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Wildlife Refuges Face Threat in Eastern North Carolina

© Stephen Strother

It is always a thrill to me to drive through the coastal plain of North Carolina. Traveling from West to East the coastal plain of North Carolina begins somewhere just east of Raleigh and extends all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Agriculture is still the predominant industry in this part of the state and farmland and forests often stretch for miles between small towns on sparsely traveled farm roads. The closer you get to the coast the more wild the scenery becomes. The terrain becomes very swampy especially in the Northeastern corner of North Carolina where part of the expansive Great Dismal Swamp still exists. Peat bogs, pocosins (a unique type of swampy wetlands characterized by a vegetation mixture of broadleaf evergreen shrub and pond pine), forests (mostly pine), and farmland make up the landscape here. This is a landscape that has withstood the test of time. This area of North Carolina is too remote a place for nature to be threatened by urban sprawl (except in beach towns). Great national and state parks as well as wildlife refuges protect hundreds of thousands of acres of this landscape and create safe haven for hundreds of wildlife species. Lake Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge alone is home to over 800 species for part or all of the year.

Ironically, it is the area's remoteness that may endanger it (and its wildlife) the most. The United States Navy is searching for a location to build a new Outlying Landing Field (OLF) and six of the seven proposed locations are located in eastern North Carolina. The proposed OLF would be built so that pilots of F/A-18 Super Hornet jets can practice landings and takeoffs. It would be constructed specifically to reduce the number of noisy takeoffs and landings at Oceana Field in the populated Norfolk/Hampton/Virginia Beach, VA area (the jet squadrons would still be based at Oceana and other existing airfields but would use the OLF strictly for practice - up to 100 takeoffs and landings per day). Faced with organized citizen complaints regarding the noise around Oceana Field the Navy has decided to look elsewhere for a possible solution – somewhere where there are not that many people to be bothered by the noise. Using these criteria some areas of eastern North Carolina look like perfect alternatives, however, when you have low densities of human populations you often have high densities of wildlife.

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