Conte Corner: Fifty Years with Andrew French

Conte Corner is contributed by the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership (formerly the Friends of Conte), a regional network of more than seventy-five public and private organizations that serves as a forum and framework to forge partnerships that benefit wildlife, people, and environmental quality in the Connecticut River watershed. The column focuses on federal programs and investments that have supported critical conservation, restoration, recreation, and education projects led by members of the partnership and have in turn benefited the communities of the Connecticut River watershed.

In November 2024, I sat down with Andrew French, Refuge Manager of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge and the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge and longtime employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), to discuss his career and perspectives on the Connecticut River watershed.

Andy French, refuge manager of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge and the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge, at the Fort River Division, Hadley, MA. Image credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Smith: In light of your upcoming retirement, tell us about the start of your career—how old were you, and did a book, a course, a person, or an experience set the stage for you?

French: I would say that the stage was my childhood, and my dad was my mentor. I grew up on national wildlife refuges (NWR). I was born on Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge in southern Illinois where my dad was the biologist, and our family—our parents and the four of us kids—moved between refuges throughout his career with the USFWS: to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’s Seney NWR and then back to Illinois and the Chautauqua NWR and to Parker River NWR in Massachusetts.

My backyard was always a national wildlife refuge. My dad laid out Rachel Carson NWR in Maine, and I remember flying with him when I was eleven or twelve years old in the back of a little Cessna. I used to hand him rolls of film. He was documenting with aerial photography the southern coast of Maine. About fifteen years later, in 1985, I came back to Rachel Carson as Refuge Manager. That was my first refuge manager job, and the personal connection made it particularly rewarding.

From an early age I knew that learning the business meant figuring out the different parts of the job and how things fit together to make NWRs operational for wildlife and people. I took specific jobs at refuges where there was a lot of land management and where I could get hands-on experience with public access. On-the-job training helped me figure out how to set up NWRs and how to buy land to augment refuges. I took a job to figure out habitat restoration. All of these experiences provided me with solid hands-on experience that has informed my career. My first job with the USFWS, I was a Youth Conservation Corps enrollee at the Parker River NWR in 1975. This June 2025 will be fifty years since I walked in the door starting my career as a seasonal employee.

Smith: Can you tell us about your career at the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge (Conte Refuge)?

French: I would say that I trained my whole life for this job with the Conte Refuge. On October 3, 1997, the USFWS accepted the donation of Third Island in Deerfield, Massachusetts, which officially established the Conte Refuge. The Connecticut River Watershed Council (now Connecticut River Conservancy), was the nonprofit partner involved in that land donation. Their leadership was instrumental working in tandem with Congressman Silvio O. Conte (R-MA) to pass the Connecticut River National Fish and Wildlife Refuge Act of 1991. When Congressman Conte passed away in 1991, his colleagues renamed the refuge in his honor. It’s a watershed and a landscape with legislation, and that’s special. December 8, 2024, was my 22nd anniversary leading the Conte Refuge. The Conte legislation is still cutting edge—it’s very broad; perfect for a large working landscape. Throughout my career I’ve been fortunate to find ways to get things done. There are 360 different directions on a compass, and I don’t spend too much time on any one of them when there are so many options.

Smith: What do you consider some of your greatest accomplishments?

French: For about forty years now I’ve been setting up universal access trails. I’m appreciative of being able to have done that because what’s good for wheelchairs and walkers is good for young families and strollers. If you want to connect people with nature, start them early. Trails provide an opportunity for outdoor experiences for the whole extended family regardless of mobility capacity.

I’ve also set up a few NWRs and expanded a few NWRs and am thrilled that I was able to do that. I’ve been involved in the acquisition of 125,000 acres of land in sixteen states. And don’t ask me my favorite because I like all of my kids—no favorites. Now I find myself asking, what can I do next? And I wish I had another twenty years to do more land conservation—to facilitate the acquisition of land for the larger conservation estate to make sure that we have outdoor places and spaces where people and wildlife can thrive. I’d also focus on aquatic species passage as it’s key to have rivers with natural flows and functions.

Another thing I’m proud of and continue to work on are landscape partnerships. My first foray into working on these partnerships was setting up the Friends of Rachel Carson NWR in 1986. Back then National Audubon had an Adopt-a-Refuge program where they worked with refuge neighbors. Some of the refuge neighbors didn’t like the development they were seeing along the coast adjacent to the [Rachel Carson] NWR, and they wanted to get together to do something about it.

I sent the neighbors paperwork about the Adopt-a-Refuge program despite being advised against this by my supervisor who cautioned, “They’ll get in your business. They say they’ll help, but they’ll end up taking over.” The group recruited two people from each of the communities where the NWR was located, and that was the beginning of the Friends of Rachel Carson.

The friends group was great—there was a particular Senator who wasn’t supportive of our conservation efforts, and they were able to sway him. Our first universal access trail was the Carson trail, and the Friends recruited the Senate majority leader and the Regional Director of the USFWS at the time to attend the opening ceremony for the trail. It was then that I knew this partnership work was the path forward.

Smith: What are the most important issues threatening the health of the watershed? What are the key opportunities we should take advantage of to remedy these issues?

Andy French and David Sagan, Conte Refuge operations specialist, on an airboat in Log Pond Cove, Connecticut River, about half a mile upstream from the Holyoke Dam at South Hadley Falls. Image credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service.

French: I’m always trying to figure out how to build a playbook for connecting wildlife to people. The NWR system needs to do this for wildlife and people. We’ll know when we’re successful because we’ll have outdoor spaces where people and wildlife can thrive. Yes, we’re there now, but it’s not a static thing because populations, land uses, and the climate continue to change.

We need to increase our investment in the conservation estate, both public land and private land. With the COVID pandemic, conservation land became more visible and then valued, and then we get to the viable question. Here’s one thing we know: there will be another pandemic. When that happens there will be more people, and it’s imperative that we prepare so the places we have now remain viable and capable of accommodating the visibility and value.

We need more outdoor destinations and healthy habitat to keep these conservation investments viable and resilient. When people visited the Fort River Division of the Conte Refuge during the pandemic we advised them to remember how important these places are to them. In the future we will need more capacity to handle more people as well as more outdoor spaces and places for people to go.

And we know now more than ever that the public needs these places. Who protects the land doesn’t really matter. Multiple entities working together on these projects represents an opportunity. Our nation’s crown jewels are its national wildlife refuges, national parks, and national forests. The states and other conservation partners have a tremendous and vitally important portfolio as well. There are things you can do in national forests that you can’t do in national parks and national wildlife refuges. Those differences are good because they offer the ability to accommodate different interests.

There’s a lot of common ground where our shared actions are compatible and complementary, so much so, that our individual contributions through communication, coordination, and collaboration will be magnified on the landscape- or watershed-scale. We’ll need to continue to focus on this in the coming years, and that is what I find so encouraging and exciting about the evolution of the Friends of Conte into the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership. As a partnership that is based on a network of relationships, so much is possible, and it is rewarding and fun!

Smith: If you could give advice to a young 20-something just starting their career in the NWR system, what would you tell them?

French: I’d tell them to learn the business—to cultivate an awareness of all of the different parts and how they fit together. Get to know partners and especially their priorities in your landscape to the level and depth that you can advocate for them in a conversation. This kind of mutual awareness allows us to integrate parts that collectively work for us as a group, and you will inevitably have more people striving for a shared outcome.

If they were working in the Connecticut River watershed, I’d tell them to actively engage with the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership. As it was envisioned twenty years ago as the Friends of Conte, this watershed-based relationship is the forum, foundation, and framework to forge partnerships. We need to get together and learn about each other’s priorities, so we know how the parts fit together and then we support each other. This will make us the most successful within the watershed. Trying to do things separately is like an orchestra with members playing their own tune. Working together and having a shared understanding is a recipe for a lot more success.

Markelle Smith is Director of the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership and Conservation Partnerships Director with Mass Audubon.

Collaboration in the watershed between Mass Audubon, Audubon Vermont, and Connecticut River Conservancy, all members of the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership, is being supported in part by a 2024–2026 grant from The Watershed Fund, parent of Estuary magazine.