Qualla: Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge

Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TeakTurtle, CC0. On a clear morning in late December, the cornfields at Pungo Lake fill with white. A hundred thousand birds - tundra swans, snow geese, ducks of a dozen species - lift off the water in waves that look from a distance like blowing snow. The sound is overwhelming, a continuous high whirr of wings that does not let up for minutes at a time. They have flown thousands of miles to be here. The Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge was set aside, in part, to make sure they would have somewhere to land. It is also the place that brought back the red wolf.

Image: TeakTurtle | CC0

Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge: Pocosin, Algonquian for Swamp

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region, Public domain. The word pocosin comes from an Algonquian language spoken by the peoples who lived on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula before European contact, though the exact etymology is uncertain. A pocosin is a freshwater wetland built on peat - decayed organic matter held above the surround...

Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region | Public domain

Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge: Bringing the Red Wolf Back

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region, Public domain. By the 1970s the red wolf had been hunted, trapped, and habitat-stripped almost to nothing. Fewer than twenty pure-blooded animals remained, all collected for a captive breeding program. In 1987 federal biologists chose the Albemarle Peninsula as the place to try a release - a re...

Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region | Public domain

Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge: Drained by Enslaved Hands

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region, Public domain. The refuge's land carries a difficult earlier history. Beginning in 1840, the State of North Carolina, through an agency it called the Literary Board, launched a decade-long attempt to drain Pungo Lake and convert the basin to cropland. The 25-foot-wide canal that resulted was du...

Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region | Public domain

Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge: Fire and Peat

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Digger470751, CC BY-SA 4.0. Peat soil burns. That is the consequence of being made of compressed plant matter that has been drying out under the influence of those nineteenth-century canals. In April 1985 the Allen Road Fire ignited in the refuge area, scorching nearly 95,000 acres in about six days before ...

Image: Digger470751 | CC BY-SA 4.0