Jacks and Jills of all trades: Park rangers’ jobs range far and wide
Published 3:01 pm Monday, March 31, 2008
By By TERRY GRAY
Special to the Daily News
Scratch the surface of a Goose Creek State Park ranger and you’ll find a peace officer underneath, an educator, a first-responder and a few other subspecialists as well.
Park Superintendent Kelley Thompson and her staff of three rangers earn their wide-brimmed Smokey hats by training in areas as diverse as fire suppression, teaching techniques, chainsaw safety and — at least at Goose Creek — the lifestyle of the southeastern five-lined skink.
Last week, the newest member of Thompson’s staff was sworn in as a park ranger. Chris Cabral raised his hand and took an oath at a ceremony in William B. Umstead State Park near Raleigh, after completing a four-month course in basic law enforcement at Pitt Community College. Cabral, 38, has a master’s degree in parks and recreation technology from East Carolina University.
For every ranger, this event marks the rite of passage from trainee status to career employee.
Among his other duties, Cabral is the park’s main safety officer, concerned mostly with the safety of the system of trails that meander for eight miles through the 1,670-acre preserve. That often means cutting trees or branches that are threatening to fall, so Cabral and every park ranger must also receive training in how to handle a chainsaw.
Now he also has the authority to handle the rare incidents — typically involving alcohol consumption or speeding violations — that pop up at Goose Creek. Often, it’s nothing more than just excessively happy campers.
Like all rangers, Cabral must keep his credentials current through annual, week-long seminars that cover changes in the law and other topics and techniques required by the state.
Of all the rangers on the staff, Brigner has the most law-enforcement training and is, thus, the park’s “sheriff.” But for Brigner, Cabral and Sandra Fambrough, the third ranger at Goose Creek, the law-enforcement part of the job is incidental to their main mission. Above all, they are educators.
Education
Goose Creek is one of three parks in the state designated as environmental education centers, according to Thompson.
That places special emphasis on sharing their knowledge of the local flora and fauna with schools and other groups, such as the 4-H and civic organizations.
This past weekend, for example, Brigner led an excursion called Rabbit’s Habits. This coming weekend, her tour will seek out skinks.
Goose Creek, located nine miles east of Washington on Camp Leach Road, lies on the Pamlico River between Mallard Creek on the east and its namesake creek on the west. According to Thompson, there were approximately 165,000 visitors to the park in 2007.
The rangers are certified as environmental educators through a series of seven 10-hour workshops.
Sandra Fambrough came into the parks and recreation field via a master’s degree in education from Mars Hill College, and her specialty is in conducting workshops and field projects for “young naturalists,” children aged 6 to 12.
The rangers have some freedom in picking their programs and target groups, she said. Ideas for the educational programs are spawned through the rangers’ own incentives, or come from ideas contained in workbooks published for their guidance.
Most of the programs are held at the park site, but the rangers travel, too.
First-responders
While the workshop students and projects participants come and go, there are always campers, hikers, cyclists, swimmers and boaters to attend to. When there are accidents or injuries, the rangers trade their Smokey hats for first-aid kits. Each is certified as a first-responder.
Each ranger is also certified in CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) through the Red Cross and takes refresher courses each year.
Injuries or incidents at Goose Creek are usually heat-related, or involve burns or falls, she noted.
Training in search-and-rescue fundamentals is a federally mandated requirement for the staff, Thompson said.
At Goose Creek, search-and-rescue concerns have so far been limited to cases in which someone’s car is found after hours and a “hasty search” of the park is made, followed by phone calls to determine if the missing person has communicated with authorities or family members.
The training for rangers is most valuable in such cases as the disappearance last March of a Boy Scout in the Blue Ridge Parkway area, in which state park rangers from Stone Mountain were the first of 25 search-and-rescue groups to respond in the four-day search, according to Thompson.
The training mainly consists of learning the protocol for major search missions.
A burning desire
Thompson, 40, is a graduate of Western Carolina University’s natural resource management program and has 13 years in with the N.C. Division of Parks and Recreation. She is the most widely qualified member of the staff, but she’s still learning.
Her next training challenge is to become qualified as a “burn boss,” which is someone who sets fires — and manages the result — for a living. The training requires 100 hours of instruction, she said.
Currently the Division of Parks and Recreation employs just one burn boss for the entire state. Thompson has supervised “smaller burns of 50 acres or so,” she said, but she wants to do larger burns.
Each of her staff members, including the park’s maintenance employees, is trained in wildland fire behavior and fire suppression. The week-long course is taught by members of the N.C. Division of Forest Resources.
Major burns are planned in the park later this spring, according to Thompson.
Critters
Because the documentation and preservation of the park’s living resources is a major mission for Thompson and her staff, they must also receive significant training in natural-resource-management techniques, she said.
Bears, deer, red wolves, turtles, rabbits, lizards, fish, crabs, herons and about 100 more or so species of birds are monitored and, in some cases, netted or safely captured for census purposes.
The rangers enforce fish and wildlife regulations as a routine part of their jobs.
Then, there are the trees and plants to protect or manage.
That’s one of the few jobs at Goose Creek the rangers won’t be handling themselves. That job will be awarded to private contractors, who will take the wood as payment, Thompson noted.
As Brigner said, “We multi-task so many different things.”
So, in a single working day, a ranger could give a lecture, lead a tour, clear a trail, treat a burn, hunt down a wayward hiker and trap a rabbit.
And remember, if you scratch a Goose Creek State Park ranger, you might just get a citation.