On our regular road trips to Longboat Key, Florida, my wife and I like to take varying routes, thereby encountering a diversity of landscapes and ecosystems. This time, we crossed the Appalachians in order to revisit old friends (see The Flying Ewe) and then set our sights on the Delmarva Peninsula, east of Chesapeake Bay. Traveling southward through that land of wetlands, pine woods and chicken farms, I was looking forward to visiting the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, renowned for its Atlantic beaches, coastal marshes and wild horses.
My image of the refuge and its setting was first sullied by a seemingly endless chain of billboards along the causeway that leads from the mainland to Chincoteague Island. Once on that heavily developed real estate, we cruised down Maddox Avenue, lined with gaudy tourist traps.
Relieved to escape across Assateague Channel to enter the Wildlife Refuge, we soon enjoyed spectacular vistas of wooded wetlands, filled with a pleasing mix of coastal birds and, to our delight, a small herd of wild horses.
Unfortunately, my initial enthusiasm diminished significantly when we reached the dune-lined coast. There I observed what appeared to be a large public beach; hordes of humans and their vehicles stretched along the sandy shore, a scene of recreation rather than conservation. In all my visits to National Wildlife Refuges across our varied country, I have never encountered such a disturbing sight. Proudly proclaiming to be "one of the most visited National Wildlife Refuges in the nation," Chincoteague personnel fail to acknowledge that most of those patrons are primarily interested in the sun and surf, not in the wild residents for which the refuge was established.
