Members of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund say a similar agency being created across the state line in Virginia may end up generating more confusion than advocacy for the Outer Banks herd.

A bill introduced by Delegate Terrie Suit, R-Virginia Beach, in the Virginia House of Delegates would award state funding to aid a nonprofit group called the Wild Spanish Mustangs Fund.

According to Suit's office, the nonprofit's funding would pay the medical fees as well as the costs of corralling Corolla horses that stray across the state line into Virginia. The funding would also pay for repairs to any fences that needed mending to keep the horses confined to North Carolina.

Karen McCalpin, director of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund in Currituck, said she was taken aback when she heard about Suit's legislation. The Wild Spanish Mustangs Fund apparently made no contact with the Wild Horse Fund, which has been given stewardship over the herd, prior to seeking the legislation in Virginia.

"We were not asked for any input so I was very surprised," McCalpin said. "Part of cooperation is communication and there wasn't any communication.

"The horses don't belong to the Corolla Wild Horse Fund but we are the organization that's charged with the management of the fund and it does reside in North Carolina."

One reason there may not have been communication about the new group is that two of its members are Gene and Donna Snow — former co-directors of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund. The Snows, who live in Virginia Beach, resigned last year after the Wild Horse Fund board of directors elected to hire a full-time manager. McCalpin took that job last summer.

The Snows did not return phone messages for this story. But Barrett Stork, a spokesman for Suit, acknowledged that the Snows are part of the proposed new organization.

While the Wild Horse Fund welcomes the assistance of the Snows and the Wild Spanish Mustangs Fund, it wants to ensure services to the herd aren't duplicated, McCalpin said.

"Any group wanting to help the horses is good, but we have to be careful we are not recreating the wheel," she said.

That's one reason McCalpin said she grew alarmed when she learned that the Virginia group originally wanted to call itself the Corolla Wild Horses Fund — a difference of one letter from the Currituck-based group.

"That would have been very confusing. I expressed concern about that," she said.

Stork, Suit's spokesman, confirmed that the name of the proposed Virginia group was changed to Wild Spanish Mustangs Fund after McCalpin's complaint.

"The two names were very similar," he said.

McCalpin said the Wild Spanish Mustangs Fund could prove useful in cases where horses get under or around the fence at low tide and gallop north over the Virginia line. But she said that happened only a handful of times a year, and the Corolla Wild Horse Fund now has someone on call to retrieve horses that escape their enclosed habitat.

But there are several areas of potential competition between the groups that could do more harm than good, McCalpin said. Fundraising is a concern, she said, because both groups will potentially be competing for funds from the same donor base — horse lovers.

But Suit said Tuesday she wasn't sure why McCalpin had made an issue of the Virginia fund.

"We are all just trying to jointly help and protect these horses and there was never any intention to duplicate another fund name," Suit said in an e-mail. "The bill was never submitted with the other name ... I am hopeful that we can pass this legislation and obtain funding that will help to protect the Wild Spanish Mustangs in the future. We all share the same love of these horses and a desire to keep them safe."

There's already been one area of controversy between the two groups. The Snows apparently conducted a count of the herd by air last week, and only found 50 horses on the Corolla beaches.

But that's half the number found by Steve Rogers, herd manager for the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, and Tim Cooper of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during their aerial count in August. That count found 119 horses, although the herd has since thinned to 102, McCalpin said.

"We certainly didn't count each one twice," she said.

One of McCalpin's upcoming projects — implementing a management plan that thins the herd to 60 — also proposes to use a technique, birth control, that the Snows opposed during their five years in charge of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund.

McCalpin said the Wild Horse Fund's board of directors recently reversed their long-held opposition to artificial methods of birth control for the herd.

"We have decided to adopt a natural birth control program," she said. "It's not realistic to expect adoption to deal with the number of horses we need to meet the (targets in the) management plan."

McCalpin and herd manager Rogers will be trained to "dart" selected mares with the birth control drug PZP starting this spring.

"Birth control would be used for some of the older mares who are becoming pregnant every year. It's putting a strain on their bodies," she said.