Maine’s national wildlife refuges have gotten used to a lack of money for biological studies, maintenance and other projects.

Now they’re dealing with staffing cuts so deep that wildlife advocates warn that the refuges are in as much peril as some of the animal and plant species they’re supposed to protect.

At the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Wells, for example, the staff has been reduced from eight people to five in the past year and a half. It’s even more severe at Sunkhaze Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Milford, where the sole remaining position – manager – was eliminated earlier this year.

The nation’s 548 refuges, including 10 in Maine, are a last bastion for plant and animal species that are losing habitat to sprawl, pollution, invasive species or other forces. Refuges help sustain healthy wildlife populations and restore struggling ones.

Rachel Carson, for example, is a leader in efforts to save the piping plover and the least tern, two endangered shorebirds. The refuge also is helping restore the New England cottontail, an endangered rabbit species, said Ward Feurt, Rachel Carson’s manager.

Refuges also provide opportunities for recreation and education. Nearly 400,000 people visit Maine refuges each year to hike, watch birds, photograph wildlife or study nature, according to the Cooperative Alliance for Refuge Enhancement, a national advocacy group.

The alliance released a report this month calling for a renewed commitment to the refuge system started by President Theodore Roosevelt 105 years ago.

“Refuges have been so woefully underfunded. What’s happening in Maine is indicative of what’s happening nationwide,” said Desiree Sorenson-Groves, vice president of government affairs for the National Wildlife Refuge Association. A $3.5 billion maintenance backlog and an ongoing 20 percent workforce reduction are leaving wildlife refuges vulnerable and making them less visitor-friendly, she said.

Maine’s refuges face a $25.9 million shortfall for conservation projects and deferred maintenance, according to the report.

The elimination of all employees at Sunkhaze Meadows, which had four staff positions five years ago, means that refuge will be managed from an office in Rockport, although it remains open to visitors.

Rachel Carson, Maine’s southernmost refuge, includes salt marshes and estuaries scattered along 50 miles of coastline between Kittery and Cape Elizabeth. It protects prime habitat for migratory birds and gets about 250,000 human visits a year, Feurt said.

In the past year and a half, the refuge has lost its deputy manager, an administrative employee and the staff member who patrolled the refuge and managed the prescribed fires that are used to maintain natural habitats. The refuge now brings a fire crew down from Moosehorn Refuge in far northern Maine.

Some of the money from those salaries will be available to help manage the refuge, he said. But the loss of more than a third of the staff will have impacts, he said. “I’m of the opinion you get things done with people,” Feurt said.

Refuges nationwide actually got a funding increase in the current fiscal year, in part because of protests from advocates, said Janet Kennedy, federal refuge supervisor for northern New England. But, she said, “Up until this year, we’ve had basically level budgets and increased costs of operations.”

The staffing cuts, in fact, are intended to free up more money to catch up on deferred maintenance and other projects, she said. “It’s a solution for us to live within our means.”

It’s not unusual for mainlanders to head over to Peaks Island or some other Casco Bay community in hopes of making a home or raising a family.

Some stay and some don’t.

But it’s not that often that the newcomers are beavers, and they decide to stay on.

Peaks now seems to have two beaver families – or perhaps one family with a guest lodge. The two well-built lodges have appeared near the southeast shore and Trout Pond.

Along with building their lodges using branches, saplings and some pilfered lumber, the beavers have been hard at work on multiple dams. They’ve raised the water in a stream more than a foot and may flood part of Battery Steele this summer, said Garry Fox, a biology teacher at Portland High School and member of the Peaks Island Land Preserve.

Fox and other islanders have been watching the engineering project progress, knowing that destroying the dams wouldn’t discourage the industrious rodents from simply rebuilding. “You can’t beat them in that regard,” he said.

The first of the beavers is believed to have arrived about five years ago. One islander thinks she saw that one, tired and wet, climb out of Casco Bay onto the south shore near Cushing Island.

They seem to like the privacy of island life and keep pretty much to themselves. “They operate, it seems like, at night,” said Fox, who has yet to see any of his new neighbors in the fur.

The islands of Casco Bay are certainly no Galapagos, a cluster of islands off Ecuador so isolated they have their own varieties of bird and turtle species. But the nearly two miles of Atlantic Ocean that separates Peaks from the mainland is enough to give it a different mix of wildlife.

“We don’t have squirrels. We don’t have chipmunks,” said Fox.

Those smaller mammals can reach islands using the life-raft strategy – cling-and-drift – but the odds aren’t good. It’s a much easier journey for larger swimmers, which include moose and deer, a species Peaks has plenty of.

Raccoons can swim, but they’re thick, absorbent coat would get too heavy for a Peaks crossing, said Philip Conkling a naturalist and director of the Island Institute in Rockland. Raccoons do sometimes reach Maine islands involuntarily. “They have been brought out to islands … to be hunted for recreation,” Conkling said.

Someone on Peaks once introduced a raccoon, but it hasn’t been seen for a while, Fox said. Another islander once brought a skunk across, apparently to get the upper hand in some island feud. It was trapped and shipped back ashore, he said.

Coyotes have started swimming to some Maine islands, which worries those who raise herds of sheep offshore, Conkling said.

“From time to time you’ll get a bear on the biggest uninhabited islands,” he said. “It’s hard for them to find a mate, but there’s plenty of food.”

Conkling has seen beavers, or at least their handiwork, on several islands. Some young beavers basically travel so far downstream in search of a new home that they find themselves swimming in one of Maine’s bays.

“They don’t live in saltwater but to migrate through it is not a problem. They’re fully aquatic and they’re strong swimmers,” Conkling said. “They’ve shown up on Vinalhaven, which is 8 to 12 miles offshore.”

But, alas, the story of island wildlife is often one of immigration and extinction, said Conkling. Food and new habitat runs out before too long and it’s time to move on.

Fox, in fact, thinks the Peaks beavers may soon run out of poplar and birch trees to chew on. Then, like a lot of mainlanders before them, they’ll realize island life isn’t for everyone.

Now that Maine’s Legislature has stepped up regulation of toxic chemicals in consumer products, the state’s environmental health advocates are hoping the momentum carries over to Washington.

With today's introduction of the Kid Safe Chemicals Act, Congress took the first step toward a possible overhaul of the 30-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act. Health advocates and environmentalists have long argued that the law is too old and weak to deal with a variety of possible threats such as bisphenol A, an ingredient in plastic baby bottles linked to adverse effects in laboratory studies.

The federal proposal would require chemical manufacturers to provide health and safety data so federal regulators can take chemicals off the market if they don’t meet health standards for exposure to children. It also would set up a bio-monitoring program to study Americans’ exposure to chemicals.

Public health and environmental advocates in Maine praised the effort today. But they also sent a letter urging Maine’s congressional delegation to strengthen it. They want to see the federal legislation include a provision in a new Maine law that makes it possible to phase out toxic chemicals when there are safer alternatives.

A lack of faith in federal protections led several states to take up their own legislative proposals this year. Maine’s Legislature overwhelmingly supported a state program to track dangerous chemicals in consumer products sold here, as well as a process for phasing out those considered unnecessary.

Gov. John Baldacci will hold a signing ceremony for that law in his office Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. He’ll be joined by members of the Alliance for a Clean & Healthy Maine and the Governor’s Task Force to Promote Safer Chemicals in Consumer Products, as well as other supporters of the bill.

Terry Connelly remembers clipping out a 2002 newspaper headline declaring an end to the long-running saga of the McKin toxic waste site in Gray.

It was a satisfying, mission-accomplished moment for Connelly, who lives in Eliot and oversaw the site for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The sad stories of all the people affected by poisoned groundwater around the former dump are still with him.

But toxic waste sites have a way of hanging around and causing headaches, or worse, long after the cleanup crews pull out. “They don’t seem to go away,” Connelly said.

Connelly is part of an EPA team revisiting the McKin neighborhood this summer as part of a five-year review. He hopes to find that nature’s self-cleaning cycle is making progress. But it’s a forgone conclusion that the plume of toxic chemicals is still lingering deep in the sand, gravel and bedrock, moving very slowly into the Royal River.

And there is an emerging concern that the chemicals left behind could still pose a health threat in the form of vapors seeping up through the ground.

The McKin Co. began dumping oil sludge and industrial solvents into a former gravel pit off Mayall Road in the 1960s. The waste came from more than 400 businesses, school districts, municipalities and churches.

In 1975, two friends living near the site noticed stinky drinking water. After one had a miscarriage, they began hearing about a range of health problems in the neighborhood, including skin rashes.

Tests finally identified industrial contaminants in the water two years later, and the town shut down McKin and began extending public water to the owners of 50 contaminated wells.

McKin became the catalyst for a whole set of state laws regulating the hazardous waste sites that would follow. It emerged around the same time as other toxic sites around the country, including one in a New York neighborhood called Love Canal, and eventually became one of the first in Maine to be named a federal Superfund cleanup site.

The parties that sent waste to McKin spent more than $21 million on the cleanup, which included pumping and treating groundwater for several years. The active cleanup was declared over in the late 1990s after experts decided the site would clean itself naturally within about 50 years, just as fast as the pump-and-treat effort.

The groups that had been financing the cleanup paid a $4.5 million settlement to landowners and other parties. And in 2002 the story was declared over.

Groundwater and the Royal River continued to be monitored, however, and will for decades more. The Royal River has been meeting water quality standards, even at the point where the groundwater plume discharges into it, Connelly said.

But the old dump site may still be capable of harming its neighbors.

When the cleanup was declared over, no one thought of toxic vapors seeping up through the soil into homes and buildings.

“It wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen,” Connelly said. “And then a couple years later, we start hearing these stories about other sites … We’re seeing it throughout the country.”

EPA officials plan to test air quality in some Gray homes this summer, he said. If there is any evidence of “vapor intrusion,” the contaminants would be vented away much like radon gas that seeps into basements.

It’s another reminder, Connelly said, that avoiding a mess is a whole lot cheaper and faster than cleaning one up.

Commute Another Way Week starts Monday.

People who give their cars a rest and bike, walk or ride the bus to work will once again be rewarded with free T-shirts and prizes.

But Matt Sargent and his friends couldn’t wait for the prizes. Not with gas prices shooting up 71 cents per gallon in the past year – 37 cents in the past month alone.

“I was spending $120 a week” just driving to and from work, Sargent said.

So Sargent and two buddies did what a lot of Mainers may finally be ready to do, now that a gallon of gas costs $3.70. They changed their driving habits.