Happy National Wildlife Refuge Week!!

Each year during the second week of October we celebrate our nation’s unique and wonderful national wildlife refuges with National Wildlife Refuge Week. In a non-COVID year, our wildlife refuges would be full of visitors this week--festivals, guided nature walks, and educational presentations in the Visitor’s Center. This year, we celebrate our nation’s refuges as individuals, with quiet moments on these special lands. 

This full week of celebrating our National Wildlife Refuge System includes all 568 national wildlife refuges and 38 wetland management districts. Refuges include 95 million acres of land and 760 million acres of submerged lands and waters— the only public lands and waters set aside to conserve America's fish, wildlife, and plants. 

We have produced this wonderful report, in collaboration with Defenders of Wildlife, as a tribute to endangered species protection throughout our National Wildlife Refuge System. Despite the special relationship between the Endangered Species Act and the National Wildlife Refuge System, no robust tally of how many threatened and endangered species our refuges harbor had ever been until Defenders of Wildlife and the National Wildlife Refuge Association teamed up to figure it out.  Learn more in our report, Finding Refuge. 

And no matter who you are or where you come from, we would like to remind you that you belong on your public lands!  National wildlife refuges have something to offer everyone from fishing to environmental interpretation! 

All of us at the National Wildlife Refuge Association wish you a happy National Wildlife Refuge Week this October 11th-17th, next year we hope to see you out on a national wildlife refuge!