An American Kestrel perched atop a pole at Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge. Photo by the author.

Finding Common Ground in New Mexico’s National Wildlife Refuges

By Jay Cooney
Nestled behind New Mexico’s largest city is a beacon of hope, where South Valley community members rejected industrial development in favor of creating the Southwest’s first urban wildlife refuge. At Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge, community is central to a rewilding project. This commitment is reflected in its visitor center, where one can peruse a small library on topics ranging from Indigenous land defense to ecological economics while watching a flock of Sandhill Cranes touch down just outside. These books and the land conveyed a shared vision: our relationship with ecology, one of exploitation or caretaking, is rooted in how we treat our own communities. Valle de Oro carries the forward-thinking legacy of America’s National Wildlife Refuge System.
Since their 1903 inception as federal bird reserves protecting pelicans from market hunters, America’s National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) have always been visionary in scope. Today, NWRs encompass 850 million acres of land and water, constituting the world’s largest public lands network dedicated to wildlife conservation. Over 200 NWRs were established specifically to preserve waterways, wetlands, and other stopover habitats essential to bird migration. Six of New Mexico’s NWRs are less than a 2½ hour drive from Santa Fe, providing free access to birdwatching opportunities across unique ecosystems.
In northeastern New Mexico, where the Great Plains and Sangre de Cristo Mountains meet, expansive short-grass prairie is preserved by the Las Vegas, Rio Mora, and Maxwell National Wildlife Refuges. Though sometimes belittled as flat or featureless, prairie ecosystems are remnants of the American Serengeti whose wildlife abundance stirred the souls of various cultures. These NWRs’ plains and wetlands continue to support habitat for declining grassland birds, including breeding pairs of Long-billed Curlew. A plaque at Las Vegas NWR reminds us that grasslands’ native flowers also help sustain us, as approximately one out of every three bites of food we take is made possible by pollinators.
South of Albuquerque, the Valle de Oro, Sevilleta, and Bosque del Apache NWRs conserve the diversity of avian life that springs from the Rio Grande. This riparian corridor is world-renowned for the thousands of migrating Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese that descend upon it each winter. Refuge managers use gates and ditches to mimic natural flooding cycles, enhancing habitat for threatened species like Southwestern Willow Flycatchers. Two of these NWRs also overlap with the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, one of the most biodiverse deserts on Earth.
The primary challenge facing NWRs is chronic underfunding, with nearly half left without on-site staff. This condition worsened in February, when approximately 250 NWR staff members were fired as part of the dismissal of thousands of federal public land workers. Recognizing these layoffs as foreshadowing attempts to privatize wildlands for extraction, grassroots organizations like New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and Backcountry Hunters & Anglers are leading bipartisan efforts to keep public lands in public hands. Incomplete as New Mexico would be without the trumpeting of cranes over the Rio Grande, or strutting of curlews across the plains, National Wildlife Refuges should be a cause with common ground.

Jay Cooney is a Naturalist at Wild Birds Unlimited of Santa Fe