A VIP Visit

Wednesday was in interesting day. It started with a field trip, the refuge had a VIP visit and we restarted inspecting fire extinguishers.

The refuge has an annex in Port O'Connor, TX, a nearby small port known for its fishing (where nearby is a 45 mile drive). It is the nearest port to the north end of Matagorda Island. The refuge annex is a small site on the water with several buildings, a wharf and the barge the refuge owns. We were there to inspect fire extinguishers and first aid kits in the buildings and the barge.

The barge is about 100 feet long and is used to ferry heavy equipment to and from Matagorda. Needless to say, it isn't used very much as not much is going on on the island, but it is kept in good condition and is used. The main building is a vehicle storage barn and is actually used to store Texas Parks & Wildlife Department boats and vehicles. Matagorda Island is jointly managed by that state agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, so the Port O'Connor Annex serves both. The other building is a dwelling which is occasionally used to house researchers working on the refuge. I assume it is for those who want access to the north part of the island or the waters around it. It is a nice little house. It was an interesting trip to see the annex and some time not spent in the office.

We returned in time for a potluck lunch held for a visit from the Fish & Wildlife Service Region 2 Director, Dr. Benjamin Tuggle. Region 2 is Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona, a rather large region with 47 refuges. He'd come out from Albuquerque to visit the refuge and see how it was faring. The potluck lunch was put together by the staff and volunteers (Ellen supplied brownies—the joy of access to an oven). There was at least two days worth of food and three days worth of desserts for all of the staff, the volunteers and the five guests.

Dr. Tuggle spoke to us after the lunch and was very upbeat about the future of the refuge and the Fish and Wildlife Service. It has been a tough few years with federal budget cuts, but they seem to have stabilized (aside from the fact that the current Congress has eviscerated funding for the endangered species act—my comment, not his). He was especially encouraging to Sarah and Matt, the crane techs, and Sarah, the biology intern, that hiring would pick up and getting younger staff into the agency was our high importance. After the lunch, they went off to see the refuge—and the Whooping Cranes, of course.

For us, it was back to fire extinguisher inspections. New safety policies require that all of the fire extinguishers in buildings and vehicles be inspected every month and it is now March. It seems like we just did this. I think this is the last month that it is the Biology department's responsibility. Sarah has done most of the hard work finding all the extinguishers and setting up the inspection checklists. We are the testers and next month and beyond, whoever does it will have it easy. We got about half of them done in the afternoon. We would have done more, but we were also recording vendors and models of each extinguisher as we went along. That information had not been collected.