Seeking Refuge explores how conservationists and wildlife managers carved out refuges in the North American West to sustain migratory birds. By the early twentieth century, Americans and Canadians had drained or filled many of the wetlands these birds needed to survive. Conserving them required a continent-wide effort to create a network of protected areas in West Coast states and provinces.

At the center of these efforts was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, America's leading wildlife protection agency. It created and managed wildlife refuges amid the industrial, irrigated landscapes of California and Oregon. In doing so, the agency often battled farmers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to obtain the vital water necessary to sustain habitat on which birds depended.

Seeking Refuge is one of the first books to explore the history of these refuges and their role in protecting migratory birds. It examines how the migration of North American birds, one of the continent's great natural spectacles, depends on the intensive management of refuges embedded within working landscapes of farms and cities. If wildlife are to survive, they will increasingly do so less in remote sites far from people but in these sorts of places. Their fate will depend on fostering landscapes where people and animals can thrive.

Few things on earth more powerfully symbolize the wonder of nonhuman nature than the extraordinary movements of millions of birds from poles to equator and back again as they repeat their annual cycles. If there is wildness on this planet, surely we see it in the sky each time these magnificent creatures pass above our heads... How to "protect nature" when nature perennially ignores the places we've set aside for it is the profound question that makes Robert Wilson's Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway such a suggestive and important book.

At its most basic, this is a story about protecting wild nature in working landscapes. For the past century, we have tried to segregate wildlife from parts of the countryside devoted to productive uses. Wildlife managers may no longer bomb waterfowl and herd them into refuges, but there is still a sense among farmers and the public that waterfowl belong in designated spaces. The western landscape is a shared space, and the refuges are part of the irrigated landscape, even if the two appear clearly separated on maps.

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"This concise, understated, well-crafted work allows readers to reach their own conclusions... Wilson quietly demolishes the dichotomy of preservation versus development, and challenges the language of environmental restoration. Wildlife is not 'out there'; it is all around us, entangled in the places we live and work. Animals and humans share a 'hybrid' landscape. Wilson suggests that wildlife habitat cannot truly be restored to its original state. Like it or not, when we try to save nature we inevitably change it. This is true on the planetary scale and the local scale. By looking to the past, Wilson helps us peer into the future, as we try to imagine the consequences of our efforts and proposals to engineer our way out of the latest environmental crisis."
—Jared Farmer, American Scientist

"Seeking Refuge approaches the region at several scales simultaneously. As a result, Wilson provides a rich analysis of land and water use; waterfowl migration and conservation; biologists, wildlife agents, and hunters; and the transformation of multiple landscapes. His thoughtful study also enhances our appreciation of the remarkably resilient birds, whose semiannual migrations continue to lift our spirits."
— Science

"For anyone who has followed the ongoing disputes on water allocations in the Upper Klamath Basin, Seeking Refuge... is a book to devour."
— Klamath Falls Herald and News

"This concise, understated, well-crafted work allows readers to reach their own conclusions... Wilson quietly demolishes the dichotomy of preservation versus development, and challenges the language of environmental restoration. Wildlife is not 'out there'; it is all around us, entangled in the places we live and work. Animals and humans share a 'hybrid' landscape. Wilson suggests that wildlife habitat cannot truly be restored to its original state. Like it or not, when we try to save nature we inevitably change it. This is true on the planetary scale and the local scale. By looking to the past, Wilson helps us peer into the future, as we try to imagine the consequences of our efforts and proposals to engineer our way out of the latest environmental crisis."
— Jared Farmer, American Scientist

"Wilson ranges across the entire refuge system of the Pacific Slope in order to observe the dynamics and management challenges associated with the whole flyway. The result is a tour de force of historical and geographical analysis that will surely become a standard work on its subject."
— William Cronon, University of Wisconsin

"By surveying the complex history of the Pacific Flyway, Robert Wilson has provided us with the portrait of a win-win ecology, one where the needs of a bewildering variety of migratory waterfowl are met even amidst the surging activity, agriculture, and land transformations of humankind. More than this, he has shown us that such reconciliation ecologies are very political indeed. Eschewing environmental romances typical of conservation by stressing historical struggles over land and water, Wilson nevertheless preserves a wonder for a 'natural' world always in-the-making."
— Paul Robbins, University of Arizona

"How do American farm policies reshape wild landscapes to produce food for people? How do American wildlife policies reshape wild landscapes to produce habitat for ducks? These may seem like quite different questions, but Robert Wilson's Seeking Refuge brilliantly reveals the interconnections between wildlife refuges and agricultural systems in the West. Wilson explores how the toxic waste water running off farm fields became integral to wildlife refuges. Irrigated agriculture fed a hungry nation while it created wetland habitat for migratory waterfowl. But the results poisoned both chicks and children. Clearly argued and wonderfully written, Seeking Refuge illuminates the intricate connections between wildlife and people in America."
— Nancy Langston, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"The author's skill in examining the interplay between wild birds, their increasingly manufactured habitats, and the varied human institutions responsible for altering them makes for a compelling story that readers will find fascinating."
— William K. Wyckoff, Montana State University

Robert M. Wilson
Assistant Professor, Geography

Maxwell School, Syracuse University
Email Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson is an assistant professor in the Geography Department of Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

His work examines the environmental history and historical geography of western North America. In particular, he is interested in the development of cultural landscapes, relations between society and animals, and environmental governance.

His current project, The Nature of Incarceration, explores the historical geography of Japanese-American internment during the Second World War.