, went up there and that’s where it all started.
Mark: So where was up there?
Duane: Washington D.C.
Mark: Washington D.C. Interior Building, yeah.
Duane: I was there four years, and in 1968 I got married and moved to Portland and was the Pacific Flyway biologist there.
Mark: So you worked in at least three of the flyways.
Duane: Oh yeah, yeah. And then let’s see, 1977 I was made Chief of the Waterfowl Population Surveys Program, which I served in until I was forced into retirement in 1983.
Mark: Did that mean going back to D.C. or did you do that from Portland?
Duane: Well they tried to get me back to D.C. and I refused to go, so they relented I guess; ‘cause they had to advertise twice to people, they were trying to get people to go to Washington. I said, I’d been there, done that, I don’t need to come back here.
Mark: So what was your job as Chief of Waterfowl Surveys?
Duane: Well mainly administrating people, and keeping track of funds and so forth and making assignments to various biologists and so forth. And then getting the waterfowl banding program, running that which we employee about 30 students; we didn’t employee them really, we paid GS 2, I guess I call it, wages and we’d have to supervise them. But generally the flyway biologists were easy to take care 4
of, satisfy, except there was not; never had enough money to do things, and that was always a big stumbling block.
Mark: Are there some memorable instances in your career you care to share?
Duane: My flying career you mean?
Mark: Yeah, let’s talk about your flying career, ‘cause you’ve got a big plane beyond you.
[Laughing]
Duane: Well I, let’s see the first airplane I had was a hand me down 180 from Horton Jensen. It was a good airplane except the radios the in it weren’t the best. The only experience I had with that aircraft that was bad, I was flying IFR back to Washington D.C. and I was above the clouds and so forth in the clear and my radios went out. And I had no navigation at all and the only emergency radio I had was way in the back in the baggage compartment, so I had to keep rolling the trim ahead on it trying to get back there, and it’s start up, roll the trim some more. I finally got to it and I got into Fort Wayne, Indiana I guess and they said, after I landed there they said they could tell I was desperate. But I got the radios fixed and went on in to Washington. So with the 210 up at Edmonton Industrial Airport, which is an airport right downtown Edmonton, buildings all around. Took off out of there and blew a jug on the engine, and my heart sank, we’re going to crash. Well my observer John Koerner, I believe it was, turned white and [unintelligible] turned downwind and landed just fine.
Mark: In downtown Edmonton.
Duane: We made it back to the airport.
Mark: Did you have any other incidents when you were a pilot?
Duane: Well yeah, in 712, which was a 206 Amphib floats; well a couple experiences with that one. Just before the surveys one year I fueled the airplane full, it was an airplane I didn’t fly commonly all the time; full of fuel and loaded the observer on and I went out west of Edmonton and there’s a big lake out there, said, “Well we’ll land here and see how it performs.” Well we taxied around a little bit and went to take off, the darn thing would not get in the air; kept running out of space. And we did several attempts, you know, back and forth trying to make waves and so forth that would help us into the air without success. And I said, “John there’s only one way we’re going to get this out of here and that’s if we lighten the load.” So I taxied put pretty close to shore and said, “Get out.” [chuckled] So he got out and I made a couple of runs and was able to get it off the water, and then I came back in a 180 and landed in the field out there and picked him up there. So yeah, the other incident was with the same 206 flying just at the edge of the bush in northern Alberta, going over to the Coal Lake restricted area, military area. And of course we always flew up to almost tree top level so never really bothered about calling people when we flew through the restricted area. And anyhow we were right on the very edge of it anyway, but all a sudden the engine goes [makes noise]. And my gosh, I said “Well something has to be wrong.” I switched tanks and the engine died, switched it back again and it starts 5
sparking and I said, “We’ve got to land, or we’re going in the trees.” So I called Coal Lake tower and declared an emergency and they cleared us to land there; they were very nice to us and refueled us. It turned it out the filter, the gas filter caps were worn out and were venting fuel. And so I spent, I supposed a year’s time explaining that, why I was in the restricted area and why it was necessary to land there. So that’s basically it.
Mark: Any memorable people you worked with?
Duane: Frank Bellrose.
Mark: Tell us about Frank.
Duane: Well he was a, he worked with the wood duck. And every year when I was at Chautauqua, he would say, “Well I’m going to finish my book on the wood duck.” As far as I know, he never did finish it, but he kept finding new things in research with it. He was a very interesting fellow to work with.
Mark: Anybody else you worked with that sticks with you.
Duane: No.
Mark: Well anything else you’d like to recount from your career?
Duane: Not really I guess.
Mark: [laughing] Well then we’re done.
End of interview
Paul Camp
No full textPaul Camp, former Chief of Engineering and (as of 2006) Special Assistant to the Chief of Business Management and Operations, has been involved with the building of the National Conservation Training Center since the very beginning and talks about the history of the project.
Organization: FWS
Name: Paul Camp
Years:
Program: HQ-Special Asst. to the Chief of BMO
History, Buildings, facilities and structures, Planning, National Conservation Training Center1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Paul Camp
Date of Interview: November 15, 2006
Location of Interview: Shepherdstown, WV
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Brief Summary of Interview: Paul Camp, former Chief of Engineering and now (as of 2006) Special Assistant to the Chief of Business Management and Operations, has been involved with the building of the National Conservation Training Center since the very beginning and talks about the history of the project. He discusses traveling around West Virginia looking for sites, the first sight chosen, and finally finding the Hendrix property. He talks about what type of design they would use, where they got their inspiration from, the architectural group used, how many buildings there would be, where traffic would access the site, where people would walk and how far, the physical location of buildings, engineering challenges, and design elements of the buildings along with other features on the property such as the bridge. Paul also discusses what things he would have done differently including the Division of Education offices and the walkway in front Instructional West. He felt that they had a great team working on this project including Rick Lemon and his staff, the engineers, and the architect. This project has spanned over a 17-year period for Paul and he is very proud to have been able to work on it.
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Mark: Okay today is November 15, 2006. We’re in Shepherdstown, WV and we’re doing an oral history with Paul Camp about the history of the National Conservation Training Center, and the interviewer is Mark Madison. Paul thanks for agreeing to do this.
Paul: Glad to be here.
Mark: Just for the oral history, why don’t you spell your name and give us your title.
Paul: Paul Camp, CAMP, I’m former Chief of Engineering now Special Assistant to the Chief of Business Management and Operations.
Mark: Okay. And why don’t we start at the beginning, how did you first become involved with the NCTC project?
Paul: Mark, my association with this project spans almost 17 years. I was fortunate enough to involved in the project from the very beginning, in fact I recall touring some of the early sites that the Fish and Wildlife Service was considering with Bill Hartwig then the Chief of the Reality Division. And Bill and I scoured the West Virginia area for suitable sites why back in 1989 and 1990, first looking for properties that would be suitable for the Training Center as it was then envisioned. From that very early beginning up until today, I’ve been associated with this project. As you know we’re still putting the final touches on the last phase of work here and that’s the construction of a municipal water supply line that will eventually connect the facility to the cooperation of Shepherdstown and, at least as it stands right now, it’s the last piece work that remains to be done.
Mark: Where were some of the earlier sites that were purposed and not chosen?
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Paul: Some of the, some of the sites were fairly close, five to ten miles away and then actually one site that we ended up purchasing for the Training Center and actually was more than a training center at that time, was, it was envisioned that it would be a training center and also an educational center and a visitor center and much grander than simply a training center. But the Fish and Wildlife Service went and actually purchased a piece of property, several hundred acres along the Shenandoah River, not too far from Harpers Ferry. It was referred to as the quarry site and in fact had a great deal of potential but after we made the purchase it ended up being cost prohibitive to develop that site and turn it into what we wanted to, so eventually the Service disposed of the property, but that was, that was one of our leading contenders and more than our leading contender it was, it was our preferred site at one time. Between Harpers Ferry and Martinsville, we looked at three or four different properties that all had the potential in terms of size and physical characteristics. When the Service came across the Hendrix property, though, I think everybody who was associated with the project fell in love with it. The biggest concern was its remoteness and the distance associated with this site and Dulles Airport is under the, under the understanding that most of our people would be flying in from distant areas. But the advantages of the site, the size, the physical characteristics, the proximity to the Potomac River far outweighed any concerns and I believe it was unanimously accepted as the preferred site and from there we went into negotiations with the Hendrix family and, and here we are.
Mark: What did the site look like when you first saw it? Obviously it’s quite different today…
Paul: It is…
Mark: …ten years later.
Paul: …it was beautiful then as it is now, just pristine, undisturbed, you know obviously portions of this site had been pastured and used some, some pieces of the property had been logged but overall it had a very pristine character to it, and very, very little physical 4
man caused disturbance. It was a site that just immediately lended itself to this kind of adaptive use, and again one of the reasons why everybody, it was almost a no-brainer once people came out here, said that it would be prefect for what we had contemplated at that time.
Mark: Okay once you find the site, what’s the next step then?
Paul: Well one of the first things we did after we settled on the site was to assemble a team. And the Division of Engineering at the time, located in Denver, Colorado, had about 60 or 70 employees at the time; engineers, architects, landscape architects, planners, administrative people. We knew that the Division of Engineering would be a key part of the team but we needed other pieces and one of the first things we did was to go out and do, pretty much, a nationwide search for competent, capable, architecture, engineering firms that had experience in this type of design work. We ended up selecting a firm that was in the Washington D.C. area, Keyes Condon Florance, and recruited them and signed them over, obviously this took months to do maybe even up to a year to finally secure their services, but we in fact did acquire their services and brought them in as the key principle design entity for the facility. In addition to that, of course, the NCTC staff, Rick Lemon as the principle point of contact representing the customer, if you will at this point, assembled a team himself to make sure that all of the needs of the Service for this type of facility would be included in the early decision making of the, the project, so that was the first thing we did. Once the team was established then it was pretty much a standard routine type of a process in terms of inventorying the site and, and conducting exhaustive studies on topography, vegetation, wildlife, other physical characteristics, soils and other, other existing features of the site, you know once we had that information the fun really started and we began working on design concepts. It was a fascinating period where anything, any possibility was on the table, nothing was ruled out, a lot of thinking outside the box and whether we wanted one building, one massive building or numerous small buildings, whether we located the buildings up high on the ridge or down low in the wooded bottoms; it was just a very creative energy filled time for all of us that were associated with the project and, and just a very stimulating time in the, in the 5
process. It didn’t take us long in that design process to quickly figure out that we wanted a design that respected the land and respected the character of this site and very early in the design process, Mark, we decided that a large building dominating the site would not work here. And we felt like, especially because of the conservation orientation and the conservation orientation of the cliental that would be visiting and using this site, that we wanted to get people out onto the landscape. And so the way that all started to begin to translate into design elements is numerous smaller buildings spread throughout a common green area with a trail system connecting all those parts and pieces and, you know once we got to that design theme, then it was a matter of laying that concept onto the ground and, you know, we started looking at where buildings might best be located and how far people would walk and where to put cars, for instance, and moving vehicular traffic to the perimeter of the site and allowing people to interact and walk in and amongst the, the paved paths and vegetated areas and allow people the opportunity to decompress in between classes and to move between dining facility and education facility and overnight accommodations and allowing people to have a little outdoor experience in between those activities, daily activities. It was a fascinating time and the one that was just filled with numerous different concepts and ideas and just, just an incredible time in terms of the development of this site.
Mark: Now as you were thinking about the smaller buildings, were you also thinking about the aesthetics of them also or did this come later?
Paul: I think there were a number of things that were happening at the same time and while we were looking at and contemplating the physical location of buildings, we were also beginning to develop a, an architectural theme, if you will. And again a glass and brick kind of downtown architectural theme was, was, I don’t think even considered for a moment. We looked at rustic lodge theme, log cabin, national park kind of theme and farm house, I mean I think those were three or four of the initial thematic concepts that we looked at early on and again not too far into the process, we started traveling around the countryside, the local area and were so impressed with the native architectural of some of the farm buildings and barns and so on is, we quickly moved towards that as our 6
architectural theme. Simple structures, stone, brick, standing seam roofs, rich colors, those were, those were some of the design elements that the team moved to and, and began to explore and refine without, without being too cute and too rustic and so on; you see the way it’s been translated onto the site.
Mark: What were some of the greater engineering challenges of this particular site?
Paul: There were, there were several, there may be many but, but clearly the soil type, the Karst topography that we have here was a challenge. We were trying to balance the location of buildings onto the site with cost considerations and trying to avoid a lot of blasting and a lot of earth moving and again to respect the site. I would say that the substrate and the soil types and the close proximity to rock to the surface was a huge challenge in terms of locating buildings and conducting our final engineering designs. Another was the maintaining this whole concept of trying to keep vehicular traffic on the periphery of this site, I mean that required careful location of buildings and trying to find the right balance between having our, our residence walk a certain distance, not too far but far enough to where there would be an opportunity to experience the outdoors in between classes and breaks and things like that. Moving the vehicles to the periphery required a little bit more road surfacing and parking areas that if you had all of the, all of the traffic come into a main multi-story parking garage, for instance, I think that, from a design standpoint, that would have been much easier. This was a little bit more challenging to be delicate but yet still keep the vehicles and pedestrian traffic separated. Those, those were clearly two challenges that, that we had during the design phase of the project. I guess the third was trying to maintain a, a concept that respected our initial concerns with regard to sustainable designs and low costs designs overtime and make that work within our budget. We were very concerned that we did not want to build a facility here that required a major remodel and freshening up and updating 15 or 20 years into it’s long life. We designed and used concepts, design concepts and materials and just an overall approach that we felt would maintain this facility over many years, 30 or 40 years without a major freshening up. We chose oak, hardwoods, brick surfacing, split-face block, standing seam metal, and material that did perform well over time and the 7
evidence is, is pretty evident that we succeeded in that area here 10 years, almost 10 years into, following it’s opening. The materials and the surfacing and the performance of the buildings and construction, I think, looks as every bit as good as it did in day one; that was a big challenge to find that right balance. And then again costs, of course you know this, this facility was by far the most costly construction project in the history of the Fish and Wildlife Service but again if you look at its intended use and how its performed over time, I think most people would say it was worth every penny.
Mark: I would but I’m biased. What about a couple other interesting aspects, you already alluded to the parking which strikes a lot of people, they’re not use to periphery parking; that’s really (unintelligible). Another interesting aspect that people comment on a lot is the bridge connecting the Commons to I-East. How did you guys choose to do something, you could of actually veered a pathway, which we have around…
Paul: We could have and I think, Mark, at one point we were looking for some strong design elements. One is the common, the green area, the forested green area that the dormitories, the Commons, and the instructional buildings are, are centered around. But we were looking for another architectural element that would help unite and define the major core, core area of the facility. And clearly one, one option was to steer people around that ravine and I think during one of our many design charrettes, we felt as though there was an opportunity to really strengthen the connection between the Commons and the rest of the campus and to do so because they’re somewhat on a straight line orientation along the ridge was to connect them with the bridge. I think most people feel that was successful in terms of tying those two elements, the Instructional and the Commons, together with the bridge. I don’t think a circuitous path that went down into the bottoms and came up the other side would have, would have accomplished the same. Certainly another interesting design element is the auditorium and the reception; I mean we wanted that to be a, have a suburb first impression. We wanted people to be impressed when they opened the double doors to the reception area and kind of be proud and impressed with this home of the Fish and Wildlife Service that we created. Again I think we accomplished when, you know when you first walk into the reception area and see the 8
commanding view and the impressive size of the foyer and the auditorium, it’s, it’s something that takes peoples breath away.
Mark: Yeah, it’s impressive externally and interiorly.
Paul: Indeed.
Mark: Was the plan always, in the entry building, to have a museum in the center of the (unintelligible)?
Paul: We—at one time, as I recall, the museum did not have as immediate proximity to the reception. I believe at one time we even had the museum in a separate building. And because of the message, messages that are included in the museum we felt over time that it needed to be strongly tied to the reception area and, and the place that virtually everybody comes to when they, they visit the facility for the first time. And so there’s no missing the museum and there’s no missing the message and the richness of the history and the stories that are told in the museum, it’s right there, you just, you can’t bypass it. And so that, that ended up being, I think, a good decision to have it as close to the, kind of the center of focus there for the entire facility.
Mark: Another unique design aspect here is the daycare center. I hazard to say the Fish and Wildlife Service probably has not built, or had not built a daycare center previous. So what challenges did that bring?
Paul: I don’t think we, I don’t think we had and up until we built this one and I don’t think we’ve built any others. You know the biggest, the biggest challenge with, with the daycare facility, as I recall is, is how much, how big, where it should be, how close; there were a lot of decisions that we made that, at least initially, we were not sure of. What was the demand going to be, how many of our visitors, how many of our employees would be using that facility and, you know, we tried to enlist the, the expertise of some of the best, best architects and designers that we could find. And, and I think we came close 9
to hitting the mark there, but that was, that was a lot of estimating and guess work involved in that facility, again principality because we’ve never done one of those before and I don’t think that’s, that’s a real exact science.
Mark: We’re still working on it.
Paul: We’re still working on refining that, aren’t we?
Mark: Which we talked about earlier…
Paul: Yes.
Mark: …with Steve. Another design element that, that I recognized from coming from academia, is our classrooms have an extraordinary number of windows compared to any other place I’ve been or taught in. What was the decision behind that?
Paul: I’ve, I’ve, well first of all, I guess, in terms of whether that’s the right thing to do or not in a classroom, we probably debated that more than any other design element. And I think again because of the conservation orientation and our mission here, we felt a strong need to connect to the outdoors and we felt a lot of our Fish and Wildlife Service employees would be uncomfortable in classrooms that were windowless. The concern and I guess the design challenge there was how do we close off those openings to the outside when we had audiovisual equipment and other activities going on that required a real focus on the front of the room, for instance. And we accomplished that through some pretty high tech window coverings that, you know, room darkening, easy to use, that type of thing, so we felt as though we had that concern addressed, but I think, I think the, a couple things. Number one, we wanted to make sure, consisted with our exterior design theme, that we had the right look and feel in terms of, of voids and solids, enough windows to make these buildings look light on the land, not too heavy, not too massive. The, from the inside, again, we wanted that connection; we wanted people to be able to not feel claustrophobic and hemmed in. And again, you know recognizing that a lot of 10
our people are, are in the field most of the day, we wanted, we wanted there to be a comfort level there and a connection with the outdoors.
Mark: Another striking element, speaking of the instructional buildings, is all our offices are hidden. I mean when I first came here it’s like where are the offices; they’re all on the second floor basically with the main floors devoted to instructions. Who, where did that idea emerge from?
Paul: I believe the, the rational for that was to have instructors in close proximity to the areas and the people that they would be interacting with. It forced our instructors to interact with, with the students at breaks, whether they were teaching the class that a certain group of students were there visiting the center or not, it would cause that interaction to occur on a daily basis. Our instructors don’t forget who the students are and don’t lose touch with the students because they’re simply one floor separated as oppose to being two buildings away, a quarter mile away or whatever. We wanted that connection but yet we didn’t want the constant buzz associated with the students using the facility to detract from and distract the teachers from, you know, their preparations and work. So what we, what we ended up doing is, is simply having one floor of separation and still allowing an easy connection and interaction to occur. I guess the other thing that it afforded is, is to have most of the instructors in an area with a lot of light, a lot of windows, a lot of access and opportunity to have the outdoors close by.
Mark: Moving off of the instructional buildings, the lodges are fairly interesting because there’s a large commons area and where did that come, you said that you traveled around and got designed elements from, from other structures?
Paul: Yes. The lodges, the lodges were an interesting and kind of fascinating design opportunity. We wanted; we knew that from the standpoint of being economical that we couldn’t have two-dozen lodges with few rooms in each lodge. We knew that we had to be somewhere in the, the 40 to 70 units per lodge range in order to be economical in terms of our construction costs. At the same time we didn’t want to feel like you’re in a 11
big commercial Hilton Hotel or Marriott or whatever it might be, so we tried to have the lodges flow along the landscape. If you know, if you notice that none of them are all perfectly on one floor, they, they grace the site and the follow the contours of the site; there’s a lot of exterior variation in terms of little alc
Albert Novara
No full textAlbert Novara oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
Albert Novara joined the federal government as a flyways biologist conducting aerial surveys. He flew in Canada, Mexico, North Dakota and the Arctic.
Organization: FWS
Name: Albert Novara
Years:
Program: Refuges
Keywords: History, Biography, Aircraft, Biologists (USFWS), Waterfowl, Surveying, Photography, Wetland restoration, Employees (USFWS), Patuxent Research RefugeORAL HISTORY
Of
Albert Novara
(Retired)
Interviewed by
Mark Madison
On April 19,2000
Oral History Program
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
National Conservation Training Center
Shepherdstown, West VirginiaOral History – Albert Novara
Location:
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
1
(There are two interviewers. The second person is not identified. For simplicity, MM will be identified as the interviewer in this transcript regardless of which one is talking.)
MM: The other person in the room is Mark Madison. And we’re doing an oral history. All right, we’re taping, good?
MM: Al, usually our first question is what did you do before you came to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
AN: I was employed by the Illinois Department of Conservation: the name of which later was changed to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
MM: All right.
AN: Also while working for the IDNR I held the positions of: Federal Aid Coordinator, District Wildlife Manager, and my last position with IDNR was Assistant Land Manager in charge of wildlife and waterfowl management areas.
MM: I have been calling you Al because that is on your resume.
AN: That’s okay, my full name is Albert.
MM: Oh okay. I’m trying to read this.
AN: You can’t read it, huh? Okay.
MM: All right, and then what happened after that?
AN: We’ll I got to the point where early in my state career the administrative aspects of my job was not my “cup of tea”, I longed to return to the field where I could work in waterfowl management. It was during the summer of 1978 that a position came open with the federal government for a Flyway Biologist (airplane pilot). I applied for the position, was interviewed by Ross Hanson and Duane Norman and selected for the position. Due to previous commitments with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, I was not able enter federal service until early 1979.
MM: And what year would this have been?
AN: That would have been ’79, following when I was first selected in ‘78. And my first assignment… do you want me to go into the… what I did?
MM: Yes. Oral History – Albert Novara
Location:
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
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AN Okay. My first assignment was working with Bill Larned in the section of waterfowl populations surveys in southern Manitoba.
MM: Okay.
AN: Learning the ins and outs of aerial surveying, it was a very, very interesting time of my career, learning a lot of things. And, the most interesting thing that I experienced was the expanse of northern habitat types, all of things that I had read, and my formal education, and growing up and the stories that I had heard, to see this magnificent country firsthand was just almost overwhelming to me. I just couldn’t believe that they were paying me to do it.
MM: Well, what did it look like, for those of us who’ve never been in Manitoba?
AN: Oh, it was just beautiful. I was up there in the spring and everything is just coming alive; you see a lot of birds and… just the expanse of the habitat. I mean, it just seems like it goes on forever, and then seeing the demarcations in the habitat as you go north. I mean, that was just very striking to me.
MM: What type of plane were you flying back then?
AN: Back then I… let’s see, it was a Cessna 185.
MM: Okay.
AN: And that was my first experience with a tail dragger, so it took a little bit of adjusting to, because I learned to fly on a tricycle-type plane.
MM: How do you adjust to that?
AN: Well, it’s difficult, but I did not have too much trouble.
MM: Is it hard to learn how to take off with a tail dragger?
AN: No. The landing is a little bit more critical, but the takeoffs weren’t too bad, but the landings got a little tricky. And then for the rest of my career, usually we would be paired up, like when I flew with Doug Benning in Mexico, it was all tail dragger time. So, you get used to it, but it is a little bit difficult at times.
MM: What happened after Manitoba?
AN: Okay. Came back and I was stationed at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. That’s where all of the trainees were stationed at that time. Some of them, like Oral History – Albert Novara
Location:
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
3
Doug, I think, well they were out there briefly, and then we were assigned to a duty station. And then, you more or less stayed there in training until one of these older fellows retired or left the station, so that’s what happened in North Dakota.
MM: So you were like a vice president?
AN: Yes, about as important as the vice president.
MM: You were like the vice president.
AN: Yes. About as important as a (undecipherable). So then the Jamestown area was open and had survey responsibilities in the central flyway, so my wife and I packed up and we went to North Dakota, which was really different. I had never lived up there. I grew up in southern Illinois. And, we really liked it there. As a flyway biologist in the central flyway, we continued to do surveys in Canada and the central flyway. We worked extensively with the sandhill crane stuff in the spring on the Platte River, in Nebraska. We also were conducting Mexican surveys every year.
MM: What years were these up in the central flyway?
AN: ’80 through ’91.
MM: How were the sandhills doing back then?
AN: Oh, they were great. We pretty much had a good handle on them. They all seemed to congregate on the Platte River in the spring, and at that time we did not have a lot of them outside of our survey area. Now, that’s become quite a problem now. The same survey area, you know, they fly and they (undecipherable) and a lot of them are outside of those traditional areas. So it was very interesting. We were doing a lot of aerial photography and looking at our counting expertise. We would count flocks and we’d end up with about 400,000 birds and then we have the aerial photography. Everything we counted, somebody took a picture of and they were looking at our accuracy. It turned out quite well. I think we were in about the 90% range. Doug Benning did a lot of research to confirm our accuracy. Doug Johnson also did the statistical work that reached the same conclusion.
MM: (Undecipherable) because they were concerned that the (undecipherable, two people talking at once).
AN: Yeah. We knew that there was bias in our aerial surveys, and you were dealing with large numbers.
MM: Right. Oral History – Albert Novara
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Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
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AN: As opposed to the duck-type survey stuff that we did, where you’re online and you don’t only count big numbers like that. So, we’d always have a problem when you’ve got large concentrations, like in some of the wintering counts on Canada Geese and what-have-you, and it is kind of a baseline type thing.
MM: How do you count them? I mean, this is a good question.
AN: Well, I think everybody has their own method of doing it. I had experience in Illinois with flying goose counts, and I would tell people… they would ask me how I did. I would see a flock of birds whether on the ground or in the air and decide whether we’re looking at tens, we’re looking at hundreds, or we’re looking at thousands. And, I used to have a pencil and I knew what 100 birds looked like and I would put on 100 and try to move it 100, you know, like that. And that seemed to work pretty good with me, I mean, on the counts. It’s kinda (undecipherable).
MM: When you were first being trained, how did you learn what 100 looked like?
AN: Well, Jim Voelzer had a publication where they had rice grains on a piece of paper. I kind of studied that to get an idea of estimating numbers; it helped me refine my counting accuracy. Also, on the Canada geese thing, we had three people doing the same thing and you kind of compared notes, although the important thing is being consistent. You don’t want an up and down type of thing. If you consistently count only half of the birds that are there, you can correct for that, but you can’t correct for inconsistency.
MM: Right.
AN: For the (undecipherable, two people talking)…
MM: Well, if you’re consistent you should have a trend too.
AN: Yeah.
MM: The numbers are going up or down.
AN: That’s right.
MM: Even if you’re off a bit.
AN: Yeah. So, anytime you get large numbers of any kind of birds, you run into this bias problem, but I think we got pretty good at arriving at fairly good accurate numbers. Oral History – Albert Novara
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Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
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MM: That’s fascinating.
AN: Yes.
MM: We never asked anybody this question.
AN: Yeah.
MM: We just… people say well, we go out and count.
AN: Yeah. And some people are better than others at it, you know.
MM: Now, when you do the photography, how do they count it? Do they pull it up and count the (undecipherable, two people talking) or something?
AN: Well, we did two different kinds. All of the habitat photography was done with the old World War II K-17 cameras. When fitted into the belly of the airplane, you pushed a button and the camera took hundreds of photos as you go across the habitat. The crane stuff was done with 35mm photography. And, we had a guy in the back and he was taking a picture. You tell him, “This is what I’m counting here”, whether they were in the air or on the ground. And, we had that blown up and the poor secretary had to try to count all of those little dots. And then they would have a frame number and we would have a number assigned to that frame as to what the number was. So, yeah, it was harder for the people interpreting the photos than it was for us, (undecipherable). But the thing is, we’re counting in an airplane, you know, you’re not only counting birds and looking at habitat, you’re flying the airplane and you’re navigating, you know. I mean, you have to stay on these lines that you are flying and that was before they had GPS and all of the modern navigating equipment.
MM: So, obviously (undecipherable, two people talking).
AN: Yeah. So, you know, you’ve got lines drawn on a map and, you know, you’ve got to stay on that to see, you know, you cover the same areas, or that you don’t include more area than what’s in your transect.
MM: So while you are out navigating pre-GPS, are you (undecipherable, two people talking).
AN: Well, I haven’t done too much of the GPS navigating, but that’s all come later, but it’s sure made things a lot easier.
MM: Yeah. Oral History – Albert Novara
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Interviewer: Mark Madison
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MM: So you went all the way down to Mexico?
AN: Oh yeah.
MM: How was that down there?
AN: It was great. It was different and it gave me exposure to the big picture, the habitat. And the culture was different. I mean, dealing with those people, it’s not the same hectic pace that we have in this country and people don’t understand the urgency of doing different things. And, Doug and I handled quite a few. We used to seem to be paired up quite a bit down there and learning the ins and outs of all of these different airfields. But, what I remember about Mexico was the windstorms sometimes down there and the high altitude lakes that had a lot of birds that you wonder what they’re doing there and some of the problems you have administratively. A guy doesn’t get you a permit, and the airport Commandant ruled the roost. You can’t even sit in your airplane unless you get permission and things like that. And a lot of things with the tourists were facilitated with money. Well, we were on government business, we couldn’t do that.
MM: Right.
AN: And, that was a little bit different. And weather, getting good weather reports. A lot of times we’d call back to the states if we could. That was always a hassle, you know, just using the phone, and getting good accurate up-to-date weather reports. And, sometimes the airlines helped us with that. And, when we worked in Mexico, there was like several different groups. We had people that worked on the east coast; that was a crew. We had people working on the west coast; that was a crew. You had people in the interior highlands. So, during my career, I got to work all of the different areas and I especially liked that stuff on the west coast, down to Guatemala and Tapachula. We’d fly from Acapulco all the way down to Tapachula. That was a one-day type survey, and then you came back up through the central highlands, and you see things that just, you never get a chance to see that much habitat and birds and you see peculiarities, like you see canvasbacks in these high altitude lakes.
MM: Yeah.
AN: And we don’t know, you know. Of all the different places that I worked, that to me was the most interesting. I mean, I love the Arctic and I love Canada, but Mexico was interesting.
Oral History – Albert Novara
Location:
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
7
MM: Well, that’s cool.
AN: It really was.
MM: That’s very cool.
AN: Yeah. After I left the section, they have expanded some of the things, you know. Initially when the section was set up, you know, they were going down south as far as Venezuela, you know, to look at things in Central America. Matter of fact, I was hoping that Chuck Glover would talk about the first time they flew in Venezuela. They were going across this big lake and it was quite remote and he says… that they got real low and as they went by this one place where the Indians or locals were, a guy threw a spear at the airplane. Did he bring that up last night?
MM: No, he didn’t.
AN: That’s kinda different. And, I know that when Doug and I were flying in Mexico, sometimes we would see a farmer out there, using a mule or a horse to plow and he would have reins wrapped around him and we would go over a hill and come back and the horse was dragging him across the field and we wondered whatever became of him.
MM: Yeah.
AN: So, that, you know, those count… Some of the things I remember about that.
MM: Did you end your career in the central flyways or did you…?
AN: No. I had always been interested in this harvest survey. You know, I don’t know if you’re familiar with what we call the Wing Bees.
MM: Yes.
AN: Okay. And, I had worked with Sam Carney and I was allowed to go to all of the flyways to work on wings with him, and I really enjoyed working with Sam and he was getting ready to retire, so I came back to Patuxent. I still flew… came back and flew as an observer up in the Arctic with Carl Ferguson, but I took over not the chief of the harvest surveys, but the national Wing Bee coordinator, so I was running the Wing Bees across the country. And, that was a very interesting time for me because it was a time when they started to computerize all of the stuff that we’d done by hand. I mean, we used to get done with the analysis of the wings and we would separate envelopes by state, by county, by age, by sex.
MM: What were you looking for? Oral History – Albert Novara
Location:
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
8
AN: Well, we were looking for a distribution of the kill. We found out a long time ago that hunters couldn’t identify ducks that well. So, we had one survey to determine how many hunters we had, then the other survey, by them sending in a wing, we could tell what the speciation was of the national harvest. And then, also from that, we could look at the age ratios from those wings. We could tell the age and the sex, with about a 95% accuracy, from the wings. So that was pretty interesting.
MM: Yeah.
AN: And, Sam had spent a lot of time with me. I don’t know if you ever knew him, or…
MM: No.
AN: But he set up all of the original Wing Bee procedural type things and through his study and working with the Smithsonian found a lot of different characteristics that people weren’t aware of, as far as determining age and sex from feather analysis and he was kind of the Grand Master at that. So I really, really enjoyed that, and then after a while I had a chance to come back to my roots, southern Illinois, and I took that opportunity and went back there for ten years…no, not ten years, eight years. I got into a program where I was doing a lot of field work. Private land work with farmers and people I wanted to work with, and restoration of wetlands and the restoration of bottom land habitat. Planting of trees and that and working on a joint venture earlier with Ducks Unlimited, the Nature Conservancy, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. At one time, the Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge was the premier joint venture area in the region. So that’s where I finished out my career, but the whole time I was doing that I still had opportunities to go on the special assignments. For example the breeding and production surveys, the Wing Bees, and... They also allowed me to go out to Johnson Island one time for three weeks under the auspices of the Smithsonian; working with ocean birds to discern feather development patterns. And I really enjoyed that, so...
MM: Wing Bee. How are you spelling that?
AN: Wing Bee. It’s a takeoff from the term quilting bee; the old ladies would get together and they would all work on the quilt. They called that a quilting bee. So all of the biologists get together and work on wings. So I call it the Wing Bee.
MM: This is to help the transcriptionist.
Oral History – Albert Novara
Location:
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
9
AN: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It’s a fairly practical program. We have annually looked at close to 100,000 wings, in all four flyways. So you get a good idea as to what the kill is and the age ratios, and this all goes back into understanding populations and setting regulations and, you know, the stuff that you do in Canada, the breeding pair and production surveys are one aspect of this system, this big picture, but there’s other things that enter into it; the banding information and the harvest information.
MM: Yeah. That’s fascinating.
AN: So, a very important component of that.
MM: What were some highlights of your career, things that stick with you?
AN: Well, I had a fairly level career, I don’t…
MM: That’s wild.
AN: No escape from mediocrity in my background. I just think my exposure to a lot of folks. I mean the Glovers and the (undecipherable) and Art Brazda. I’m just fascinated with these folks that I have worked with; some of the people, like Jack Green, were my heroes. And, that made the highlights of what I enjoyed and I look back on and the fact that I survived all of this with no major problems, no accidents. And, that’s kind of a highlight.
MM: Yeah. That it is a highlight, isn’t it? (Undecipherable) your career.
AN: Yeah. Oh yeah. Hey, it was a wonderful career. I would tell my dad what I would do for a living and I’d tell him, “We used to take vacation and do that.” “And they’re paying you.” He couldn’t believe it. I mean, there’s… there’s work to it.
MM: Sure.
AN: I mean, it’s just like any job, I mean, you have things to do, there’s paperwork and I don’t care what you’re doing, you’ve got administrative duties that you have to attend to and the biggest change in that whole flyway type thing has been the computerization, the accuracy of the results, and the fact that if you’re not tied up doing a lot of number correcting, I mean the computer is doing that, you had more time to think and report about habitat, and I think that has been a big, big advantage.
MM: Were they using only computers when you (undecipherable, two people talking).
Oral History – Albert Novara
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Interviewer: Mark Madison
Interview Date 04/19/2000
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AN: No, when I started, absolutely not. We had a tape recorder that was used. And, we’d come back, we’d record everything from the flying surveys. We took data from both the pilot and co-pilot. In addition to all of this, we had to fly the plane and navigate, we had to count the birds and remember what the ground crews were doing. The right-hand observer counted ducks and water, so when you got back to the motel room that night, you had to transcribe all of this, put it on a data form, through special notation, and then you had to summarize all that, okay? So you did all of that and at that time, then there was another form that you used for the summarization for each one of the segments that went into the computer, you know, and you’d check… put the numbers in there and when you got back all of the stuff, it had to be audited and, you know, quality control was such that even though you’d gone over it several times, they’d still find errors.
MM: Right.
AN: You know, on the data. And then it was computerized and then after it was corrected, you’d get a copy back and you came back. There was always a great urgency to get this stuff done because of the regulation process. There were so many days after they published regulations to…
MM: Right.
AN: For public comment and that kind of thing. So we were always kind of under the gun. So, it’s usually a May and July type of thing with those types of surveys. Coming back…
MM: So the computers really helped?
AN: Oh my goodness, yes. Well, it just didn’t make mistakes in addition. You would not think that that would be difficult to do, but when you’re dealing with page after page after page of numbers and the different types of notation, it was quite e
Leroy Sowl
No full textLeroy Sowl oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
Leroy Sowl discusses the various positions he has held in the Service, and the various projects and important events he was involved with, including the Trans-Alaskan Pipe line and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Organization: FWS
Name: Leroy Sowl
Years: 1950's-1980's
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Biography, Aircraft, Biologists (USFWS), Buildings, facilities and structures, Chemical spills, Directors (USFWS), Employees (USFWS), Education, History, International affairs, Islands, Legislation, Man-made disasters, Marine mammals, Military, Motor vehicles, Mountains, Native Americans, Oil Spill, Places (Human-made), Ships, Structures, Supervision, Training, Transportation, Vehicles, Wetlands, Wildlife refuges, J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge, Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish RefugeOral History Cover Sheet
Name: Leroy Sowl
Date of Interview: October 9, 1999
Location of Interview: Shepherdstown, WV
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: roughly 23years.
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Refuge Manager of the Lower Souris National Wildlife Refuge.
Most Important Projects: Worked on the Trans-Atlantic Pipe Line
Colleagues and Mentors: John Halaka, Robert “Sea Otter” Jones.
Most Important Issues: The Trans-Alaskan Pipe Line, problems in legislature.
Brief Summary of Interview: He talks about how, knowing the right people, he immediately found a job in the Fish and Wildlife Services. He then continues to describe the various positions he has held, and the multiple locations he had been to. Further detail is given towards the various projects and important events he was involved with, including the Trans-Alaskan Pipe line and the Exxon Valdiz oil spill. Finally, he goes into detail about the difficulties he faced and the people who made his job more difficult, usually coming from the government or less-than-helpful laws.
Interview with Leroy Sowl
By Mark Madison
10-9-99
Leroy Sowl:
...the impact it had. The Aleuts on Attu Island that were made slaves from Japan is one of the incidents that people there now probably don’t remember. It’s no longer a Fish and Wildlife concern, but the Islands used to be a national wildlife refuge. The Americans took the Aleuts, the natives on there are Aleuts that the Russians had moved on to the to hunt seals. They were taken, uprooted from their homes and taken down to southeastern Alaska and they were put internment camps just like the Japanese Americans were. They weren’t thought to be disloyal or anything. It’s just, we’re protecting them from the Japanese, and a lot of the Eskimos, more Eskimos than Aleuts were what were called Eskimo Scouts during World War II, and they serve all over, and a lot of those people live on national wildlife refuges, or did at one time. Some of them are native landsmen. That history needs to be recognized. Salmon industry is still a strong industry up there, but people now probably don’t remember the stream guards.
Madison:
What were those?
Leroy Sowl:
They were largely college students getting degrees in conservation, at least the ones I knew, that were taken up there and armed with rifles and they were put there to protect the salmon streams from poachers. Now that history’s kind of gone from the Fish and Wildlife Service because the people that were involved were taken out of the Fish and Wildlife Service and put in the National Marine and Fishery Service. That’s another place you need to go for Fish and Wildlife Service history, if you haven’t already done it, National Marine and Fishery Service, particularly in Alaska, and the River Basins, as it was called, Ecological Services now, in Alaska was part of the National Marine and Fishery Service until they went into , and then they came back the Fish and Wildlife Service. Some day we need to reunite with National Marine and Fishery Service. Madison:
Some future time. What about your own career? How did you end up in Fish and Wildlife and Alaska, for that matter?
Leroy Sowl:
How did I end up in the Fish and Wildlife Service? I went to the University of Minnesota and studied wildlife management. There was, in the wildlife department, there was an animal damage control specialist, his last name was Peterson, I think, that had an office in there, and he was kind of an adjunct professor I was told today, but I didn’t know that, because I never had any free classes, but anyway, he was evaluating people there, the students there, and he came to me one day and says, “Come on with me”, and he took me over to the Regional Office and he introduced me to everybody from the Regional Director on down, and he had me interviewed and within days after I graduated, he said, “Let’s go”, and he took me over there, and I had a job before I left the office.
Madison:
It doesn’t happen that way anymore.
Leroy Sowl:
No, it doesn’t. But see, the Fish and Wildlife Service was expanding then, and they obviously had people out like, and I can’t remember his first name, like him, with their eye open for potential material. The same thing happened to me in the Marine Corp. I never made it into the Officer ranks because by the time I was old enough, I knew what happened to second lieutenants in a war, and I didn’t want any part of it. They were cannon target, and that’s why they were, you know, when I came in, they put me in aviation and they put me in ordinance, and the reason was my test scores and things like that, and I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out later, when they said, come on, we need you to lead troops, they had taken my test scores and everything and had designated me to be a future officer in the war. I wasn’t old enough. They didn’t realize that. Well the Fish and Wildlife Service, in those days, were composed of veterans. They operated the same way, obviously, and you know, I didn’t go looking for the job, I was recruited, and I would assume that that was a . I became a Refuge Manager.
Madison:
Which refuge?
Leroy Sowl:
Then it was Lower Souris National Wildlife Refuge, and that’s what I still call it.
Madison:
What’s the new name of it?
Leroy Sowl:
Pardon.
Madison:
What’s the new name of...
Leroy Sowl:
J. Clark Salyer, and I did my trainee time there. I was given responsibility for what were called easement refuges. They were wetlands under easement. This was before the wetland program, in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, and I just met a young lady who had been managing those wetlands for the State of North Dakota, she’s moved to Iowa, and she wasn’t even aware of the history, but she had seen an occasional sign, so I don’t know what happened to them in the Fish and Wildlife concept, but probably the easement ran out. I was given that responsibility, and then I was moved down, told I was going to the Upper Mississippi National Fish and Wildlife Refuge.
Madison:
Now when was this? Roughly what years?
Leroy Sowl: Let’s see. I was out in North Dakota ‘59 and early ‘60. I moved to the Upper Mississippi in ‘60. I was the District Refuge Manager at Pole 9 at Lansing, Iowa. The structure of the refuge has changed now. I was there four and a half years, and then I was, in those days they didn’t ask if you wanted to go somewhere, they told you, and they sent me out to the far northwest corner of North Dakota to be manager of what was called the Crosby Wetland District, that had, at that time, four counties. By the time they left there, it was down to three. Then a call came out, they needed biologists to go to Alaska and work in the Aleutian Islands and monitor the Atomic Energy Commission. I don’t usually volunteer, but I volunteered for that because I had been trying to go to Alaska in my college years as a stream guard, and I had tried and tried and tried, and they didn’t even bother to acknowledge my interest. I suppose it was because they had so many people they didn’t need to bother. Anyway, I got to Alaska, and I worked on Amchitka Island for three years. Actually, at the time I went up there, Dave Spencer, and you probably already interviewed him...
Madison:
Yeah, we have.
Leroy Sowl:
...was the Associate Supervisor of refuges in Region I. He was the Associate Supervisor for Alaska because Alaska was under Region I technically at that time. They didn’t give us much support, and he was the first member, his secretary was the second, and I would have been a third member to come on to the staff in Alaska, and I was followed very quickly by John Hakala, who’d been there before as the Kenai Moose Range Manager. He got the job because he was notoriously tough on the oil companies and . They knew they needed hard heads out there in the Aleutians to fight with the Atomic Energy Commission. John was the hard head, and I tried to be the, you know, good guy, bad buy. I tried to be the good guy. I was a little hard, too. But I did that for three years, and then they decided they needed to build an oil pipeline through Alaska. So here I had this monitoring experience, and I was away from my family every other month for the entire month, and the kids were young. Ethel had to take care of them on her own. She didn’t drive, and so she was stuck with those kids for a month, and then I came home, and I had so much comp time built up that I spent two weeks at a time not working, and we traveled all over Alaska. Then I said, here’s this chance for me to come in, be with my family, buy a house, and really settle down. So I took it. Well, I had more of a family life, but I was gone a lot because that pipeline needed watching, and I got so many people, what happened was that my group turned into a data gathering group, gathering data on wildlife on the pipeline. That was the time the Environmental Impact Statements first came out, and we wrote the first large Environmental Impact Statement, and Washington just came down all over it, because they said, you cannot talk about rape, pillage, and plunder. We didn’t do that, but we made it really tough. So they put together an interior pipeline EIS statement, bit if we hadn’t started out, they wouldn’t have done it, and so we worked then with USGS and the Bureau of Land Management on this statement. The Bureau of Land Management got, we’d been very stubborn and everybody told us we didn’t need monitors for that pipeline, the engineers would take care of it. Well I’d been on Amchitka, and I knew about engineers. Some of the stuff they did out there was just atrocious. To go back to that, there was one time one of their drilling rigs was sitting in a wetland area, and they started pushing the topsoil around the tundra, and I said, “You idiots can’t do this.” “Why not?” “Because, I said, “that soil’s going to turn liquid and it’s going to go swoosh, right down the mountainside.” “Are you an engineer?” “No, I’m not an engineer, I’m a biologist.” “Well, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” I went in town, I came back, and the whole mountainside was down the drainage, and the Corp of Engineers was providing the engineers, and their soils engineers came out and he said, “Why did you idiots do this?” “Well, we didn’t know this was going to happen. Leroy was telling us it was going to happen, but he’s not an engineer, what did he know,” and that guy said, “You damn idiots, if you didn’t believe him, you should have called me.” So I had that kind of reputation, so they moved me on to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and...
Madison:
When did you start working with...
Leroy Sowl:
That was, let’s see, ‘67, that was 1970. ‘67 I went to Alaska. In 1970 I switched over to the pipeline. There were three of us, GS-13's. The other two guys didn’t want to be supervisors. One of them was Chuck Evans, who you probably have already interviewed.
Madison:
They have in Region 7.
Leroy Sowl:
He was an Environmental Services, whatever, River Basins pilot biologist. So I became the project leader, which meant I was stuck with the paperwork, but I also had a good deal of influence in that job, and I don’t know if I should tell this or not, because it could get people in trouble, but after the pipeline was built, one of the oil companies that was involved decided they were going to sue me personally, because at one time after we had these stipulations done, and Bureau of Land Management, Geological Survey, Fish and Wildlife Service, and some other people had developed these environmental stipulations, and a lot of them had to do with caribou. Well, the political pressure came on, and these other agencies all backed off, their bosses backed off. Well, in my case, being known as a fighter, Gordon Watson, who was the Area Director at the time, just disappeared when they wanted a representative back in Washington, and I had to go back, and what they were trying to do was take away stipulations that the oil companies didn’t like, and eventually I just told the Deputy Director, and my names are gone now, but I told him, I said, “I am not going to give anymore.” “Oh, okay,” and they quit. In other words, they would have taken away the whole book of stipulations if I hadn’t have defended them. But in those days, it was a little different than now. As long as they had a reputable, professional, career person there telling them no, they could only go so far. Nowadays, they just override them. Well after the pipeline was built, this oil company decided that I’d been full of hot air because nothing had happened to the caribou. You know, I was wrong, and it had cost their company millions and millions of dollars, and they were going to sue me personally. Well, what they forget about is Alaska’s a small society, and I found out after the fact, because one of the people that worked for the law firm and one of the people that was in the Fish and Wildlife Service casually told me one day, “Did you know that you were in deep dog doo?” What had happened was, they called one day and the Regional Director, Keith Shriner, was gone, and the company representative called and didn’t want to talk to me, but the Regional Director’s secretary said, “Well, Keith is not going to be in for quite awhile. If you want to act now, you’ve got to talk to Leroy.” Well, he didn’t really want to talk to Leroy, but he did, and what he asked me was for the names of all the confident caribou biologists that I could think of in the United States and Canada to give them an opinion on the matter, and what it was, they were trying to get these people to say that Leroy overreacted. They all, to a man, apparently said the other way, if it hadn’t been for Leroy, you’d be in trouble, because the caribou would be in deep trouble. So they dropped their lawsuit. I don’t know the details on this because I just got a back channel, but that’s the kind of game that was played up there at that time, and I would bet that it’s still going on. If you look at the history of the place since I got out of there, there have been several regional directors that have been removed. One of them’s right here, and you can talk to him. I don’t know why, Putz, I don’t know why he was removed, but he evidently said no at the wrong time, and they got rid of him.
Madison:
What did you do after the pipeline?
Leroy Sowl:
After the pipeline, well now, there’s two stages to the pipeline. I was there during the planning and the environmental stipulations and everything. It got so hot there for me that Gordon Watson arranged for me to go to Washington DC, and I was assigned to the Office of Biological Services, which is gone now. It doesn’t exist anymore, and what was my first job down there? Oh, the first year I was down there, I worked on what was then called the Trans-Alaska Gas Pipeline, and they’ve never built that pipeline. But how many years ago was that? That was like ‘74 or ‘75. Just one of the components of that Trans-Alaska Gas Pipeline was one called Northern Border, and that came under this whole umbrella. It’s just been this past summer that Northern Border has been building pipeline through where I live now. It’s taken them all this years to do it. But I was sent down to do that, and when that kind of drained off, they needed a coordinator for Outer Continental Shelf, and most of the people wouldn’t touch that with a ten foot pole, because they knew it was going to be political.
Madison:
Oh, yeah.
Leroy Sowl:
I was a GS-14 at the time, and I was given responsibility for that. I did that until about 19-, boy, 1976, I think, or was that, no, I’d have to work it out on paper, but I did that for awhile, and then the Office of Minerals Management was formed, and they, more or less, took over the whole Outer Continental Shelf thing, and we predicted something. It took a lot longer to happen than we said, and that was that Valdez oil disaster. We told them it was going to happen. In fact, the Merchant Marine Academy did a mock-up on it, and they thought it would happen within six months. It took several years for it to happen, but it did happen, and they’re still having trouble with that. Well, I went on from there, I guess, and about that time, Gordy Watson needed a Deputy Regional Director duty. That was called an area then. They didn’t acknowledge it as a region, but it shortly became one, because I went back there as Gordon’s Deputy, and then I guess I shouldn’t mention names of Assistant Secretary, but he got cross ways, and the Assistant Secretary who was nominally a friend, not a foe, I was in the Washington Office and Lynn Greenwald was Director then. He called me in, he said, “Leroy, old friend, I need your help.” I said, “Okay, I’m your man.” He said, “I have to remove Gordon Watson from that job,” and he said, “I want you to take over for as long as it takes.” Well, it took a year. I was in there a year. That was long enough to get more exposure to the Alaska delegation, get in deeper . Then Keith Shriner came up, oh, in the meantime, in that year while I was the Acting, it’s different than a normal Acting in that Lynn gave me an appointment as an Acting for as long as it took. They couldn’t give me Area Director status for some reason, but they gave me Acting Area Director status and put it on paper. So I really was the Area Director for that year, and during that time, I was responsible for staffing what became the Regional Office, hiring personnel officer, hiring contracting, and everything, and then Keith Shriner came up as Regional Director, because when Lynn checked around on me, people like the Audubon Society, who I’d been involved with for several years, said, “No, you know, his history shows he’s sympathetic to oil, he’s involved with pipelines and things, we don’t want him.” The oil companies said, “He’s an environmentalist, we don’t want him,” and the State said, “We don’t want him.” Because you can’t be the head of the Fish and Wildlife Service in a state like Alaska. Well, it’s even worse now, as you know, and after this week, it’s going to be even more hot up there. Just before I left Alaska, I ran into an Alaskan employee, John who was head of the Marine Mammals for the State of Alaska. I’d been over to the man’s house for parties and friendly. He wouldn’t even talk to me. He wouldn’t shake my hand, and you know, what have I done? But it was something the Fish and Wildlife Service had done or, who knows. John and I professionally started getting along because nobody had ever been able to capture and move sea otters alive, and when I was on Amchitka Island, the Seattle Tacoma Zoo, Sea-Tac Zoo wanted a sea otter exhibit. So they have a group of, or did at that time, Boeing employees that go out and do these things in the name of Boeing, and they sent a group to Alaska to capture and move sea otters. Since I was on the island, I got tapped to capture the sea otters, and I can’t claim much credit for it, but they actually moved those sea otters to Seattle and they lived. It’s the first time in history that captured sea otters had ever lived. Well, what it was, all it was was we decided that we could take sea water along, keep those sea otters cool on the airplane. It took about three hours to go from Amchitka to Anchorage, and it’s almost the same distance as going to Seattle, so it was another three hours down to Seattle, and those sea otters got there alive. One of them was named Leroy after me, and he was put in the Sea- Tac Zoo. He may have been the only one that survived, and the Alaska biologist said, “Wow, we didn’t know you could do this.” Well the sad story is that Leroy expired fairly shortly, and nobody knew why. They do now. You can’t put sea otters in fresh water. They have to be in salt water. They can only be in salt water aquariums, or at least that time. They may have found some way around it, but for some reason it didn’t work. So I was a good guy to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game then because they started coming out there to Amchitka and hauling sea otters away by the plane load to re-establish sea otters elsewhere in southeast Alaska and then down in the northwest United States. As I say, that all evaporated there, and I was no longer a friend by the time I left. Now I got digressing here, and I forgot where I was. I guess...
Madison:
You were saying how hard it is to be Fish and Wildlife in Alaska. Basically it was a no win situation.
Leroy Sowl:
Yeah, that’s basically it.
Madison:
Why is it like that there though?
Leroy Sowl:
It’s basically that way by the Native Claims Settlement Act. Fish and Wildlife Service had federal mandates and subsistence and some things like that which the citizens of Alaska, that are non-native, violently detest. Their politicians detest them and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game detest them. Now the
Roger Boykin
No full textRoger Boykin oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
Mr. Boykin has a background in forestry and Fire Management, which served him well to work co-laterally in his Fire Management role and integration of fire management and forest ecology.
Organization: FWS
Name: Roger Boykin
Years: 1978-
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Employees (USFWS), Biography, History, Fire Management, Fires, Hurricanes, Forestry, Prescribed burning, Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge, White River National Wildlife Refuge, Bogue Chitto National Wildlife Refuge1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Roger Boykin
Date of Interview: 2005
Location of Interview: Southeast Region
Interviewer: Brett Billings
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 27 years
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held:
Bachelor’s Degree in Forestry from Mississippi State University; Forester at White River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Arkansas; Crab Orchard Refuge as a Division Forester; handled the Forestry and the Fire programs for Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Missouri; Bogue Chitto National Wildlife Refuge in Slidell, LA; Atlanta Regional Office as the Regional Forester; Regional Fire Coordinator in Southeast Region to present day. Worked in Region 3 for 3 years prior to Region 4 where he has worked since.
Most Important Projects: Fire Program; Hurricanes Ivan, Katrina and Rita response and rescue operations; awarded one of the very first National Fire Plan Awards in the Southeast Region
Colleagues and Mentors: Howard Poitevint, Regional Fire Coordinator for Southeast Region and one of first Fire Coordinators for FWS in the country.
Most Important Issues: Hurricane management; Fire management
Brief Summary of Interview: Talks about how his background in forestry serves him well to work co-laterally in his Fire Management role; integration of fire management and forest ecology; offers insights to grad students interested in fire management; discussed importance of personnel management and decision making skills crucial in fire work; value and advantage of working for a small agency (FWS); speaks passionately about personal response by FWS workers in emergency rescues following devastation and destruction from hurricanes in the southeast region.
2
INTERVIEWER: If you would just go ahead by giving me your name and spell it, please.
RB: I’m Roger Boykin. It’s R-O-G-E-R B-O-Y-K-I-N.
INTERVIEWER: And your birthplace and your birthdate.
RB: I was born on March 6, 1952 in Forest, Mississippi.
INTERVIEWER: What’s your educational background?
RB: I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Forestry from Mississippi State University.
INTERVIEWER: What years have you been employed with Fish and Wildlife?
RB: Started in 1978 and I’ve been employed ever since.
INTERVIEWER: How did you find out about Fish and Wildlife, how did you get into working with Fish and Wildlife?
RB: Well it was not by design. I was, right after I got out of college, I went to work for the state of Mississippi, had a great job with them except it didn’t pay anything. So I decided I needed to work for the federal government if I was going to be able to feed my family. Actually went to work for the Forest Service for a short period of time, but I had to take a technician position to just get on the federal work force. And so as soon as I got on with them I started sending out applications of professional positions and I sent one to the Fish and Wildlife Service for a Forestry position on White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas and was selected for that position. So I wish I could say it was by design or that I had always wanted to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service but the truth is it was the luck of the draw that got me started with them. I never regretted that; it’s a great organization but I really didn’t know anything about them prior to that.
INTERVIEWER: What jobs and what duty stations have you been to in the Service?
RB: Well, as I said, I started at White River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Arkansas, and I was a Forester there. Left there and went to Crab Orchard Refuge as a Division Forester; I handled the Forestry and the Fire programs for Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Missouri. Stayed there about three years, moved down to Slidell, Louisiana, to work on what was then Bogue Chitto National Wildlife Refuge, is now part of Southeast Louisiana Refuges. And I, as the Forester there, also managed the fire program but it was under a Forestry title. Left there and went to the Atlanta Regional Office as the Regional Forester. The Regional Forester at that time was within the fire shop, stayed the Regional Forester for about five years. The Regional Fire Coordinator retired and I applied for the job and was selected for it; that’s where I am to this day.
INTERVIEWER: Particular reason you decided to go from the forestry end back over to the fire end?
RB: Well, it was a career move; I mean the truth is Foresters in the Fish and Wildlife Service typically top out about a GS-12. And Fire allowed for some 3
further career development and advance in grade. I’d been working, co-laterally, in Fire for a lot of years ever since I, really every single job I had, I had been working co-laterally. So I had a lot of fire experience, even with the State of Mississippi, I was a County Forester in southern Mississippi and a lot of fire experience there. When the job opened, I just applied for it. I still do a lot of the forestry work for the region, in fact, whenever there are forestry plans and prescriptions and such as that, I’m the primary person that reviews those for the region because of my past forestry experience. I don’t spend, certainly, as much time in Forestry as I used to just because the fire program is so overwhelming and the volume of work to do. So I don’t get to go out on reviews, I don’t get to actually go out and do the things I used to as a Regional Forester, but still act kind of as an advisor on that. And presently the Region doesn’t have a Regional Forester, they haven’t refilled that position. When I refilled the position that I vacated, I filled it as an Assistant Fire Coordinator. And that just has to do like say with how the Fire Program has grown over the last twenty, twenty-five years.
INTERVIEWER: You know I’ve seen a lot of people that came to the Fire Program from like Park Service Fire Program, or came in with Fire Science background. How does your having a Forestry background; how does that influence the way you deal with fire?
RB: Well, a lot of the acres, the fire prone acres, and a lot of acres we burn and protect in the southeast region, in particular, are forested acres. And so having a Forestry background helps me integrate fire with forest ecology. And so it allows me to develop a program that is environmentally correct for our forested habitats because I have that forest ecology type background. So I think it’s pretty important in our region. There’s certainly some other regions that don’t have as many forested acres as we do and it probably isn’t as important to them to have a forestry background; it would be difficult in our Region to oversee the biological integration of those two programs without having that knowledge.
INTERVIEWER: Keeping that in mind, let’s say somebody’s going through school right now, they’re on that undeclared, undecided major. And they’re interested in fire but they’re not sure about the best route to get there. What’s your advice as far as the types of classes somebody ought to take to prepare them for a career in Fire, Fire Management?
RB: Well, certainly, I mean you’re right, there’s not a lot of fire courses out there. There are a couple colleges that are beginning to look into fire curriculum and that’s probably a good thing, but there’s not a lot of it; so having a degree in biological science. So one of the places I see the Fish and Wildlife Service being so different from other agencies is the objectives of the Fish and Wildlife Service are biological in nature; we don’t have a lot of the other objectives that other agencies have. The Forest Service has a multiple use objective where the Fish and Wildlife Service is very, it’s wildlife, and wildlife is so habitat-dependent. So if you don’t have some background and knowledge in habitat management, some biological sciences, it’s difficult to manage a fire 4
program, I think, real effectively. We ask our FMO’s out on the ground to manage a different kind of program than a lot of other agencies ask their FMO’s to manage; they’re biological-based programs in many cases. So the first thing is, I think, a biological background is really important. And then the other thing is, quite honestly, you know I live in Atlanta, Georgia and I tell people all the time, “You know I didn’t go to forestry school thinking I was going to live in a town of four and a half million people.” Which is what I do. So the truth is there’s a lot to manage in a fire program that’s not about fire and is not biology; it’s about program management. So the truth is, I think that business courses, personnel management, those kinds of things that are not the reasons a lot of us got in this business originally, or important things, important skills to have in order to effectively manage a program. So certainly in the first few years that someone in fire, a lot of technical is the most important thing you have, but as you grow through a career, which most people want to do, the focus changes somewhat. And you have to be able to have those skills, get them somewhere either from coming to a place like NCTC or using other mechanisms to gain those skills or when you go to college you have a number of electives you can take. When I was going to college I had a Forestry professor tell me all the best electives you can take are business courses and the truth is I didn’t listen to him but it was true; had I taken some of those I wouldn’t have made the early mistakes that I made in my career. And so management is not just about biology, you got people working for you, you’ve got to do personnel management, you’ve got to do all of those things. Refuge Managers are getting to the point where they’re not just managing just the biology of the area, they’re managing public use, they’re managing their personnel; all of those sorts of things that certainly have direct effects on the biology integrity of the refuge, but you manage it through other programs. And fire’s exactly the same way. And if you move up in just the fire organizations and incident management teams and such as that; the Incident Manager on and Incident Management team doesn’t really manage the fire, he manages the team, and then he has people working for him that manage the fire. So those skills are really important for someone to develop through their career, like I say, either through school or after the fact.
INTERVIEWER: Part of what you were saying also made it sound like it depends what region a person is from, maybe whether they study forestry versus grassland ecology and things like that. Are there other regional bias, things like that?
RB: Well, I think, I’m not sure; I could manage the day-to-day budget stuff, personnel stuff like that in any region. But if I were say, in Region 3, that is a lot of grasslands, or Region 6, the mountain prairie region, I just don’t have the educational background or the work background where I understand those ecological systems out there. And so it would just take me longer to come up to speed to know what the real issues are, to know what some of the effects of different practices would be. As a graduate Forester and a practicing Forester for many years I understand, or to some degree understand, what some of those ecological effects of different practices are going to be. So yeah, 5
having experience within certain habitat type is a valuable tool, and certainly each region is very different. I know nothing about the desert southwest. I couldn’t go down there; in fact, I wouldn’t know a salt cedar from a ponderosa pine if they were standing side by side hardly. So I just don’t know what the ecology of those plants are, and I would just have this learning period that I brought experience with me to the job in Region 4 that helps me.
INTERVIEWER: To wrap that subject up that we were on, any further advice to students or people looking to be graduate students in a fire program, or looking to cross train into fire?
RB: Well, fire is a wonderful career, it really is a good career; has a lot of opportunities for people but it takes certain mentalities. I think people have to do some self-evaluation to determine if fire is the right kind of career for them; it can be a very, very high pressure environment. You’re making decisions on a fairly regular basis that people’s lives depend on; you’re just doing a lot of those sorts of things that some people are just better suited for than some other people are. All of our jobs in the Fish and Wildlife Service are important. I don’t mean to make light of any of them, but truly you can have a different personality type and be a biologists, or be something else than you can be in being a fire manger. You’ve got to be a decision maker, if you’re the person out there directing people on fighting a wildfire, you’ve got to be a decision maker. You’ve got to be able to make good decisions, you’ve got to make them in a reasonable period of time, you’ve got to be able to stand behind those and have that personality that just works, and not everybody has that. And it doesn’t mean that they’re better or poorer person for it, it’s just people are different and fire is one of those careers; it’s no different than everybody’s not suited to be a policeman. There are certain jobs in life that require that decision making, and it’s not always just decision making ability, it’s a willingness to make decisions and do the things you have to do at the moment. So I think some self-evaluation, is this the right career for me, am I willing to do the things? Because I, quite honestly, I’ve seen some people in fire that for them personally they would have done better somewhere else, and it doesn’t mean they’re not a good person, in any shape or form. It’s just it wasn’t the right environment for them. As far as other educational, because there is so little fire education out there, I’m not sure that any one particular route is the right route to take. Like say some biological background and just some management type stuff, I think is probably what’s going to best outfit a person. Certainly if they have a region of the country that they most want to live their life in, going to a school that offers some courses, some biology that covers those habitat types, is an important thing to do, I think.
INTERVIEWER: That’s good, very good information and I think that young people, they’re starting their career, find that kind of information very handy. A little while ago you said working for the Service is great, what makes you say that?
RB: Well, the Fish and Wildlife Service is a relatively small agency and you know a lot of people in it, but it allows people to kind of connect on a more 6
personal nature, I think, than a lot of big agencies do. The other reason is, and I’ll relate this back to Forestry, when I was a Forester in the Fish and Wildlife Service I would often be the only Forester on the station; very few stations have more than one. So when I was managing a Forestry Program I did everything, you know, I went out and I wrote the forestry management plan, I went out and did all the timber crews and then I worked up all the data, I did the prescription, I went out and marked the timber afterwards, and then I made the sell and I administered the contract. And if there was reforestation to do afterwards, I did that, so I did the entire process. A lot of other agencies that are bigger agencies, the Forest Service is a good example, on a national forest on a district level they may have a dozen different people doing those things and each one of them may be very compartmentalized. So you’ve got one person who’s only writing prescriptions, you’ve got a timber marking crew and that’s all they do is go mark timber based on a prescription that someone else wrote. And then you’ve got a timber sell contract administrator, and once the sell is made he administers it and then you’ve got a reforestation forester that handles. So it’s rewarding to start a project from conception and take it all the way through yourself, that’s a rewarding process that a lot of other agencies don’t have simply because they’re bigger than us; so being a small agency is part of it. There’s also, I think, a real family atmosphere in the Fish and Wildlife Service that some other agencies, once again in large part because of their size, has lost. I tell people all the time that all the FMO’s that I have in my region used to work for the Forest Service and now they work for us. I’ve hired all my people from the Forest Service but none of them have ever gone back, and that’s true. So that’s a pretty strong statement when you say things like that. The agency cares about its people, it’s a rewarding place to work, most of the people in the agency believe in the work we do; they think it is important work and it’s wildlife-based. So many of them went and got their education because they were interested in conservation, and so they get to come to the Fish and Wildlife Service; it’s a conservation agency and work in that and work purely for conservation rather than having to mix in a lot of the other things. So it becomes a rewarding agency to work for because of that.
INTERVIEWER: Good information; want to get on to some of the business side of stuff. Can you recall which Presidents, Secretary of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Directors that you’ve served under either as a Forester or in Fire?
RB: Well, I’m so bad at remembering names that I probably can’t remember a lot of them.
INTERVIEWER: Let me put it to you this way, do you remember any particular Directors or of those folks that you met and you served under where you felt that their leadership made a difference in how your job was carried out?
RB: I can’t talk about, really, those higher levels of government because typically I’ve not been exposed to those people; I’ve certainly been exposed to some of their policies. But as far as any kind of a one-on-one interaction with those people above a Regional Director 7
position, if you will, I have not been exposed to them. And I’m not sure, there certainly have been policy changes through a career; you can’t have a 30 year career and not deal with some policy changes. But as far as it being really sticking in my mind that this one Director or this one Secretary really changed things from black to white or night to day, that’s not what I’ve seen. What I’ve seen is this progression or this change in policy that’s been more of a stair step type progression from where we used to be to where we are now. And certainly the National Fire Plan in 2000 was a huge change in fire thinking, if you will, around the country. It started talking about instead of managing fires themselves we were managing communities and fire’s effects on communities, and that’s a different way of thinking than we used to think. And so that, I can’t even remember the Secretary that was in at 2000 right off the top of my head, but that was a pretty big change in fire management for the Service, if you will, is beginning to look at things a little differently. But I don’t think that I attribute to any one person much as I would attribute it to more of a different thinking within the general populace, and that different thinking being reflected through policy makers, if you will.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, you were talking about the National Fire Plan was definitely something that changed your work in extent. Can you think of any other significant events, things that also prodded or moved things one way or another?
RB: The thing I know best is my region, the Southeast Region. I’ve worked there my whole career with the exception of the three years I was in Region 3. But there have been some things, I mean, the fatalities at Okefenokee in the early ’80’s was one of the very significant events, not only in our region but the entire Fish and Wildlife Service Fire Program where prior to that there was a, as many things, it takes tragedy often to change the way people think and the way they act. And so there wasn’t a lot of guidance on fire and fire management prior to that event. There was also a death within a couple years of that at Merritt Island Refuge. And those deaths caused some people to kind of sit up and take notice and say, “We’ve got to do a better job of fire management. We’ve got to get more professional in fire management.” Then in the late ‘80’s is really the first time that the Fish and Wildlife Service ever got dedicated fire funding. Prior to that all fire management in the Fish and Wildlife Service was a co-lateral function, and so there was a different thought process because of the way the funding was. Once we got dedicated fire funding then we started hiring dedicated fire people, meaning full time fire people. And that started the change that brought in professionalism because people were working in fire all the time. They began in working in the interagency fire community that really, before the late ‘80’s, we didn’t work in the interagency fire community an awful lot. Now the Fish and Wildlife Service has a very, very long history of fire management. They actually started prescribed burning in the 1940’s, first federal land management to conduct prescribed burn was the Fish and Wildlife Service. But we were doing all of that kind of within ourselves, we w
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