From: Merritt Clifton, editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE. To: Date: Friday, August 10, 2001 12:39 AM Subject: Wildlife in no-man's land From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993: Wildlife in no-man's-land: Are war zones safer than refuges? When the Persian Gulf War erupted in February 1991, ecologists shuddered at the probable fate of the wetlands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The region, where Kuwait meets Iraq, is among the world's busiest corridors for migratory birds--both songbirds and waterfowl, coming and going from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The bird populations were already in trouble. Intensive sheep-grazing had desertified thousands of acres of vegetation. Oil-rich Kuwaiti thrillseekers compounded the damage with reckless use of offroad vehicles and contests to see who could shotgun the most birds, without regard for either endangered species or bag limits. Even before the war broke out, "It was like the battle of el-Alamein, a constant barrage of gunfire," recalls Kuwait University pharmacology professor Charles Pilcher. After 14 years of struggle, Pilcher and other Kuwaiti environmentalists persuaded the government to establish three wildlife reserves in 1990, but designating them and actually protecting them were two different matters. Then came Iraqi tanks, landmines, Allied bombs, and burning oilfields. Observers feared a repetition of the Lebanese civil war. Lebanon too was a major corridor for migrating birds, especially storks, until the early 1980s. Then, however, locked in monotonous standoff, troops of all the warring factions relieved stress by machine-gunning 15 to 20 million birds per year. By 1986 the Lebanese flyway was largely history. The stork population of Europe and the Middle East has yet to recover. This time, though, there was no standoff. The heavy fighting was over in a matter of days. And recreational shooting hasn't resumed in a big way, either. "The millions of unexploded mines and bombs still strewn across Kuwait are powerful ecological guardians," Reuter reporter Dominic Evans observed in February 1993. "Together with increased Kuwaiti military patrols," who guard against any repetition of the August 1990 Iraqi invasion, "the live ordinance is a daunting deterrent to hunters, desert joyriders, and flocks of grazing sheep." Adds Pilcher, "Duck and coot species I've plotted since 1976 have risen in some instances a hundredfold. In the old days we might have had 20 or 30 of one species of duck, and they've gone up to 20,000." Acknowledges Donald Heintzelman of the Wildlife Information Center, Inc., in his Wildlife Protectors Handbook (reviewed on page 19), "Ironically, longterm effects of war sometimes benefit wildlife. In Truk Lagoon in Micronesia, for example, sunken Japanese warships now support an artificial reef rich in corals, sponges, and fishes. The demilitarized zone between North and South Korea is a wildlife sanctuary where endangered white-naped cranes winter," protected, like the Kuwait birds, by unexploded and largely unmapped landmines. "Populations of tigers increased in Southeast Asia's tropical forests during the Vietnam War," as combat drove out farmers who had killed tigers to protect their families and livestock. The human exodus apparently also helped the highly endangered koupri, a wild cow then thought to be extinct, but rediscovered in the Vietnamese highlands in 1988. Nonetheless, Heintzelman's answer to war is, "Ban it!" No one rational could argue that war is good for animals, wild or captive. As a popular bumper sticker puts it, "War is not good for children or other living species." Any misanthrope under the misconception that the abrupt bloody massacre of human beings might help animals need only look at any war zone: RWANDA, February 8 -- Rebel troops overran, ransacked, and partially razed the late Dian Fossey's Karisoke Research Center, made legendary by the book and film Gorillas In The Mist. Jittery and often hungry soldiers had already scattered the local gorillas, half the world mountain gorilla population, with constant gunfire. A 23-year-old silverback named Mrithi, featured in the film, was an accidental fatality during May 1992. Others may have been poached. MONROVIA, LIBERIA, February 21-- Biologist Betsy Brotman buried her husband, Brian Garnham, near his home in England. Garnham, manager of the Liberian Institute of Biomedical Research, was killed by looting Liberian soldiers on January 31 as he tried to defend a colony of 120 captive chimpanzees who had been used in hepatitis research and therefore couldn't be released without risk to the wild population. Twelve of the chimps subsequently vanished, apparently killed and eaten by soldiers, who may thereby contract and spread hepatitis themselves. Another chimp was shot and abandoned; yet another died of thirst. Veterinarian Patricia Gullett of the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute of the New York Blood Center made three trips to the chimp colony with food and water during the two weeks after Garnham's death, but was unable to get the factions fighting in the area to agree to a ceasefire long enough to permit the evacuation of the estimated 106 chimps believed to be still alive. CAPLJINA, BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA, March 8 -- A World Society for the Protection of Animals convoy set out on a thousand-mile journey through a gauntlet of Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim checkpoints to take concentrated livestock food to the two dairy farms left in Bosnia. The cattle at 11 other farms were killed by snipers and shelling. "Children are literally starving to death in this conflict," said WSPA international projects director John Walsh, "because livestock have been used as a weapon of war," causing a critical shortage of food for infants in a region where thousands of infants have been separated from mothers, who often are too malnourished to nurse the infants adequately anyway. Walsh reported after an October 1992 frontline inspection that combatants had deliberately torched about 40 square miles of prime wildlife habitat, then shot at a mother bear and her cubs as they fled the flames. At least one bear was killed by a landmine, while soldiers shot two displaced wolves when they attacked sheep. "While rabies is endemic in foxes (in the area)," a WSPA report said, "an effective government vaccination program had in the past markedly reduced the threat. This program has collapsed. With the large number of roaming stray dogs increasingly interacting with the large numbers of foxes, wolves, and other animals, health officials and veterinarians fear an outbreak of rabies is imminent." Earlier in the Balkan fighting, at least 20,000 cattle, 150,000 pigs, and a million chickens, ducks, and geese were killed when Serbian gunners shelled Croatian farms in a successful effort to disrupt the Croat food supply. The world paid little attention to that, but winced as shrapnel cut down at least 120 of the renowned Lipizzaner horses, and the entire menagerie at the once-acclaimed Sarajevo Zoo starved to death--a replay of the slow starvation of the Kuwait Zoo collection the year before. Most media attention to the victims of warfare goes to humans; then captive animals, whose plight can be documented. But sketchier reports reached ANIMAL PEOPLE in recent months from the Caucacus and Georgia in the former Soviet Union, describing hungry wolves on the prowl after being driven from their native habitat by ethnic fighting. Some of the last wolves left in Europe, they were gunned down on sight by frightened villagers. Specific incidents involving animals are only the beginning. Modern warfare almost inevitably devastates habitat. World War I shelling defoliated most of Europe; World War II hit just as forests were starting to grow again. The U.S. introduced chemical defoliation during the Vietnam War. Twenty years after that war ended, the jungle has largely recovered, along with wildlife populations, but meanwhile other wars have defoliated portions of Central America, Asia, and Africa. Along with defoliation comes flooding, topsoil loss, and loss of species. Though habitats do recover, the new growth seldom perfectly duplicates what was lost. War zones vs. refuges Around the world, however, including in the U.S., dangerous no-man's-land frequently becomes the last refuge of wild animals when the shooting stops--and sometimes while it's still going on. A surprising variety of species actually seem to prefer the risks of such sites to sharing habitat with hunters in traditional sanctuaries. As far-fetched as comparisons of the seemingly tranquil U.S. National Wildlife Refuge sytem to the battlefields of eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa would superficially seem, hunting is permitted on 259 of the 472 U.S. refuges, which conduct more than 550 hunting seasons, putting 133 "game" species at direct risk and disturbing virtually all the other native birds and mammals. Of the 259 refuges that allow hunting, 91 also permit trapping. The military, too, is a more disruptive presence on many wildlife refuges than on some of the biggest bases. Roughly 100 U.S. refuges are used in military training, ranging from artillery practice to tank maneuvers to low-level strafing runs by jet fighters. The military also makes heavy use of other protected lands, including 17 million acres borrowed from the Bureau of Land Management and three million acres distributed among 57 National Forests. Wars ravage a landscape for a few weeks or months or in extreme cases, years; but most wars do end, eventually. Hunting on federal refuges is usually for just a few weekends each fall, but it does take place each and every fall, simulating recurring outbreaks of war, and the aggregate still comes to roughly one million hunter visits per year (out of 31 million total human visits, the rest of which mainly involve summer recreation areas). Wildlife refuge hunters outnumber the combatants in most recent wars, and may expend more ammunition per year than is used in the whole of some significant regional conflicts. The known death toll is on the order of 400,000 animals per year, not counting as many as three million ducks who die from ingesting now-banned lead shot left in the marshes where they feed by generations of hunters who often claim their permits bought the refuge system. In fact, hunting revenues bought only about 4% of it; the remaining 96% was acquired with general tax revenues. The annual hunting-related animal casualties in U.S. National Wildlife Refuges closely parallel the known losses to date in the two years of the Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian war. The fighting in the Balkans has raged across about 25.6 million acres of the 63.2 million acres of the former nation of Yugoslavia. Intense fighting involves about 12 million acres. The National Wildlife Refuge system includes 14 million acres outside Alaska--plus 77 million acres in Alaska, a fourth of which is the 19.5-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Of course the regulated slaughter on wildlife refuges does not directly harm human beings, and the habitat damage resulting from hunting isn't as obvious as a mortar shell hitting a barn. Home , home on the bombing range Military use of National Wildlife Refuges and other protected lands has gone on continuously in some cases for more than a century (often beginning before the lands were "protected".) Damage to wildlife and habitat is well-documented. In November 1988, for example, a Navy weapons test killed 3,000 fish in an arm of Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, dividing the Patuxent Naval Air Test Center from the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. The incident was remarkable less for the relatively low number of animals affected than for having happened in broad daylight in a heavily traveled boating corridor. Until early last year, seals, sea lions, and birds were routinely disturbed by naval bombardment at Sea Lion Rock, a tiny island on the Copalis Wildlife Refuge in Washington state. The attacks ended only after the Navy closed the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station as a cost-cutting move. The U.S. Army acknowledged in 1991 that birds were ingesting bits of white phosphorous left after shelling exercises at the Fort Richardson Range, near Anchorage, Alaska. Also in 1991, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and the Wilderness Society sued the Army because a variety of activities at Fort Benning, Georgia, are allegedly destroying habitat for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. Investigators are still trying to assess the impact of military nuclear waste disposal on the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, 30 miles west of San Francisco. Between 1946 and 1970, the Navy dumped more than 47,500 barrels of radioactive materials in the vicinity, along with a floating drydock and the aircraft carrier Independence. The Independence was nuked in a test blast at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Surviving the bombing, it was towed to the Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco Bay to see if it could be decontaminated and repaired, but the Navy finally gave up and scuttled it on January 26, 1951. The Gulf of Farallones sanctuary, created 30 years later, is home to 7,000 seals and sea lions, 17 species of whales and porpoises, and more than 300,000 sea birds. So far, none seem to have been harmed by nuclear waste, but many of the steel barrels are now leaking. Low-level jet flights reportedly inhibit waterfowl nesting at the Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada, but that's the least of the problems in that vicinity. In 1983-1984, flooding spread from Stillwater into the Navy's 41,000-acre Bravo 20 bombing range. Toxic materials from Bravo 20 allegedly poisoned seven million fish along with tens of thousands of birds. In 1989, cleanup crews trying to cleanse Bravo 20 removed 1,389 live bombs, 28,136 rounds of ammunition, and 60 tons of shrapnel. The General Accounting Office in 1991 reported that hunting, military use, and other inappropriate activities were adversely affecting 63% of the National Wildlife Refuge system. Wildlife habitat outside the refuge system is also often at risk. Bravo 20, for instance, is only one of a cluster of huge bases in southwestern Nevada near the California border, with clusters of well-publicized wildlife problems. The biggest base of the cluster is the 400,000-acre Nellis Air Force Range, reputedly home of the largest wild horse population left in the world. According to the Bureau of Land Management, the Nellis Range harbored 6,200 wild horses in July 1990, but only 4,300 a year later, after hundreds and perhaps thousands died of thirst and starvation during a prolonged drought that cut the carrying capacity of the range to an estimated 1,500 horses. The Air Force and the Nevada Commission for the Preservation of Wild Horses saved the remaining horses by trucking in food, antibiotics, and 10,000 gallons of water a day. In July and August 1991, the BLM removed 2,000 horses from Nellis, at cost of $500,000. The Air Force, the horse rescuers, the Sacramento-based Animal Protection Institute, and the Public Lands Resource Council all disputed the BLM horse population figures, however, and the true extent of the 1990-1991 crisis remains in doubt. Bombing and strafing practice on the adjacent Desert National Wildlife Range meanwhile may menace the threatened desert tortoise. Across the state, nuclear fallout from weapons testing done from 1951 until 1962 at the Nevada Test Site is believed to be one reason why the desert tortoise population at the Woodbury Desert Study Area near St. George, Utah, fell by 50% between 1982 and 1987. Plutonium absorbed in the tortoises' shells didn't kill them, but apparently inhibited reproduction. Since desert tortoises may live for 80 years, and don't reach sexual maturity until age 15, the effect of the fallout took 25 years to become evident--long enough for tortoises who reproduced before the nuclear testing to die out, and for the paucity of young tortoises to translate into a general population decline. To the north, Hill Air Force Base, the Wendover Range, the Deseret Test Center, and Dugway Proving Grounds occupy much of the Great Salt Lake Desert. Involved to some extent in nuclear work, this cluster of bases is even more notorious as the primary U.S. chemical weapons arsenal. Chemical weapons tests may have routinely killed wildlife as well as animals used in research, but details remain classified. The work done at Dugway didn't become generally known until March 14, 1968, when a test of a nerve gas called VX went awry, killing 6,000 sheep who were grazing near the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, 30 miles downwind. The resulting outcry moved then-U.S. president Richard Nixon to renounce first use of chemical weapons in war, while Congress imposed restrictions on chemical weapons testing and research. Though most military activities are now covered by stringent environmental regulations, a National Guard training exercise in Utah broke 35 of 81 safeguards as recently as 1988, according to then-House Interior Subcommittee chair Bruce Vento. "There ain't no home like a hole in the ground." --Bugs Bunny Yet the military legacy on public lands may be more positive than not, if only because, as in Kuwait, unexploded ordinance and toxic wastes have kept other human abuse of habitat to a minimum. The potential value of a military presence on protected lands surfaced during a decade of debate over the use of Monomoy Point, Massachusetts, as a naval gunnery range. The rocky point is located at the southern tip of the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, off Cape Cod, almost within sight and sound of the head offices of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the International Wildlife Coalition. For more than 40 years, Navy pilots bombed and strafed Monomoy Point from low-flying aircraft, startling seabirds for whom the refuge is a critical nesting area--one of the few protected barrier islands of significant size along the New England coast. By the mid-1980s, Monomoy Point was a cause celebre. Executives of the Massachusetts Audubon Society nearly got lynched by other wildlife protection groups when they published a report suggesting the bombing and strafing might have helped the seabirds more than it hurt, inasmuch as it kept the rookeries off limits to hikers, picnickers, surfers, and boaters. Overall, despite the military activity, the seabird population of Monomoy Point was in good health compared to the populations of similar sites where the public either was given or simply took access. Indeed, within another few years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was obliged to close several relatively peaceful beaches along the New England coast to protect the nests of the endangered piping plover, a ground-nesting bird at much greater risk from careless footsteps than from flying shrapnel. Similar ironies have emerged at countless other sites. Forty-five endangered species thrive at the 100,000-acre Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California, and endangered clapper rails make a last stand at the nearby Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station (where in keeping with a tradition of trying to kill problems, the Navy and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tried to prevent predation in 1989 by trapping hundreds of non-native red foxes). The Marine Corps takes gung-ho pride in protecting six endangered bird species at 125,000-acre Camp Pendleton--peregrine falcons, light-footed clapper rails, California least terns, California gnatcatchers, least Bell's vireos, and brown pelicans. Troops are taught to recognize and avoid them, along with the also endangered Stephens' kangaroo rat. Despite constant war games waged for decades by the Ninth Infantry Division, much of the 193,000-acre Yakima Firing Range may be in better shape, ecologically, than adjacent property used for cattle grazing. On the other hand, the Yakima Firing Range is visibly far more damaged than the almost adjacent 570-square-mile Department of Energy Hanford Site. The Hanford Site was established in 1942 for the purpose of extracting and processing the plutonium used in the first atomic bombs. Nuclear bombs were manufactured there for approximately 40 years; the site is now primarily a repository for radioactive waste. As early as 1958, government biologists found radioactive rabbit and coyote dung scattered over a 2,000-acre area; apparently the rabbits tunneled into contaminated earth, and were then eaten by the coyotes. Still, as Newsweek reporters Sharon Begley and Patricia King put it in a February 8 feature article, Hanford is "a study in dueling images. Ground water is contaminated with radioactivity," they explained, "and 177 unlabled tanks leak radioactive glop. But flocks of bats use the nine decaying reactors as caves and 17 rare species--among them peregrine falcons, bald eagles, pygmy rabbits, and sage grouse--make their homes on the reservation." A 1980 study by the Department of Energy discovered noteworthy numbers of redtailed hawks and ravens at Hanford, who found forests of electrical transmission towers a congenial habitat. The National Park Service recommended in 1991 that 89,000 uncontaminated acres of the Hanford site, straddling the Columbia River, should become an official wildlife refuge. Agricultural interests want to claim 57,000 acres, and the water rights that would go with them, for grazing and truck farming. Because nuclear facilities have always been protected against hunters, trappers, and other despoilers by barbed wire and armed guards, they tend to be the most hospitable of all no-man's-land to wildlife, so long as the nuclear weapons aren't detonated. In 1952 the Department of Defense evacuated the town of Ellenton, South Carolina, to create the 300-square-mile Savannah River Plant, a top-secret nuclear fuel processing center. Only 15 acres have ever been actively used. The rest are an undisturbed buffer zone--and are now home to another government institution, the Savannah River Ecology Laboratories, whose primary purpose is studying how nature reclaims the one-time plantation lands. Radioactive deer and ducks, and turtles with strontium levels 1,000 times above normal, have been discovered up to half a mile beyond the outermost fences. But the Savannah River Plant is probably the largest place in either South Carolina or nearby Georgia where deer and ducks are not under intense hunting pressure. After 15 years of captive breeding, highly endangered Mexican grey wolves are tentatively scheduled to be returned to the wild next year on the 3,152-square-mile White Sands Missile Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico (although a site in Arizona is still under consideration). The site of the first atomic explosion, White Sands includes about 1,000 acres of prime wolf habitat, and because of military protection, is believed to be the place where the wolves will have the best chance of avoiding massacre by irate ranchers, whose opposition to wolf restoration delayed publication of a release plan from 1982 until 1991. White Sands has already been the scene of another controversial predator release. For the past eight years, Wildlife Research Institute Inc. of Idaho has tracked and studied 100 pumas who were captured, radio-collared, and turned loose again on various parts of the base, under contract with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The study has multiplied knowledge of puma behavior. In December 1990 the researchers began experimentally relocating pumas to other parts of New Mexico. By abruptly depleting puma numbers in particular areas of White Sands, the translocations simulate the effects of puma hunting, yielding vital information on both puma reproduction and prey population growth. The translocations are also producing the first clear evidence of how well pumas adapt to new territory. Collecting such data is essential to insuring the survival of the species, but could be done almost nowhere else because of the militant hostility of ranchers to the presence of any pumas anywhere near their cattle and sheep. The most promising development yet for wildlife in no-man's-land came in late 1992, when the Senate ratified the transfer of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal from the Department of Defense to the Department of the Interior. Located just 10 miles from Denver, Colorado, the 17,280-acre former arsenal will become the largest urban wildlife refuge in the U.S.--after completion of a $2 billion Superfund cleanup . An estimated 6,500 acres of the site are contaminated with residues from 40 years of manufacturing chemical weapons and pesticides (1942-1982). When the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was closed, no one knew quite what to do with it, but an influx of wildlife displaced by urban sprawl during the mid-1980s answered the question. First came prairie dogs, unwelcome almost everywhere else because of their burrowing habits. The prairie dogs attracted 22 nesting pairs of burrowing owls, a transient population of about 100 bald eagles, and a permanent population of approximately 200 ferruginous hawks, the biggest concentration of the hawks in North America according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. White-tailed deer, coyotes, rabbits, and great horned owls have also become abundant amid abandoned refinery equipment and crumbling buildings. So far, the toxic wastes seem to have little effect on the wildlife, although the eagles reportedly will not eat roadkilled deer in the vicinity, who may have fed on tainted brush. Renewed human incursions may be another matter. Already, bus tours of the arsenal conducted by USFWS, the Army, the Audubon Society, and the National Wildlife Federation attract 50,000 visitors a year. Negotiating a ceasefire The long National Wildlife Refuge War has not been waged without opposition. For approximately a decade, an umbrella organization for major animal and habitat protection groups called the Wildlife Refuge Reform Coalition has tried to secure passage of various versions of a Wildlife Refuge Reform Act, intensely opposed by both the gun lobby and the military, as well as western ranchers who might lose grazing privileges on refuge land. Over the same period, hunting lobbyists have succeeded in opening scores of refuges up to hunters, often on the pretext of controlling deer populations, while the military has sought, with mixed success, to obtain use of another 4.5 million acres on top of the 25 million acres it already controls. (By comparison, the National Park system controls 26 million acres.) On February 4, 1993, Representative Sam Gibbons (D-Fla.) introduced H.R. 833, the latest edition of the Wildlife Refuge Reform Act. Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who introduced a similar measure in the last Congress, is soon to introduce a Senate companion version. Chances for passage have never been better. While twelve years of Republican administrations, 1981-1992, were openly hostile to wildlife refuge reform, the Bill Clinton administration appears friendly--and not only because vice president Albert Gore supported all previous attempts to pass a Wildlife Refuge Reform Act during his years in the Senate. On February 23, Clinton ordered Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to cut grazing, timber, mining, and water subsidies, by raising use fees for federal lands to market rates--a 400% increase for many ranchers, and an even steeper hike than that for miners, who acquire mineral rights for as little as $2.50 an acre under a fee structure set in 1872. The same day, Clinton nominated Wildlife Refuge Reform Act co-architect George Frampton Jr. to become Assistant Secretary for National Parks and Wildlife. Frampton is currently president of the Wilderness Society. Clinton also nominated former Wilderness Society board member Jim Baca to head the Bureau of Land Management. Now land commissioner for the state of New Mexico, Baca bucked the ranching and hunting lobbies bigtime on November 16, 1992, when he threw the federal Animal Damage Control program off New Mexico state lands for refusing to check traps more often than once every 72 hours. The ADC, essentially a tax-supported exterminating firm for ranchers, killed 2.5 million animals in 1991, at cost of $25.8 million, and is widely regarded in environmental and animal protection circles as a boondoggle. Both the Frampton and Baca appointments must be confirmed by the Senate, which is, however, controlled by Democrats inclined to align with Clinton. In addition to securing wildlife refuge reform, the Clinton administration and the current Congress will preside over downsizing the U.S. military to reflect the end of the Cold War. At least 165 military facilities are scheduled for closing and conversion to other purposes during the next seven years, including sale for development. With the human population and resultant economic pressures growing in even the least populated parts of the U.S., this may be our last opportunity to return land other than rocks and ice to wilderness, and to keep it wild. --Merritt Clifton The price of conversion MADISON, Indiana -- The pros and cons of converting no-man's land into wildlife refuges are nowhere more evident than at the 57,600-acre Jefferson Proving Ground. Since 1941, Army personnel have fired more than 23 million artillery, mortar, and tank rounds at Jefferson, including 1.4 million dud rounds that may still go off at any minute. The Army wants to close Jefferson, to save $7 million a year. But the closure will cost southern Indiana at least 410 civilian jobs. Virtually the only alternative use for the site would be as a wildlife refuge, which would require the least amount of clean-up. But even removing enough unexploded ordinance to make Jefferson minimally safe for refuge personnel could run as high as $550 million. Despite all the shooting, the edges of Jefferson are still forested, while the firing ranges, carpeted with wildflowers, attract birds and butterflies. Whether or not Jefferson is formally designated a wldlife refuge, chances are it will be increasingly important to wildlife as the human presence diminishes.