BirdCapeMay.org

Virginia Rettig is the deputy wildlife refuge manager of the Cape May National Wildlife Refuge complex, which now stands at about 11,500 acres—with a target of over 22,000—and includes the Supawna Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Salem County.  Established in 1989, the refuge provides breeding habitat for Red-shouldered Hawks, Bald Eagles, Barred Owls, Piping Plovers, Least Terns, and many others, and provides critical habitat for the migrant birds of eastern North America.

I first met Virginia in the fall of 2007 while we were leaders on a trip at Brig’, and she struck me then, as she still does, as the antithesis of blasé—an expert with the enthusiasm of a beginner, a rare gift.  She’s become an integral part of the fabled “Cape May community”, a distant island I can only visit irregularly.

RR:  You came to Cape May from a national wildlife refuge in Louisiana.  What did you do before that?
VR:  I was raised in Buffalo, and got my bachelor’s degree at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse, and then I somehow decided to get a master’s degree—I don’t know why—and applied to schools, and it all worked out with Louisiana State University…and so I got a degree in wildlife biology from there in 1994.

RR:  That’s a great school…so many terrific biologists and ornithologists have come from there, two of whom are good friends of mine.
VR:  And then I applied for jobs around the country and landed a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS, FWS), in Louisiana.

RR:  Was that at a specific refuge?
VR:  I actually worked first at the Louisiana field office, in Lafayette…which deals, like the New Jersey field office does, in private land issues…so I did a lot of permitting, 404 Permits…going out and being the official expert on wildlife and habitat in development projects…and that was an extremely depressing job, which I worked for about two-and-a-half years, but it was not a permanent position.  So when a job came up at a refuge in southern Louisiana, a low-level manager position, I got that…which became permanent and that got me into the National Wildlife Refuge System.

RR:  So refuge management is a different branch from the part of USFWS that deals with endangered species like Bog Turtles or Bald Eagles?
VR: The FWS is broken into services: the refuges, private land management and permitting, endangered species, law enforcement, and several others, but all the divisions work closely together.

RR:  What was that first refuge?
VR:  It was Bayou Sauvage, about 23,000 acres of refuge, all within the city limits of New Orleans…I got to work in several refuges, but that was the main one. 

RR:  Have you been back since Hurricane Katrina, to see what kind of damage was done to the refuge and the landscape?
VR:  Not to New Orleans, but I go back to Louisiana every year, and I’ve seen the huge damage that Rita did to the southwestern part of the state that same summer.

RR:  Did you ever get the idea, when you were working in Louisiana that something very bad was eventually going to happen?
VR:  Oh yes!  When you’re out there, it’s just marsh between you and the ocean, and the storm surge—it’s referred to as the “vicious tidal surge”—and it just comes in across thirty miles of marsh, and it’s huge. 

RR:  I remember once reading in a John McPhee book, The Control of Nature, about the control structure further up the Mississippi River to the north of New Orleans, where water—and silt—was being diverted down the Atchafalaya River…and he plainly said, back in 1988 or 89, that New Orleans—much of it below sea level by that time—was eventually and inevitably going to be hit very badly.
VR:  Actually the high riverbank areas of New Orleans were fine. The river kept on flowing right by during the hurricane…the damage was because the levees broke in places…It wasn’t the river levees that blew, the city was flooded by the levees that broke around the canals, and the water came in from the lake.

RR:  Many people have stories—origin tales—about just when, or how they got interested in birds and the outdoors.  Do you?
VR:  You know, I have no idea.  I grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, and there was a little patch of woods by my friend’s house, and we always played there…but my family never went birding—we hardly ever went camping!  But we always had a cat…

…and I think it was the summer before my senior year and I was…“talking with my cat”…and I thought, “I could work with animals my whole life.”  So I went to my friendly local vet’s, got to watch some surgery, and I saw him remove a tumor from the spleen of a Chihuahua that was about the size of a softball—and I nearly died; I was green.  So that wasn’t quite what I wanted to do…all the handholding that has to go along with being a veterinarian, I knew that wasn’t my style.  So, completely serendipitously I guess, a friend was going to go to the Syracuse College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and I thought that sounded good…So I was really lucky, and how much of that decision was conscious, I have no idea.

RR:  So you were a “Stumpy”—the nickname the foresters have at Syracuse?  Did you take any courses that really affected you?
VR:  Yes, I’m a Stumpy…and, well, a lot of the work was really burdensome, hard…you had to learn the genus and species of practically every plant in the woods…and all the birds and all the reptiles and mammals and the insects…I never took a course in ichthyology, so I’m completely incompetent around fish, which has hurt sometimes… 

But between your junior and senior year the program had a camp in Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks, and you stay there for six or eight weeks, and I took a job up there helping a grad student on a White-throated Sparrow project…before that I had been all about mammals, I was going to work with mammals. 

But within days of working on this sparrow project I was hooked.  One day I was walking on a trail and I immediately saw a Rose-breasted Grosbeak and a Scarlet Tanager…just amazing, even with these horrible little 8 x 30 binoculars I had…and when I saw those two birds it changed my life forever.  To see a Scarlet Tanager and a Rose-breasted Grosbeak for the first time ever—who would’ve thought such things existed! I had no idea up until then how incredible birds were.

RR:  So you did have an “Ah-ha!” moment.
VR:  That was it!

RR:  When exactly did you come to Cape May?
VR:  It will be four years this September, but I had been here before, visiting and birding.  I had been in Louisiana for thirteen years at that point…I had worked at the Bogue Chitto refuge, and Cat Island NWR, north of Baton Rouge—12,000 acres—and which is the last un-leveed stretch of the Mississippi in the south, and which gets seriously flooded every year, sixteen feet of water in the refuge…I was the first refuge employee there…I started that new refuge, which I’m kind of proud of.

But by 2004 I had decided I needed something new, and I was by then a seasoned bird watcher in Louisiana, pretty much birding nonstop since 1991.

RR:  So you’d birded here before?
VR:  I had been to Cape May on vacation, but never in the fall…never realizing, thinking that, like in Louisiana, spring was the best time to be here as it is most everywhere…but in Cape May, which is good in spring, the best time to be here is in the fall. 

…on one trip driving around with friends I noticed the Blue Goose national wildlife refuge signs on Kimble Beach Road, the new Cape May National Wildlife Refuge—there was this little hovel of an office there—and realized that here was a place I could work.

RR:  So your official title here is?
VR:  It’s deputy refuge manager…actually they’ve changed the name again…it’s deputy wildlife refuge manager.  So I lucked out…I’m a birdwatcher, and what birdwatcher wouldn’t want to live and work in Cape May?  There’s this amazing community here, and I’ll try to extend my stay in Cape May for as long as possible.

RR:  Over the last thirty years I’ve gotten to know a lot of people who live in the Cape May area, and it’s grown to become a remarkable community, not just of birders, but accomplished all-around naturalists, artists, and professionals…it has no equal anywhere.  And you’ve become part of that group.
VR:  I make that same argument—I just don’t think that there’s another birding/nature community of the stature of Cape May anywhere in this county.  It’s just so different from anyplace else. 

RR:  It gets a little grim down here in winter sometimes, doesn’t it?
VR:  We are remote, especially during the winter, and there’s not an expansive social life, but we make our own…My best friends down here are Pat and Clay, BJ Pinnock, and Jimmy and Dale Watson, part of the “Goshen Tribe.”  It’s great to be part of their network, they invite me over to meet people they think I’d like…I adore George Myers, who can come up with good birds even on slow days.  And I love the Bay-Atlantic Symphony, which sometimes plays down here.

RR:  And you’re involved with other things, I hear.
VR:  I love birding, but I’m very involved with backyard wildlife habitat, big-time, and I’ve started working with the Nature Center of Cape May and others on backyard habitat, how people can improve their yards for habitat for birds and butterflies.  I first learned this in Louisiana, but when I moved here I had to learn all new plants from Pat and others.  I learned so much from her, and she just reached out to me…we had an instantaneous connection. 

RR:  Do you keep a life list?
VR:  I do keep a life list…but not a lot of other lists.  I have a book I bought in 1991 that has a place for a list, and I keep it in there so I can remember what I saw and where.  A year and a half ago I hit 550, and since then I’ve had at least another ten, all probably in Cape May, so it’s around 560.  I’m certainly not a twitcher myself…my problem, if it is a problem, is that I don’t drop everything and chase rare birds…so I haven’t seen Fork-tailed Flycatcher and other things, though I did manage to see the Barnacle Goose…But I do come into work late if the birding’s good.

Chasing pinned-down birds is something of a disappointment sometimes…like seeing the Whooping Cranes on a trip to Rockport, Texas…I knew I was going to see them; but there was this Clapper Rail and a Reddish Egret on the trip—birds I didn’t expect—which seemed more rewarding.  It’s the things you find yourself…I once let my dog out at 4 a.m. and heard a Barn Owl scream, and I couldn’t believe it, it was so amazing.

We leave the office and take a walk on the refuge’s Songbird Trail (built jointly with the Nature Conservancy, which owns adjacent lands) that winds through fields and Cape May forest, upland and wetland, a mixture of pitch pine, red maple, oaks, sweet gum, American hollies and other species; I’ve seen loblolly pine, a rare tree in New Jersey, here in past years.  A Prairie Warbler is singing from a nearby sumac, a Blue Grosbeak is nearby, and a late Blackpoll is whispering in the distance.

RR:  Is the ecology here as fire-related as the Pine Barrens are?  Do you do controlled burning?
VR:  A little bit, but mostly we do mechanical manipulation…we’re just not giving up on management.  We’ve got lots of invasive species—multiflora rose, autumn olive, Japanese honeysuckle, those are the big ones—though it’s amazing there’s not much porcelain berry here the way there is at Higbees. There was much more of a pine component here in earlier times, but now the hardwood forest, the oaks particularly, are very valuable to migrants…the Pine Barrens to the north aren’t very good for bird migration.

RR:  What do you think about the work done in the South Cape May Meadows done by the Nature Conservancy and the Army Corps of Engineers?
VR:   It was definitely worthwhile…and it was definitely not a pristine habitat to begin with, but the Phragmites control is going to take a lot of work over a long time.  From a habitat point of view, it’s exciting.

RR:  There used to be a lot of rare plants there and at the Cape May Point State Park.
VR:  If there’s a seed base in there, it will be interesting to see what comes back…plants like milkweed can come back after restoration work.

RR:  Tell me a little about the Cape May National Wildlife Refuge. 
VR:  It was established in 1989, and there are now more than 11,000 acres scattered around, from Tuckahoe in the north to Rio Grande in the south, plus the Two Mile Beach unit at the Coast Guard Station, which is 450 acres, so we’re really spread out.

VR:  We’ve now got more personnel than we’ve ever had, but are just now finally going through a planning process to see what kind of habitats we have, and the needs of species that are in them.  Do we manage for forest, or do we cut trees and manage for grassland?

…On a large scale, Cape May is not that important to the breeding birds of North America, but Cape May is highly critical for migration and wintering…migrating birds in Cape May use every piece of habitat and vegetation that we have.

RR:  Is there a name for this place where we are right now?
VR:  This section from Goshen down to Rio Grande is the Delaware Bay Division, and there’s the Great Cedar Swamp Division, which is in the Tuckahoe area, and then the Two Mile Beach unit.

A Red-spotted Purple flies by, and Virginia identifies a Painted Lady, and a Tiger Swallowtail.  I see a Little Wood Satyr, and we puzzle over a duskywing for a while.

RR:  So you’ve been learning your butterflies?
VR:  In my garden particularly, but I’ve been hesitant to get seriously interested in them; I don’t know how much capacity I have left in my brain…

RR:  Favorite places to eat?
VR:  I love Freda’s—the first (and only) time I had crawfish in a meal in New Jersey was at Freda’s the other week.

RR:  Are you planning to stay here long-term?   
VR:  I’m happier in Cape May County than I have been anywhere…I love living here, I have great friends in this community, some of my best friends ever…I’d love to try to keep my house when I do move on, to have a place to come back to…but I am not ready to permanently leave Cape May.   I have no reason to.

I do go back to see old friends in Louisiana every year, and I still have a life there, it’s not like I’m just visiting.  But there’s really nothing like Cape May anywhere.

RR:  I can still detect a little southern drawl in your speech—not as much as a year ago when I first met you, but it’s there.
VR:  It’s a little bit of several places…People from the North ask me, “Where’re you from?”, and in Louisiana and down South they say, “Where’re you from?”

RR:  Do you have any favorite birding spot in Cape May?
VR:  The Villas Wildlife Management Area is about a half-mile from my house, and I now go there more than anywhere else in the county…you can take your dog, there’s lots of birds…there are even Red-headed Woodpeckers, though I don’t know exactly where the nest cavity is.

I really love Cape May Point State Park and the new boardwalk, and they’ve done so much work to improve the area.

What I love about Cape May birding is that people can see a good bird, and other people will be looking at it from another point in the area, and you can share details and confirmation, that’s so cool, and that doesn’t happen anywhere else that I can think of.