2006.08.10: August 10, 2006: Headlines: COS - Guatemala: Parks: Wildlife: Poaching: Stirling Echoes Sentine: Guatemala RPCV Steve Henry is deputy manager of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, a corner of the world he calls a “natural oasis surrounded by a sea of humanity"

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Guatemala: Peace Corps Guatemala: The Peace Corps in Guatemala: 2006.08.10: August 10, 2006: Headlines: COS - Guatemala: Parks: Wildlife: Poaching: Stirling Echoes Sentine: Guatemala RPCV Steve Henry is deputy manager of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, a corner of the world he calls a “natural oasis surrounded by a sea of humanity"

By Admin1 (admin) (ppp-70-250-73-144.dsl.okcyok.swbell.net - 70.250.73.144) on Saturday, August 19, 2006 - 11:16 am: Edit Post

Guatemala RPCV Steve Henry is deputy manager of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, a corner of the world he calls a “natural oasis surrounded by a sea of humanity"

Guatemala RPCV Steve Henry is deputy manager of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, a corner of the world he calls a “natural oasis surrounded by a sea of humanity

“I worked for two years as the field manager of a biosphere reserve in Guatemala,” said Henry, where he lived in a tiny village on the edge of the rain forest and oversaw a team of park rangers and led reforestation and environmental education efforts. “We also patrolled poaching,” said Henry. “They had problems with the poaching of mountain lions, tapir and monkeys. People would also go into the reserve and illegally collect birds like macaws and parrots for the pet trade. Henry completed his assignment in Central America and returned to the United States, but not without maintaining contact with a Guatemalan woman named Mayra whom Henry later married. The couple has two sons. “When you experience something like the Peace Corps, you live in an unencumbered way. It’s very liberating." He said he and his wife sit on the back porch of their home on Pleasant Plains Road, Chatham, and they watch their sons play in the wilderness of the swamp and tell each other they can’t believe they’re in New Jersey.

Guatemala RPCV Steve Henry is deputy manager of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, a corner of the world he calls a “natural oasis surrounded by a sea of humanity"

Swamp’s new deputy manager returns to the inspiration where it all began

By Max Pizarro Staff Writer

08/10/2006

LONG HILL TWP. - Young Steve Henry first made contact with the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge on a school field trip years ago.

It was after that childhood sojourn especially that Henry, a the native of East Hanover, grew up conscious of the idea that a wild jungle was in his backyard.

Little did he know back then, that it was also in his career path. Today, Henry is deputy manager of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, a corner of the world he calls a “natural oasis surrounded by a sea of humanity.”

As he looks back on his last 13 years with the Fish and Wildlife Service, Henry said it’s good to be back in Jersey, where his dedication to understanding and preserving the environment began; a dedication that led him to the rainforests of Guatemala, the desert country of Arizona and the Northern Great Plains of Montana – and back to the swamp finally.

“It’s a natural jewel,” Henry said of the 7,700-acre refuge that includes a portion of long Hill Township. “This place has always been about the natural world, but besides that, it’s been about neighbors supporting the refuge as part of a grassroots movement to protect this area from a jetport. The level of support the refuge receives, from top to bottom, from the halls of Congress to our neighbors is tremendous.”

Son of George and Ellen Henry of East Hanover, the budding biologist graduated from Hanover Park High School and attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he received his undergraduate degree in biology.

He went to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., for his Master’s degree in wildlife ecology.

He would go into the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1993, but first came a tour of duty in the Peace Corps.

“I worked for two years as the field manager of a biosphere reserve in Guatemala,” said Henry, where he lived in a tiny village on the edge of the rain forest and oversaw a team of park rangers and led reforestation and environmental education efforts.

“We also patrolled poaching,” said Henry. “They had problems with the poaching of mountain lions, tapir and monkeys. People would also go into the reserve and illegally collect birds like macaws and parrots for the pet trade.”

Henry completed his assignment in Central America and returned to the United States, but not without maintaining contact with a Guatemalan woman named Mayra whom Henry later married. The couple has two sons.

When the Fish and Wildlife Service hired him he started out at a refuge in Arizona called Cabeza Prieta, a stretch of desert country on the Mexican border where there were more diamond back than Mojave rattlesnakes and far more Mojaves than people.

“I’d never been in a place that harsh and desolate,” Henry said of his Sonoran Desert assignment. “The nature of the habitat is very sparse. Of course, you don’t have the diversity of plants that you have here. The landscape is laid bare. It’s the most dangerous place. If you got out there and twisted an ankle or got a flat tire and you weren’t prepared, you could be dead in eight hours.”

Part of his job in Arizona included monitoring and helping the Sonoran pronghorn survive in a drought-ridden landscape - “especially dry,” Henry said, “over the last 15 years.” There is over-predation, too, by coyotes on pronghorn fawns, and habitat fragmentation.

“Historically these animals roamed hundreds of miles in any direction,” said the deputy manager. “Since the landscape has become more compartmentalized and fragmented, the animals can’t range as far and freely as they once did.”

After Arizona came Henry’s next and to this point, longest, assignment: eastern Montana, where he worked for almost ten years at the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge, a spread of 1.1 million acres on the northern Great Plains that includes a stretch of the Missouri River.

There he helped the black-footed ferret population maintain a toehold on life.

“They live in prairie dog towns,” he said. “But the number of prairie dogs has plummeted in recent times. There are only a small number of what they were 100 years ago. What we were doing was working on creating a self-sustaining ferret population in the refuge.”

The ferrets feed on prairie dogs. Because the prairie dogs are dwindling so are the ferrets. One species that has fared well at the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge has been elk, a herd of which at the refuge Henry calls “world class.”

“The herd,” he said, “is the result of a re-introduction in the 1950s. They were introduced on the refuge and their numbers have exploded. There are a couple of thousand elk in that herd.”

The Thread

Born in Essex, raised in Morris, Henry in his early forties has come home with his own family to face the particular challenges of the swamp as invasive species like knotweed, stiltgrass, multi-flora rose and phragmitis eat away at the indigenous features of the watershed. He can also look back now at the village in the jungle, and the small town in the plains.

“You wind up realizing how many things we have that we don’t need,” he said. “When you experience something like the Peace Corps, you live in an unencumbered way. It’s very liberating. Then moving from Guatemala to the rural west, to a very small town in rural Montana, you come to appreciate a slower pace of life, community, and the people who would go out of their way to give you the shirts off their backs. Friday nights can get a bit long, that’s true. They don’t have a lot of cultural events out there. But you make up for it in the social ways in which people interact. There was always something going on in the community – but it was local stuff.”

He said he and his wife sit on the back porch of their home on Pleasant Plains Road, Chatham, and they watch their sons play in the wilderness of the swamp and tell each other they can’t believe they’re in New Jersey.

“When I told people I wanted to come back here they said I was crazy,” said Henry. “Their attitude is that everything east of the Mississippi is sidewalks and strip malls. But the swamp has been a thread through my life. It’s where I’ve wanted to be for a long time.”





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Story Source: Stirling Echoes Sentine

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Guatemala; Parks; Wildlife; Poaching

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