Cover Page

Contents

Preface
Letter

SECTION I

Orientation
Summary

SECTION II

History
Needs
Geography
Historic Sites
Competitors
Economic Aspects

SECTION III

Federal Lands
State and Interstate
Local

SECTION IV

Division of Responsibility
Local
State
Federal
Circulation

SECTION V

Educational Opportunities

Biological Reservations

Because wildlife cannot be adequately conserved, i. e., perpetuated and used, by the establishment of wildlife reservations alone and because wildlife is one of those recreational resources which permeate the entire country, it must be considered in all forms of land utilization and should be dealt with as a national resource.

One locality within one State may have a surplus of antelope, buffalo, or grizzly bear, whereas these same animals may be practically extirpated from the entire remaining area of our country. In such cases, it is hardly justifiable to permit the local viewpoint to deprive the Nation of a valuable and irreplaceable resource. In addition, therefore, to the establishment of numerous wildlife reservations, there should be a national coordination of wildlife conservation.

Such a program of conservation should include all types of wildlife utilization consistent with perpetuation of the resource and the realization of its various types of values. For example, referring to the definitions of different types of wildlife reservations given on page 4, all reservations should not be of the game preserve or game refuge types only, but should include all kinds of reservations in order to provide for all types of wildlife utilization, according to their function. But national coordination of wildlife conservation should rest in one agency.

A specific conservation measure of apparent merit is suggested by McAtee. It is as follows:

Sentiment has been aroused and action taken to preserve objects of outstanding natural interest other than birds. Among the national monuments, for instance, Muir Woods was established to save a noted redwood grove, and the Papago Saguaro to reserve characteristic desert flora, primarily the giant cactus, while among national parks the Sequoia is intended to insure the perpetuation of the big trees. We have national monuments even to protect petrified trees and fossil dinosaurs. Then let us do as much for threatened forms of wildlife lest they join the fossil world.

The sequoia and the redwood are wonderful native plants, the survivors of an evolutionary series known to have great antiquity. Their continued existence hangs by a slender thread, and we have done well to strengthen it. We may equally as well insure the preservation of such interesting birds as the road runner, the anhinga, and the pelican. The road runner is confined to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico and is absolutely unique; if we allow its extermination, it will be gone for ever, like the great auk and the passenger pigeon. The anhinga, snakebird or water turkey, is one of the very distinct family of birds of which there are only three or four species in the world; our bird is restricted chiefly to cypress swamps, and the number of breeding places available to it is constantly decreasing. There are only about six species of pelicans in all, of which two occur in the United States, and they are restricted in the breeding season to widely separated colonies, in most of which they have been terribly persecuted.

All of these stand alone among our birds, and their loss, whether from the standpoint of science or of popular natural history, would be irreparable. Birds of wonderful structure, the last remnants of their lines, and not only of national but of international interest and value, they are subjected to wanton raiding by small minorities for petty reasons. Classing them as vermin could be termed as childish, if it were not a monstrous absurdity. Rather than being dealt with so shamefully, they are just as much entitled to preservation as some of the objects that have national monuments devoted to them. Living pelicans or anhingas certainly equal, if they do not surpass, in interest, fossil dinosaurs, and road runners are just as characteristic and precious an element of desert life as the giant cactus. If we should carry out the logic of our own previous actions or should follow the enlightened example of Japan, we would in outstanding cases establish the birds themselves as national monuments. This step would all the more be warranted in the case of migratory birds, the pelicans, as protecting the breeding colonies alone is only of seasonal effectiveness.¹⁸

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¹⁸ McAtee, W. L., A Little Essay on Vermin (in Bird Lore, vol. 66, pp. 381—384, December 1931).

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