A visit earlier this year to the San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge in Stanislaus County revealed a troubling scene: the Vierra Wetlands, normally a magnet for more than 100 species of migratory birds during the winter months, sat bone dry. Gone were the snowy egrets, northern shovelers and vividly plumed wood ducks that typically fill the marsh. In their place was a barren basin ringed by withered cattails and bulrush.

The culprit wasn’t drought. It was a staffing gap. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has no refuge manager on-site to handle the routine but essential task of opening the levees that allow the seasonal wetlands to flood. The employee who used to manage that job retired back in 2024, and the position has sat vacant ever since.

It’s a scenario unfolding across wildlife refuges nationwide, including many of California’s 35 refuges. Chronic understaffing at federal land management agencies—a trend that predates the current administration but has accelerated under President Trump’s second term—has left refuge managers stretched thin and unable to keep up with basic habitat maintenance.

“For an agency that already cut the fat… it’s not even at the bone now. It’s just lopping off limbs,” said Desirée Sorenson-Groves, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, an advocacy group tracking the cuts.

The stakes are particularly high for the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where open space is scarce compared with coastal regions rich in state and regional parks. The refuge is part of a much larger web of public lands across California that sustains wildlife, protects sensitive ecosystems and helps safeguard drinking water supplies from encroaching development.

Eric Hopson, a retired wildlife manager who once oversaw the San Joaquin River refuge, said the hands-on management isn’t optional anymore given how much the region’s natural waterways have been altered over the decades.

“Our rivers and wetlands are very altered. For that reason, they don’t take care of themselves anymore,” Hopson said. “So for better or worse, we humans have to take care of the wetlands.”

Without someone dedicated to operating the levees and timing the seasonal flooding, the wetlands simply don’t function as they should—leaving migratory birds without the rest stop they’ve relied on for generations along the Pacific Flyway.

In other news around the region and state:

Cal State University students faced unexpected confusion this summer after a delay in federal financial aid processing pushed back when they learned how much assistance they’d receive for the upcoming school year. The holdup stemmed from new fraud-prevention measures implemented by the U.S. Office of Federal Student Aid, which meant CSU campuses received aid determination data as much as six weeks later than usual. Some students didn’t find out their award amounts until just before classes started, or even after tuition payment deadlines had passed. April Grommo, an assistant vice chancellor with the CSU Chancellor’s Office, called the timing highly unusual and urged students to stay in close contact with their financial aid offices and check school email regularly.

A federal judge appears ready to place new restrictions on immigration enforcement tactics used during last year’s sweeps across Los Angeles and Southern California. In a tentative ruling issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong signaled she may order agents to stop making warrantless arrests unless they’ve first evaluated whether a person poses a flight risk. If finalized, she would become at least the fifth federal judge to rein in the practice of detaining individuals without first verifying their immigration status. The ruling follows court filings last month that included text messages and body camera footage allegedly showing agents using racial slurs while identifying targets, which attorneys for detained immigrants say demonstrates that agents were targeting people based on appearing Latino. Federal officials have defended their approach, arguing that a person’s own acknowledgment of their immigration status can justify an arrest without a warrant.

And in Sacramento, a proposal that could have paved the way for reintroducing grizzly bears to California was voted down by state lawmakers Thursday. While animal welfare advocates supported the idea, ranchers and hunting groups pushed back hard against returning the apex predator to the state’s wild lands, and the measure failed to advance.

Original source: CalMatters

The post Federal Staffing Cuts Leave California Wildlife Refuge Struggling to Track Its Birds appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

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

The post Federal Staffing Cuts Leave Once-Thriving Wetlands Dry, and the Birds Are Disappearing appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.