2018 Reunion in Lincoln City, OR

Oregon Reunion - A Great Success

 

The gathering of retirees and active FWS personnel in Lincoln City on the scenic Oregon coast has come and gone but if you were one of the 100 plus retirees or the 30 plus active Service members who were there (attendee list here), you know it was one of our better reunions. Much of the credit for that goes to Robin Thorson and the Region 1 people who worked so hard on the agenda and with the presentations that kept us all in rapt attention. They also took charge in guiding us on exceptional field tours highlighting the incredible natural resources of the Pacific coast and nearby wildlife features. Thank You, Region 1!!

There’s not enough room here to adequately describe all the highlights of this reunion. We had talks from the experts on salmon restoration and bull trout re-introduction efforts and successes, expansion of grey wolf populations and its attendant problems, on how wild horse removal from refuge lands has improved habitat for other species, and an update on Malheur NWR since the end of the takeover. We had an intriguing introduction to resource issues in the Pacific Islands and, closer to home, protection and recovery efforts for sea turtles on the Oregon coast. We heard from Jim Kurth on what’s happening in D.C. and from Robin on Region 1 issues. We heard from Jessica Klement of NARFE on legislative efforts that could profoundly affect retirement benefits, both for those already retired and those still in government service. Of course, we didn’t spend the week indoors. From our dinner tables after the Greenwalt Walk for Wildlife, we were treated to a wonderful display of whales breaching in the near coast. One show-off alone breached over a dozen times as we watched. And on our tours, many of us watched as a pair of bald eagles took to scattering a colony of thousands of nesting common murres from a nearshore rock, much to the delight of the local gulls who had hoped to plunder the now-deserted colony site. They were disappointed: too early in the season.

A note about the Greenwalt Walk for Wildlife. This year, the Walk raised $700 for the Friends of Haystack Rock NWR which will help them purchase much needed transmitters for puffin studies. This is the fifth location where the Association has made a donation to show the local Friends group our appreciation for their efforts. Finally, our banquet speaker, Jim Martin, got us all worked up with his talk about the activism of Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of the conservation and preservation of large swaths of our nation’s national resource heritage in the face of Washington politics and special interests. He reminded us, no, he challenged us to continue to speak out for fish and wildlife as the job is never done and the assault on those resources that we spent our careers managing and protecting continues unabated. If we don’t do it, who will?

Here's a group shot of the 2018 Reunion attendees taken by Garry Tucker. The folks who were in Heritage meeting are in the screen at the top.

 

See the list of Registered Retirees and Guests at the 2018 Reunion

If you have more photos or remembrances of this reunion, please contact us at web@FWSRetirees.org