Interior—U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

www.fws.gov

About the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been part of the Interior Department since 1940, but its federal roots run much deeper, tracing its origins to the U.S. Commission on Fish and Fisheries in the Department of Commerce and the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy in the Department of Agriculture.

The agency manages the 93 million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System of more than 520 National Wildlife Refuges and thousands of small wetlands and other special management areas. Its fisheries program operates 66 National Fish Hatcheries, 64 fishery resource offices and 78 ecological services field stations.

Fish and Wildlife enforces federal wildlife laws, protects endangered species, manages migratory birds, restores nationally significant fisheries, and conserves and restores wildlife habitat such as. It also distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing and hunting equipment to state fish and wildlife agencies.

Nationwide, the service employs about 9,000 people. It has an annual budget of $1.3 billion. Beyond its national headquarters in Washington, D.C., it has seven regional offices and nearly 700 field units. It gets most of its national attention for its administering of endangered species regulations, which put it in the center of development and environmental disputes. It's also the agency most likely to delay or confirm local environmental permits, and it also works closely with state agencies in environmental regulation enforcement.

Tips on Covering FWS

The service is national in scope, and if you want to find feature stories that include animal-loving biologists expounding on the wonders of nature, FWS is the place to be, since those people make up the rank-and-file of the field office staff. p>

When covering the Fish and Wildlife Service, it's helpful to get as close to the source of your story as possible. While the regional offices coordinate press with the national office, Fish and Wildlife Service is highly decentralized for a federal agency – no one in Washington has to "clear" information from a regional office. Craig Rieben, Chief of Public Affairs, at (202)208-4685 will direct you to the right office to contact and work to build national context for a story, but from there he will be hands-off. Most Fish and Wildlife Service stories coming out of Washington will require both national and regional contact – national for the policy side, regional for the application.

In recent years the agency has added press officers to its field units in the Southeast and on the West coast. Finding a spokesperson in a field office is often very helpful, as that's as close to the action as you can get. If a field office doesn't have a press officer, then you have to talk with the researchers and fish and wildlife agents themselves. That's ideal if they're willing to talk – but if not, you'll get bumped back to the regional level.

The agency Web site, http://www.fws.gov , provides a wealth of information, and attempts to be intuitive to what reporters and citizens would want to know. It's especially helpful on endangered species, with everything you want to know about regulation, history, and enforcement. Press officers will refer you to the Web site for most basic information – it's not that they don't want to talk to you or be unhelpful, but their staff tends to be spread pretty thin.

For potential story ideas you can subscribe to their listserve by sending an e-mail to fws-news-request@lists.fws.gov . In the Subject line write: "subscribe."

Regional Offices are located in Portland,OR, Albuquerque, NM, Ft.Snelling, MN, Atlanta, GA, Hadley, MA, Denver, CO, Anchorage, AK and Sacramento, CA

Does this agency's information need updating? programs@nationalpress.org