Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge

A tricolored heron (Refuge Reporter)

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A fantastic place to see a splendid variety of birds, Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge attracts nearly 1.5 million visitors a year. Half of them, however, are summer visitors coming not to see birds, but rather to swim and to see the ponies. Chincoteague has the distinction of being within a national seashore as well as the home of a legendary herd of wild ponies. Moreover, the refuge is so important to the local economy that more than one-third of all the local jobs are attributable to refuge visitation.

Attempts in the 1980s to prepare this highly popular refuge for the future became stymied when desires by the gateway town of Chincoteague to further capitalize on tourism appeared to run headlong into the needs of wildlife. But interest in a planning process persisted, and a refuge master plan was finally developed and approved in 1992. A visitor center complex is included in the plan. "With so many visitors," says manager Schroer, "we have a tremendous opportunity to get the word out on refuges." Only Merritt Island NWR in Florida and Wichita Mountains NWR in Oklahoma attract greater numbers of visitors.

The refuge is located on the Virginia portion of 37-mile-long Assateague Island, a barrier island along the coast of Virginia and Maryland separated by a narrow bay from smaller Chincoteague Island, where the town of Chincoteague is located. The refuge was established in 1943 with funds derived from the sale of duck stamps. The land was bought from a Baltimore family who had earlier contributed to the demise of the island's community of Assateague Village. The villagers were forbidden by the landowners from crossing their private land to Toms Cove, where the islanders earned their livelihood by performing commercial oystering. Forced to move, the villagers dragged their houses to barges and floated them to Chincoteague Island, where a fishing industry continues to exist, although scaled back from what it once was. Schroer hopes to include the village site as a cultural resource on a new trail and water impoundment sometime in the future.

Later land acquisitions increased the size of the refuge from the original purchase of 8,800 acres to the present 13,600 acres, which include all or part of three other barrier islands and several islands in Chincoteague Bay. The refuge was isolated from the mainland until the 1960s, when the Assateague Island National Seashore was authorized and a bridge was built to connect Assateague Island with Chincoteague Island for the first time.

Rachel Carson explained why the refuge site was selected in the first of a series of booklets on refuges she initiated in 1946. She said that federal biologists, after years of searching, decided that the "wild seacoast island" was the best spot to fill the gap between Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge and Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in southern Virginia and to "provide protection and breeding territory for the greatest number of species."