Laura Wolf didn’t have to venture far into the woods to find what many enthusiasts consider a “life bird.”

The scarlet and summer tanagers’ nest was just inside the North Tract of Patuxent Research Refuge, near Fort Meade. These rare birds favor lush forests that have all but disappeared in this area. Yet this brilliant red tanager nested within a mile of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, a fence-line away from a sprawling suburban metro area packed with nearly 10 million people.

Among Maryland birders, the Patuxent refuge’s secluded northern tract, a huge swath of reclaimed military land, is a beloved but closely held secret.

“To some extent, that was intentional,” Wolf said. “But now we need to save it.”

Lately, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has slashed hours at the North Tract; it’s only open one day a week and had no staff one recent Sunday to check in visitors or count how many came. Across the refuge’s sprawling 13,000 acres — which includes the secluded North Tract, the more visited South Tract, and the restricted, research-only Central Tract — only five full-time employees remain, according to a former refuge manager.

And under President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget, Patuxent’s renowned research labs would be defunded completely.

Patuxent once boasted 23 full-time staff members, according to former refuge manager Bradley Knudsen, who led the refuge from 2000 to 2019. Even in easier times, these employees learned to do more with less, protecting what resources they could by emphasizing hunting under Republican administrations and endangered-species protections under Democratic ones, Kundsen said.

But given Trump’s plan for Patuxent, Knudsen fears the refuge may never recover.

“That’s what I worry about,” the former director said on a recent hike around the South Tract’s Cash Lake. “It becomes the new norm.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the agency is “implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency, and government accountability.” The spokesperson did not answer a question about staffing reductions, saying the agency doesn’t comment on personnel matters.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Interior Department division that operates the Eastern Ecological Science Center at Patuxent, defended eliminating its research.

USGS “proudly supports” Trump’s spending plan, “a historic, America First budget that delivers middle-class tax cuts, unleashes American energy, secures our borders, and invests in the infrastructure and security of our public lands,” a spokesperson said.

The proposed cuts, though, could end generations’ worth of science. Patuxent is home to long-term studies that, in some cases, date back nearly to the refuge’s 1936 founding.

“I look at it in decades, not in years,” said Matthew Perry, an emeritus scientist and former wildlife research biologist at the refuge.

The Eastern Ecological Science Center encompasses the 20 year-old Laurel bee lab, crucial to American insect studies. An older federal program there tracks populations of hundreds of different bird species. On one small plot of land, Patuxent scientists observed earthworm impacts on soil health for much of the 20th century, dating back almost to the Dust Bowl.

There’s also Patuxent’s bird-banding lab and its decades of tracking on birds across the globe. The lab was home for years to the ornithologist known as “dean of the bird conservation world,” Chandler Robbins, who in 1956 banded an albatross known as the world’s oldest living bird.

Despite its proximity to Washington, Perry, a historian of the refuge, said only two presidents have ever set foot there. The first was George Washington, who passed through long before the land fell into federal hands. The second was George W. Bush, who used the refuge’s Central Tract as a cycling track because it’s near a Secret Service training center in Laurel.

It’s also a favorite spot of Desirée Sorenson-Groves, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the federal refuge system.

Like Knudsen, Sorenson-Groves has grown used to deflecting cuts in presidential budget proposals, but this time, she said, things feel different.

“It’s always been in sort of a crisis mode, but never like this,” she said of the federal refuge system.

Already down 30% from a 2010 peak, staffing within the wildlife refuge system has dropped by a quarter since Trump’s inauguration, according to tracking by Sorenson-Groves’ organization.

“That we would throw away 150 years of conservation for a small gain is just unfathomable to me,” she said.

Among their most noted achievements, scientists at Patuxent were instrumental in uncovering the harms of the insecticide DDT, ubiquitous in the years after World War II.

This research inspired a young editor at the Fish and Wildlife Service named Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring, a foundational text in the American environmental movement.

But Trump has already left a mark on Patuxent research: During his previous term, the president ended a program for rearing endangered whooping cranes. Scientists had discreetly monitored the behaviors of these birds in their refuge since 1966, often donning crane costumes.

To many Patuxent devotees, the threats in Trump’s budget are existential. The federal government alone made research at this refuge possible, said Richard Dolesh, director of the advocacy group Friends of Patuxent.

“There’s nobody that’s going to step up once this is wiped out,” he said.

When the staff was counting, about 50,000 people visited the refuge’s North Tract a year — a fraction of the 275,000 who visited the South Tract and its visitors center. Those who came tended to be repeat visitors — lovers of scarlet tanagers, Kentucky warblers and other small songbirds they could not see or hear anywhere else.

But with today’s skeleton staff, no one checks visitors in at the corrugated metal building or finds out what they plan to do at the refuge that day. Ballfields closed long ago. Some areas are roped off, beyond fences, off limits already.

A federal program that enlisted volunteers to monitor the forest birds, their eggs and their use of the refuge appears to have ended, according to Meo Curtis, Martin Ford and Joe DiGiovanni, longtime volunteers who once helped with the bird surveys.

“I called and asked to help monitor the bird boxes,” Ford said. “No one ever got back to me.”

The North Tract didn’t become a part of the wildlife refuge until the mid-1990s, when Fort Meade ceded more than 8,000 acres for conservation.

The region didn’t face the affordable-housing crisis that it does today, and Knudsen fears the refuge could be desirable if the Trump administration puts the land up for sale, as it’s threatened to do elsewhere.

Without proof that the North Tract is well-loved and well-used, regulars worry that its gate would close for good, and possibly be developed for more houses.

Knudsen struggles to sum up what might be lost under the administration’s cuts.

Roaming his old refuge, the former director waxed on the harms of “nature deprivation” and the “wisdom of wildness.” He invoked the late Maryland Sen. Paul Sarbanes, who once called Patuxent “the green lungs” of the capital region.

“It’s that loss of connection to nature,” Knudsen said. “Whether you enjoy birding, hiking, hunting, fishing — it’s that loss of connection that we all need.”