Guy Willey oral history transcript

              INTERVIEW WITH GUY WILLEY

BY MARK MADISON

MR. WILLEY: …my name is spelled G-u-y-W-i-l-l-e-y. I’m a native here. I was born

in Dorchester in 1930 about a half a mile from the Refuge.

DR. MADISON: Oh boy, just like Bill! Would you mind just telling us briefly when

you came to work for FWS?

MR. WILLEY: I graduated from High School in 1948 and I came to work here as a

summer employee in 1949. I actually was on a contract out of Washington where the

surveyors were buying a new piece of property called the Smith Tract, which is now part

of the Cooley Tract. They surveyed that land and I was a bush cutter and a rod person. I

would hold the survey rods as they went through the woods. At that time all of the

surveying was done out of the Washington office instead of the Regional offices. I

remember the guy’s name Reimer, he was the surveyor. We worked over in the swamp

there for about two months. I had a real high salary at eighty cents an hour!

DR. MADISON: Some things never change!

MR. WILLEY: That’s how I began my career. In 1950 they had a couple of special

projects in here on the Refuge. They were doing some work in the river here trying to

plug off come gutts. They picked up a local fellow by the name of Briscoe and me. I

think he’s still living. But him and I worked the contractor and we hauled materials down

the Blackwater River and they put in wakefield pilings and then put these boards in to try

and stop these gutts from eroding any further than they already had. They also were

trying to hold in the fresh water so they could get these plants to grow in back of it and

not get too salty. What happened to that project was that in 1950, along came the

Korean War. In October of that year I was only 19 years old and my Dad wouldn’t sign

for me so they drafted me. So I ended up in the Korean War and I was gone for two

years. When I came back to the Eastern Shore there was no work here [on the refuge] but

Veterans had preference. So for one year I worked for the A&P, the Atlantic and Pacific

Tea Company, the grocery store. They are still around. Some of them have been bought

out. They are under a different name now I believe. When I came back here I was

working at the store and an opening came up here in the office. They called and asked me

if I would be willing to take an office job. The lady who was working in the office was

pregnant and I think she was moving away. I really thought about it and thought, “Man,

I don’t want to go do office work!” but I interviewed and got the job. They didn’t list me

as a Clerk because they didn’t have a whole lot of money and in those days Personnel

could get away with anything. They listed me as a “Clerk/Maintenance Man”. So I

worked in the office and outside the office. I did the typing and the payrolls. But at that

time we only had five employees. One of those wasn’t even stationed here, he was at the

Susquehanna Refuge. Susquehanna was under the Black Water and guy whose name was

Keene lived here in the house on the Refuge in the summer time but when winter came, he

moved to Havre de Grace. They stayed out on Battery Island just out from Aberdeen.

That’s where I learned about the flats and how the celery and all. Back in those days we

had a Senator by the name of Tiddens, he was well known up there and he had been in the

Senate for a long time. He could get all kind of money even back in the days when they

couldn’t get any money. He worked real hard for FWS and we had real heavy wild celery

beds on the flats. At that time I also worked with the enforcement people. We had two

seaplanes stationed here at a hanger. They were floatplanes. We worked the whole Bay

in the wintertime. We did the mid-winter inventories for Delaware, Maryland and

Virginia and West Virginia. This was back in the days before they turned it over to the

states. We flew all those inventories. We had different people flying. I remember flying

with at least eight or ten different pilots that were moved in here. These are guys that are

long gone now. One guy still lives pretty close here, by the name of Larry Thurman. He

lives over at Krapp. He retired three or four years before I did. We had a bush pilot out

of Alaska named Bob Bain. He stayed here for a little while and then there was a guy out

of Louisiana Joe Withers. Then the greatest Game Warden of them all, the guy who

wrote the book, Willie J. Parker. He wrote a book after he left here; I can’t remember the

name of it. [Book identified as “Halt, I’m a Federal Game Agent”] Yeah, that’s it!

DR. MADISON: I read that book too, and I couldn’t remember the title!

MR. WILLEY: In 1954, in October when I first started to work here Hurricane Hazel

came through. Winds were up to about 150 mph. It flooded these marshes here. It came

right up the Chesapeake Bay. That’s one of the few hurricanes where we had deaths in

this County. We had people killed in a house on Elliott’s Island where a tree blew down

and fell on a house. We had several other people hurt or injured too. But at that time the

Refuge became inundated with water and the spray from the salt-water. It changed this

whole watershed. The river used to be real distinct. You could follow the river just by

going along the edges by the high reeds and big core grass that grew along the edge of the

river. Once that salt got in there, because it was a brackish plant, those edges started

dying off. Around all of the little ponds that were around the refuge, you can go back and

look at the old map you’ll see that were cut off, they were semi-fresh. The tide only got

in them only on real extremely high tides. We had ponds here called Quinn Pond and

Cold Creek. At the time we didn’t see it, they weren’t doing no studies or anything but

we could see what was happening. What happened around these ponds at the back

especially, there are some bushes that bloom white and they grow all over these marshes,

well, they started dying. The root system just dies. In these ponds when the wind

would blow they would fill up in the wintertime silt used to collect around those little

‘tumps’ around the edges. They made a catch basin that help fresh water. Once that

broke loose and the marsh started opening up it started…. And then we had other factors

too. We had the Canada goose population. When I started working here in 1949 all you

saw was Canada goose flying over; that was before the corn picker. In the early 1950’s

the corn picker became real evident and by 1954-’55 we started picking up geese. You

can go back and look at the waterfowl records, but I think the first year that we had any

significant number of geese here there was probably about 5,000. By 1966 we had a

population of Canada geese on the refuge here that instead of going on to Matamaskeet in

the mild winters, they would short stop instead of going on to North Carolina. What was

happening was North Carolina and Virginia were harvesting their crops of beans and corn

about a month before the geese ever got here. The corn would germinate in the fields and

there was nothing the fields for the geese. All of the waste corn in the fields would

germinate because it was still hot. A lot of the harvesters got so efficient that they didn’t

leave seed in the field like in the old days when they were cutting with the old harvesters.

Instead of leaving 5% they were leaving 2% on the ground in a normal year; unless there

was rains or snow or something that caught the crops so they could get them out like they

did this year. Basically the geese started building because the food was here. Maryland

came right in to play because we harvested right when the geese were arriving here in

September and October. The geese would be right behind the harvesters. Those birds

that came down were real hungry and all of the young birds and all. They built up to a

population of about 110,000. A biologist came up from North Carolina and flew a survey

and counted I think that many. Not all of them were on the refuge, but they were all

either on it or near it. They all used the refuge. That population stayed up that high until

the 1980’s really. The same thing happened in Maryland. We had several mild winters

and the geese started wintering further and further north. They wintered in Kent County,

Maryland and then up in Pennsylvania. I think that except for the northeastern part of

Maryland up around Delaware, Pennsylvania is wintering most of the Canada geese.

Back in the days when we first started here, we had no Snow geese. They started arriving

about 1957 or ’58. It was rare when we saw them. They were the lesser snows that were

mixed with the difference color phases. They had the dark and the chocolate and some

were all white. This was the lesser population from where they’d migrate. The snows

were always out on the coast at places like Assateague and Chincoteague and Bombay

and all. Then they started building and that little flock built from the time I started up to

when I retired in 1985. They went from 500 to about…. Well, I don’t know what it is

now. I flew the eagles surveys in 1986 and I know there was at least 3000 that were on

the refuge here. Bill has probably got some records there. After that we didn’t count

waterfowl on the refuge working for the State.

DR. MADISON: Guy, Mike has a few questions.

MIKE: I wanted to follow up on your interest in waterfowl here at the refuge.

MR. WILLEY: Yeah, it was set aside as a waterfowl refuge. It was one of the waterfowl

refuges along the east coast and that was it’s primary purpose. Then it began to change.

It actually began to change when John F. Kennedy became President in 1962. When he

came into office there was a real high unemployment rate in the country. He started

thumbing money in. It was called ‘accelerated public works’. That’s when then built the

Center. We had a program here because Dorchester had a 14.9% unemployment rate we

hired 52 people over night and put them to work here. We built the center, the office and

all the roads around here except for the one in back of the Visitors Center. It was part of

the old CCC camp. There was a CCC camp right here. That was back in the 1930’s

under Roosevelt. The dike was extended and we built it all the way around. We also

added to the other dike. He opened it up more to public use. There was a better

recreation area and picnic area and all. For about a year and a half or two years, we were

really moving along. But when he was assassinated, the funds just started drying up. We

had seven bulldozers and five draglines working here and part of them were left right on

the site. It took us five years to get GSA to declare them surplus and get them out of here

because they were just an eyesore. From about 1965 up until the 1970’s we worked on

minimal budgets. We didn’t have a lot of personnel. The Visitor’s Center was here and

we did get funding for public use. I think they had two or three Recreation Acts that

came out that Congress passed where they funneled money in for public use, but the

maintenance budget stayed pretty slim. I remember at least 15 guys that came out of

college that we trained here. But the operation and maintenance money was pretty slim.

The guys were called Refuge Manager Trainees. I can name some of them who are sitting

up there higher [in the ranks of FWS] that he is now.

DR. MADISON: Name a few.

MR. WILLEY: Paul Schmidt. He started here as a GS-5 at the Visitor’s Center.

DR. MADISON: Really! We had an oral history with him, which I didn’t do.

MR. WILLEY: He came in here as Assistant Refuge Manager, but there wasn’t no title

for that so they put him as Recreation Specialist because he got a little bit more money.

They could pay him the whole here. There was another guy named George Constantino.

There were a lot of guys who came through here that went up really high. They came out

of schools like NC State and West Virginia, and a couple from Rutgers. There was about

one every year from 1965 up until about the time I retired. Of course, they still have

people start out on the refuge and all.

DR. MADISON: I have to interrupt because I have to say that your name has come up

more that any other name whenever we mention an oral history project. Everybody says

we needed to get yours. Denny Holland has been chewing my ear off for years, “You’ve

got to interview Guy Willey!”

MR. WILLEY: They were all good to me. Back in the 1980’s I won that award, one of

the top ten, and then I got that Distinguished Service Award, the highest one over at the

Department of the Interior. They’ve always been good to me. I probably wasn’t as good

as…there was always people that probably worked harder.

DR. MADISON: What about some of the Refuge Managers that you worked with over

the years? What was their style like?

MR. WILLEY: We had John Schorer. I guess he’s still at Chincoteague.

DR. MADISON: Boy, I don’t know.

MR. WILLEY: And there was Bill Julian. Bill went… Well, I only worked under about

five managers here. When I came here there was only one before me. That was Dave

Black. He was a 2nd Lieutenant in the military. He was drafted and got killed in Germany

in World War II. The Manager who took over was Cornelius Wallace who was a local

here. He was a local Game Warden stationed up at Susquehanna working for the feds. He

came here and stayed here from 1945 until 1968. He stayed here. Bill Julian came after

him. Then there was Don Perkuchin.

DR. MADISON: What was it like to work under Cornelius Wallace?

MR. WILLEY: He was a local down here. He had some crazy ideas. All of the law

enforcement people are a little bit ‘different’. Don’t get me wrong. You know what I

mean. Either they are crazy, or they’re so dedicated to their job. We had game wardens

here and well, we took some chances that we never should have. There was always deer

spotting at night. I’d work with these guys [enforcement agents]. We’d run a guy down

one night. These guys [illegal hunters] were drinking and didn’t know what they were

doing. We had a guy shoot a deer right along in here. And when we pulled up and opened

the door, he stuck his gun right in my belly as we opened the door. And it was loaded! I

mean, those are the chances we used to take, ask Bill. We took crazy chances. Earlier I

didn’t seem to care, but as I got older, that changed. We used to go out to Smith Island

where they were duck trapping. I never will forget it, I flew down there with this pilot

from Alaska named Bayne. They were duck trapping. This was in the 1960’s. We

circled the island and saw the [sounds like] “stuck trapping” behind the school at Yule.

He looked around for place to land the seaplane and found a little gutt he figured he could

get out of. We landed and he said, “Okay you’ve got a choice, either I walk to the trap

and pull it out or you walk to the trap!” I told him, “That don’t make any sense! I can’t

fly this plane! You know I’m going to pull the trap!” How about if they go to shooting

or something I want a pilot! How about if they kill the pilot out in the marshes, I’d be

trapped! So we pulled this trap up and we were taking them at the time and putting them

on the planes pontoons. We’d pick up 20 duck traps a week. We’d put them in smash

them up. They were about the size of this table made out of poultry wire with little

funnels in them. We’d just smash them up and tie them on. When we got over the

Chesapeake Bay we cut them loose. We couldn’t land with all that stuff on there. Well,

that time I was telling you about, I went and out the traps and we tied them on. We had

no trouble. As we took off, I could see a flash in the air. I said to Bayne, “You know, I

believe they just shot as us!” He circled back, but we never saw no one. When we got

back and pulled into the boathouse we found that they had shot two holes in the

pontoons. Later we got into trouble with the same pilot. He caught a guy in February

shooting ducks out of season, it was a guy named Paul Marshall who was real well known

in Yule. He served two years in Norfolk. But he beat the pilot. He cut him off in the

plane. Those guys very seldom ever make a mistake down there driving the boat because

they are slick and know where to go on the sandbars. But evidently this guy made this

one mistake. He ran the outboard up on a sandbar and Bayne ran up along side of him

and opened his door. He was by himself. He new who is was. He put his hand out and

said, “Mr. Marshall, I want to talk to you.” He beat his hands to a pulp with an oar. So

he just took off and left in the plane. They sent a U.S. Marshall down there they next

day. I never will forget because I went with him. He was a big U.S. Marshall out of

Washington, D.C. He was seven foot, two and he was all man. He took no head. When

we went to pick that guy up that day he was scared. They told him we was coming, and

“if you run, we’re gonna get you”. We put in a boat and I was with them when they ran

him back from Smith Island and he took him on to Norfolk.

DR. MADISON: Things are a lot different now!

MR. WILLEY: We had other instances down there where they would shoot. And they

would burn too. Down here under the accelerated public works we also built a big

building down there; bigger than this. There was a big tower and office building and all on

the island. It was just to try and get the people to respect us more and to say that we are

here to be part of your friends and all. They burnt the building to the ground! Then they

cut the tower to the ground. They took an acetylene torch and cut it to the ground.

Wallace was the Manager here then and we built the tower back. He wouldn’t let put the

building back. FWS said, “No, we can’t do that.” Over there on those islands you only

had 2% of the people that were bad. You had 98% who were just as religious. You’d go

over there and they’d do anything in the world for you. I worked down there and lived in

a house down there for five or six years. It was me and another guy; we were doing

maintenance work over there. They treated us all right. It was just those guys who were

trapping those ducks over there and selling them. They were catching those ducks and

shipping them out in the fall with their oysters. They’d clean the duck and ship them to

Philadelphia. They put them in the bottom of the barrels. Of course, they knew what

was coming up. It was like drugs. I guess Bill can tell but we don’t it much anymore.

When we fly the eagle surveys I don’t see it. There may be a little bit I don’t think there

is as much that goes on down there any more. People are more up to…the world’s

changed so fast on them people.

DR. MADISON: Did the management change when Julian took over?

MR. WILLEY: What happened when Bill came here…. Wallace was a protectionist. He

put locks on the gates. Although we had the center here, when the evening came and we

left the refuge at five o’clock the gates were locked. If a visitor came down here after five

on a day like today; it don’t get dark until eight. They had to turn around at the gate.

Then when Julian came, they opened it up from dawn to dusk. The center wasn’t open

but people still could come through. I lived here when Bill lived here. I lived in a house

up on the hill before me and my wife moved. When we started having a lot of kids we

had to move. They needed more recreation activities, Little League and stuff like that.

But we moved into Cambridge. Bill was a good manager and stayed here from about 1968

until about 1979. Then Perkuchin came in. But before that there was a vacancy and they

had a couple of Assistant Managers filled in before Perkuchin. I believe Perkuchin came

here in about 1982 and I only worked under him for a couple of years. At that time we

had another project come up. Back in the ‘80’s Reagan visited here. And he turned

around and gave us money for to buy the [unintelligible] Tract and that gave us lands for

the Delmarva Squirrel. We had a project over there where we were removing under story,

making that wood over on that Tract more of a park like situation. I worked over for

about two years with the contractors. It was all contracted. Really, like I said he and

everybody treated me real good. I couldn’t say anything bad about them.

DR. MADISON: What was it like living on the refuge? That isn’t as common today as it

used to be.

MR. WILLEY: Back in the days when I lived on the refuge my first kid was born here

and we called her Bambi. Mike knows. She was the first child ever born on Black Water.

It was okay here. The wife was from Talbot County; no mosquitoes and no shoe flies.

When we got married I promised her that we’d find a place pretty soon. We’d only go to

the refuge for a little while. We’d find a house where there was no mosquitoes or shoe

flies. But she adapted to it pretty well. She was really down to earth and a real good

homemaker and all. She worked at night for about eighteen years so we could survive.

When I first started working here as a permanent employee I made $2,700.00 year. And I

paid fourteen dollars and the house. The house wasn’t much, but then they jumped it up

to 25. This was back in the 1950’s. The Manager was making probably ten thousand. It

was a whole different ball game. You’d have to make eight to survive today.

DR. MADISON: How did your daughter like living here? How many years did you stay

after she was born?

MR. WILLEY: We lived here until my second child was born. We had two kids born

here on the refuge. The last two were born in Cambridge. I was a country boy. I liked

the country. Unlike Michael, I imagine he probably misses it a little bit. I mean you get a

little tired of it when the flies and mosquitoes are real bad! But most of the time it was

pleasant. There was a lot of things you could do here. You could go crabbing. I

remember doing that with Paul Schmidt. We fished and trout lined and did a little bit of

everything that was possible. We did some hunting in the fall. I can’t say anything bad

about life on the refuge. Some people leave FWS bitter, but I can’t say nothing bad about

it. They always treated me real good where I could never say nothing bad. We had a

couple of instances that Bill could tell you. It wasn’t the FWS but it was the personnel

that handled the situation. But I’m not going to say anything bad about anyone.

DR. MADISON: How did the personnel change from when you started in 1949 until

when you retired?

MR. WILLEY: In 1949 we only had five people here. There was four permanent

people; a Refuge Manager, Assistant RM and two maintenance people. That was the

whole staff, but we didn’t have the center and all then. Then it increased to about fifteen

and now I guess they are up to 40 or 50 now. And they are probably up to more than

that now with all of the [unintelligible] stuff and all.

DR. MADISON: Did the personnel have different backgrounds from when you started

to when you retired?

MR. WILLEY: Yeah, certainly. I was one of the few people, except maybe Bill, who got

in without a college degree. We worked out way up. They were already starting to frown

on not having a degree. I went for about eighteen years without getting a promotion. I

went to the highest point in the grade I could go to and they told me I wasn’t qualified for

promotion. They didn’t promote me until…I believe it was John Schorer who said,

“Can’t we make an exception?” I went from a GS-7 to a 9 but I didn’t get it until about

1980. And that made a little bit of difference in the salary. These guys are making big

money now, compared to what I made. But I’ve been retired since 1985. The State asked

me if I wanted to work on a contract from February to October and do stuff on the

squirrels and on the eagles. We were flying four different surveys on the eagles. Now

we’ve cut it back to two because of the funding. We started that in 1986 and this is 2-0-

0-3. It’s been almost twenty years I’ve been flying those eagle surveys. I almost forgot

what I knew on the refuge! I know more about the eagles now! And you know if the

nest is down, or threatened, or timber is being cut around it, we have that all of the time.

I’m working now on all of the books now for the whole state. After 9/11 we are confined.

We cannot fly no more than….the area here is as far as Hill’s Point. Across the Bay we

can’t even fly. We’ve got nests that we haven’t even seen except from the ground after

9/11; they won’t let us in there. Occasionally we get into Patuxent and them places if the

military really wants us in there. We’ll call and it really depends on who is in the

Commander’s office that day. If you call that day, they might let you in or they might

say no because they’ve got too much going on that day. That’s what has happened to us

on the surveying from the air.

MIKE: Mr. Guy, I know….

MR. WILLEY: Just say Guy.

MIKE: Okay. I know that growing up, you and your brother Ray were always muskrat

trapping. I’d love to hear you tell about that trapping.

MR. WILLEY: Yeah, that was something. When I came here in the 1950’s along with

waterfowl, the fur management program here almost supported the refuge. Back in those

days muskrat pelts were worth about $4.00 each. They were trapping about 60,000 off

of what became Blackwater at the time. You can imagine that was a pretty good revenue

when you’ve got a budget of $80,000 for the whole station. You could make $240,000 on

muskrat pelts. I think at the time some of that money might have gone back to the

Treasury but they did reward the refuges for doing that. The fur management program

went on until…well, we still have a program but it’s not the same. We had a shipping

code and everything. We shipped them up to a New York auction center and they had a

stamp. We were number 42. They stamped every pelt. They were sold off to different

people. They would be graded and the proceeds would go to the government. We had

that program until in the 1960’s. There was a little different concept about trapping that

started. They didn’t want people to see us removing animals from the environment. We

still have that problem. Kids grow up and they think it’s terrible that an animal has to die

for a pelt. There’s a certain about of truth to some of it. I believe that there is a way to

remove some of these animals. We get in to trouble. Now we’ve got problems now with

the mute swan. There is a generation of kids who have grown up…Michael knows. Two

of my kids would kill anything and the other two would pick up a spider and put him in

the side of the road. Seriously! That’s the concept. When you go to the schools and all,

they think it’s terrible. I still give talks about the need for trapping certain animals like

the nutria and what they’ve done and all. The kids don’t like to hear it. “How do you

kill this animal?” And “Why do you have to kill this animal?” It’s hard to explain to a 12

or 14-year-old kid why he is taken. To them a little nutria is a cute little animal. It’s the

same way with any of the little fur animals. And I don’t think that’s going to change

because we’ve got people now… you know the fur market went down. You know they

burnt down all of the fur houses in Great Britain? They burnt them down and destroyed

it. They just went wacky with this crazy stuff. Mike will tell you about the muskrat

trapping. You consume the meat. The animal is going to live for about a year and a half

or two years, three years at the most. It’s a renewable resource. Those animals like that

are renewable. It’s just like doves. People get all uptight cause they kill so many doves.

Some states protect the dove. But the dove is a ten-month bird. One cold winter would

kill him unless he was down in Florida.

DR. MADISON: Is the trapping part of the management plan?

MR. WILLEY: They still do some trapping. They still trap these units here to try and

keep the three squares from being destroyed. If you have overpopulations of muskrats

like you do nutrias they can destroy the marsh. They tunnel underneath the marsh and

they eat the roots in the wintertime unlike the nutria. He eats on top. He can drain

ponds and eat through dikes and all. It’s more of a maintenance thing.

MIKE: We don’t near the population now that there was in the 40’s right?

MR. WILLEY: No, it’s been a lot of stuff wrote about it. Back in the 1960’s they

started spraying. They sprayed for mosquitoes. A lot of the old timers felt that the

chemicals that they used, they can’t prove it, but there was probably some truth to it

because Germany outlawed it. They found out that they had frogs that were deformed

and animals that wouldn’t reproduce. Even in Africa they found out that there was

trouble with reproduction. That may have started the decline of the muskrats and they

haven’t really come back again. We can see it; in our lives there is always ups and down

and trends. It has a lot to do with the environment.

MIKE: Had they already stopped the fur station here when you started? Was Dr.

Dozier here?

MR. WILLEY: No, the fur station was still here. All the personnel had just left, but the

station was still here when I got here. That was back in 1949. The old cages and all were

still here, but everyone had moved to Slidell, Louisiana. Dozier left here and when down

there. I didn’t know them too well, but it’s written up.

MIKE: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your work on the fox squirrel recovery

team. I know you were on the earliest recovery team.

MR. WILLEY: Bill Julian was the person who was first part of that team from here.

And when Bill left, he recommended that I take over. I was familiar with it. We had five

members. There was Dr. Sleiger out of University of Maryland, Nelson Swenk who was

with Animal Damage Control from over in Blacksburg, a guy named Taylor from the

State, and another guy from the State. We wrote up recommendations and send them to

the office suggested that we get something done early. If you see the old management

plan, it suggested that we try to save the squirrel by enlarging Blackwater’s woodlands by

2,500 acres around the refuge. Then we started the translocation. Taylor and Dr. Sleiger

got into the relocation. They said that if we were going to save the squirrel we needed to

get them back in their former range. So since 1980, we put squirrels in every county.

They were introduced into Maryland, two sites in Delaware, one site in Virginia and one

site in Pennsylvania. There wasn’t a whole lot of follow up on a couple sites.

Pennsylvania said they wanted the squirrel, there wasn’t a whole lot of effort to try and

track them and find out what happened to them. Actually what happened to the squirrels

in Pennsylvania is really unknown. I don’t think anybody would know, unless they went

up there and trapped extensively, they wouldn’t really know if they survived or not.

We’d had already put the Delmarva squirrels back at Chincoteague back in the 1960’s.

He was put there from animals from Eastern Neck and Blackwater. We put squirrels on

Brownsville, which is about half way between Cape Charles and the Maryland line on

Nature Conservancy land. We put them at Prime Hook, in Delaware and at Assawoman

Refuge down on the coast. Prime Hook has followed them pretty good since is that FWS.

The State of Delaware never really followed them but they’ve seen squirrels there so we

still think those two sites are viable.

On the site at Brownsville, we hadn’t seen squirrels there for many until last year we got

a report of them been seen. We think they are still there. We know they are on

Assateague. Then we put them Wicomico County. It was on the private property of one

of the big investors in Pepsi Cola. He owns a big spread there and gave us permission.

They’ve done real well. There’s also two private farms, one in Somerset County called

Dryden and the other one Worchester County called Reagan. They’ve done real well.

Then we put them down on State Land at the Vaughn Refuge on another stretch of land

called the Jarvis Tract, which they had just bought. They’ve done real well there. The

ones in Somerset seem to be doing better and we think it’s because the squirrels came

from Dorchester and because if you look at Somerset, it’s a lot like Dorchester. It’s about

80% pine and I think that for some reason the squirrel might do better if he’s taken from a

place and put in a place where the habitat is the same. But we’ve trapped them on other

properties so we know they’ve spread in Somerset. Out in the car I’ve got a book that

FWS sent me. We’ve got five sites we’re going to do in Caroline County. We put them

in Caroline County but we didn’t think we had any squirrels there. We found out last

that they were still there in one section up toward the Choptank River. It’s called

Skelton Creek before you get to Preston and Harmony on this side. Of course, we placed

them near Harmony where John Gill lives near Harmony. He still lives up there. Before

he moved there, we put them up on one farm and they’ve done real well. The other

properties in Kent County are Anlaw Farms, which is owned by DuPonts. That’s seven

thousand acres up there. They’ve done real well there and at Remington Farms too. It’s

called Chesapeake Farms now. The only site that we’re not 100% sure about and have

kind of crossed it off it at Fair Hill on the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Fair Hill is a racetrack up there that the State of Maryland owns. It was given to them by

the DuPonts. It was given so they could keep having foxhunts. Tally ho, you know!

They dress up and have got all of this stuff, just like in old England. We sat up on a hill

and watched them. They still do that. But we put the squirrels on there because they’ve

got big wooded areas. At the time we had a change in personnel. One of the guys moved

for the state moved to Maine. He had all of the tracking data and took it with him. And

for some reason they’ve never been able to get it back from him. He refused to give it

back because he had some personnel problem with somebody that he worked with.

There’s stupid stuff like that. I know since you’re recording this they’re going to want to

know who this guy is!

DR. MADISON: We’ve heard stories like that before!

MR. WILLEY: But he went on to Maine and they’ve never been able to. I’ve been up

there and hade time counts. We’ve baited areas and sat there and waited but all we’ve

seen is grays. We’ve never seen a Delmarva. But that don’t mean they aren’t there.

DR. MADISON: You had a very interesting career. And you became from you and your

brother trapping and so on, but did you ever see yourself when you were a young man

protecting something like a squirrel in your last decades?

MR. WILLEY: No, not really. I used to hunt Delmarva back before they were

endangered. I hunted in that woods over there. There was a landowner over there named

Ewing. Squirrel hunting was real big back in those days. We didn’t have the deer here in

those days. This was back in the 40’s and 50’s. We ate them. My father would skin

him. My mother used to have to parboil them because he was tougher, but he was good

eating. I never was much on squirrel eating, but I like to shoot. They were found in

isolated areas. You either had him or you didn’t have him. You could go on a farm and

look for him forever, but he was either there or he wasn’t there. We’ve gone back and

I’ve written a whole history for Glen about what happened here. And Bill can tell you

too, but probably the thing that hurt the squirrel more than anything is that World War II

came along. We had virgin forest here on the eastern shore. The timber cutting was

extensive because there were building everything with that in the war effort. We had

military camps all over. They cut trees for the pilings. There were Loblolly pines that

grow for sixty feet without a limb on it. They’d drive those into the ground. New York,

up there where the World Trade Center is built on Loblolly pines from Dorchester

County. It’s documented! Thousands and thousands of loads of tree went into New

York and that shelve for to get that foundation. Some areas where they couldn’t get into

and cut, the squirrels are still there. It might have been too wet or the timber wasn’t good

enough quality. It could also have been privately owned land where they didn’t cut any

trees. The Duponts, the Smiths and the Jones; the people who had money. The big

companies like Ingersall, and Chrysler. All the places that were privately owned are still

pretty much intact. Over in Talbot County at Wye Plantation there are trees in there that

are 150 or 160 years old dying, and you know they die on their own. The squirrels are

still there. So we think that the biggest thing to hurt the squirrels, and the timber

companies don’t like to hear this, but the biggest thing was lost of habitat. He’s had to

adapt. If you go away from Dorchester the Delmarva can be in any scrub forest area. If

you look at these other areas and it is prime timber areas like Taylor talks about in his

reports. Here there is big timber, old growth nut bearing trees with an open understudy.

That don’t apply here; we’ve got them in the marsh.