A patch of Central Valley wetlands that once buzzed with the calls of more than 100 bird species through the winter months sat largely dry and silent this past season — not because of drought, but because there was no one left on staff to open the water gates that keep it alive.
The Vierra Wetlands, a roughly 50-acre stretch within the 7,500-acre San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge west of Modesto, is normally flooded each fall to welcome migratory birds traveling the Pacific Flyway. Snowy egrets, northern shovelers and wood ducks are among the species that typically stop there to rest and feed. Last winter, many of them simply didn’t show up, because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service no longer has enough employees to manage the seasonal flooding that sustains the habitat.
The problem extends well beyond this one refuge. Staffing shortages across federal land management agencies — worsened sharply during President Donald Trump’s second term — have left many of California’s 35 national wildlife refuges without the personnel needed to keep them functioning as intended.
At Vierra Wetlands, what should be marshland alive with waterfowl, shorebirds and beavers has instead become a stand of dried-out cattails and bulrushes. With no refuge manager stationed on-site, there’s no one readily available to maintain trails, ensure visitor safety, issue permits or monitor the health of the ecosystem.
“For an agency that already cut the fat … it’s not even at the bone now,” said Desirée Sorenson-Groves, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association. “It’s just lopping off limbs.”
Someone has to run the water
Eric Hopson spent 30 years working for the wildlife service, the last 23 of them overseeing the San Joaquin River refuge. When he retired in April 2024 at age 64, he assumed a replacement would be hired fairly quickly.
The refuge holds particular value in the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where public open space is far scarcer than along the coast. It’s part of a broader system of protected lands across California that shelters wildlife, safeguards fragile habitats and helps protect drinking water supplies from development pressure.
Beyond greeting birders and visiting families, Hopson said his favorite part of the job was managing the water itself — coordinating with neighboring farms and drawing from Hospital and Ingram creeks to flood the wetland basin each fall, timed to the arrival of migrating birds, then letting it recede again by spring.
“Our rivers and wetlands are very altered,” Hopson said. “For that reason, they don’t take care of themselves anymore. So for better or worse, we humans have to take care of the wetlands.”
His entire crew consisted of himself and one equipment operator who maintained trails, installed water-control pipes and handled whatever else needed doing. When that colleague retired a year before Hopson, the refuge was already stretched thin. By the time Hopson left too, the position remained unfilled — and then, seven months later, Trump won reelection.
Deeper cuts follow years of decline
Even before Hopson’s departure, the national wildlife refuge system had been shedding staff for more than a decade, a trend that carried through the Obama and Biden administrations alike. Refuges nationwide lost 30% of their workforce between 2010 and 2025, according to the National Wildlife Refuge Association, and more than half now have no staff physically present — a category the San Joaquin refuge joined once Hopson left.
“It’s crucial that we have people in those roles to support those ecosystems,” said Matthew Hutchinson, an assistant professor in UC Merced’s life and environmental sciences department. “The planning they have to do to make sure the water is in the right place, at the right time, at the right depth and for the right amount of time is really crucial to the success of these ecosystems.”
Early in his second term, Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency, placing tech billionaire Elon Musk at the helm of an effort billed as rooting out government waste. Before disbanding in July, DOGE moved through numerous federal agencies with minimal oversight, cutting staff, canceling grants and dismantling diversity-related programs.
While some employees have since been reinstated, one estimate based on federal data put the total job losses from DOGE at roughly 350,000 positions nationwide. Fish and Wildlife Service staffing dropped from 9,957 employees in 2024 to 8,179 by the end of May 2025 — an 18% reduction — according to the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focused on endangered species protection. Watchdog groups found California was hit harder than nearly any other state, second only to Colorado, losing 14% of its workforce across nine public land agencies.
“The second Trump administration and DOGE accelerated any preexisting challenges through their hiring freezes, their massive workforce reductions and all the restructuring across many federal agencies,” said Mary Lunetta, national conservation strategist with the Sierra Club. “It left fewer people to maintain everything from mountain trails and campgrounds, to doing critical scientific research and restoration of habitats, issuing permits and fighting invasive species.”
A poll released last week by the advocacy group Power in Nature found that nearly 70% of California voters across party lines want their member of Congress to back legislation blocking further cuts to park and public lands staffing.
Hopson doesn’t place blame on Trump specifically, but said conditions have steadily worsened. He said DOGE largely eliminated younger, temporary employees who lacked job protections — workers he called “the hope for the future” for the agency.
“These young biologists, these young refuge managers … the younger staff that are the hope for the future — they had their legs cut out from under them,” he said.
Restoring what was lost won’t be simple
The Fish and Wildlife Service says staff from the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge Complex office in Merced County, about an hour away, now provide support for the San Joaquin refuge. But that arrangement falls short of the on-site oversight the refuge once had, according to those who use it regularly.
Hopson had also handled special-use permits, including ones that for years let the Stanislaus Audubon Society survey heron rookeries, count nests and access restricted trails. Without him, those activities have stopped, said Sal Salerno, the group’s president.
“This year we haven’t done it,” Salerno said. “We just can’t do any of those activities. It’s very frustrating to want to volunteer and help count the birds.”
The wildlife service did not directly explain why the wetlands went unflooded last winter, but told CalMatters it intends to reflood the area this fall and that the seasonal wetlands still support upland-dependent migratory birds and resident wildlife in the meantime.
Experts caution that reviving a wetland after an extended dry spell isn’t as simple as turning the water back on. Overcorrecting can spur mosquito outbreaks or allow water-loving plants to crowd out species more valuable to the ecosystem, while vegetation that took root during the dry period may not provide adequate food for returning waterfowl.
“There are a lot of moving pieces, and just because you throw water into it doesn’t mean that it’s going to bring it back to what it was,” said John Veon, a doctoral candidate in ecology at UC Davis. “It’s not impossible to bring it back 100%, but you do have to sit and think about the challenges.”
For now, the refuge remains open to visitors — drawing roughly 11,000 trips a year, according to the wildlife service — and birds can still find similar habitat at the Sacramento and Merced national wildlife refuges nearby.
When migratory birds begin their journey south from Alaska, Canada and the Arctic this fall, they may find Vierra Wetlands flooded once more. Until then, the basin remains dry. Hopson, now living in New York, has visited a handful of times since retiring and describes the sight as sobering — though he holds sympathy for the remaining staff trying to keep things running.
“They’re just overwhelmed,” he said. “They’re heroes who are basically trying to keep the ship from sinking.”
Original source: CalMatters
