About the Author of From War Effort to Wildlife: Exploring the History of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge

Terry Wright spent 23 years with the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish, and Parks supervising an intensive field program devoted to establishing  wildlife habitat on lands surrounding Lakes Oahe and Sharpe in central South Dakota.  Serving as a Forester for 9 years and then as a wildlife biologist for another 14 years, the SDGFP Oahe/Sharpe habitat mitigation program planted 2.5 million trees, established hundreds of acres of cropland areas as winter food for wildlife, seeded hundreds of acres of native grass and dense nesting cover for native birds, placing them together in specially designed "habitat mosaics" to help wildlife survive  severe South Dakota winters. Wright also planned and conducted dozens of prescribed burns on thousands of acres of native and established grassland sites to rejuvenate them for wildlife use. The habitat development program Wright directed eventually transitioned into a Congressionally approved $111 million trust fund in 1999, designed such that annual interest monies from that fund could be used  by SDGFP in perpetuity to establish and preserve wildlife habitat throughout South Dakota.

 

In 2002, Wright returned to his native Colorado to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a Rangeland Management Specialist. His initial job was to monitor the establishment of all USFWS restoration grassland seedings to determine whether or not they were meeting very stringent success criteria.  For three of those later years, Wright supervised the entire USFWS grassland restoration field program as the Rocky Mounain Arsenal  transitioned into a USFWS National Wildlife Refuge, and the $2.1 billion environmental cleanup came to an end. Wright was also the main contributor helping to  develop the Refuge's Habitat Management Plan, a document establishing the wildlife management goals and field methods to attain those goals for the next 20 years for some 11,000 acres of restored grasslands that had been completed by USFWS.  He also served on the Refuge's Cultural Resources Committee during his tenure at RMANWR, whose purpose it was to collect, organize, interpret, document, and properly store some 1,400 artifacts found on Refuge property. Wright retired from the USFWS in the fall of 2016.

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Wright conceived of the idea to develop an on-site Refuge tour guide for visitors in 2020 to show them what was present on this former U.S. Army chemical weapons manufacturing facility / EPA Superfund cleanup site before its transition into a premier urban National Wildlife Refuge, and for Refuge visitors to appreciate the importance of the environmental cleanup that occurred here and the tremendous effort it took to turn RMA into RMANWR. As he says, "Seeing a herd of some 225 bison on restored prairie that was once one of the most contaminated sites in North America is nothing short of a miracle. I want folks to appreciate that miracle, and the tremendous effort of so many that went into making it a reality."