WILDLIFE CONSERVATION 793 



and even opacity of streamways that should be clear as crystal, the 

 destruction of valuable fish resources, the silting and choking up of 

 reservoirs and of irrigation works, the lowering of water tables, the 

 drying up of springs, the increase in black blizzards of dust, and the 

 abandonment by settlers of homes and lands. 



Man has unnecessarily and unintelligently reduced the food and 

 cover for wildlife. He seems not to have realized that every time he 

 cuts a needed tree or a bush, every time he cleans a fence row or 

 grazes the underbrush out of a woodlot, he thereby removes the life- 

 giving food and essential cover of many living creatures — insects, 

 mammals, birds, and game. It is of little use to liberate fish in streams 

 if no fish food is there. 



Man has perfected his mechanical devices so that all creatures are 

 threatened: guns, stronger, better, more of them; more efficient am- 

 munition ; automobiles, comfortable, speedy, easily capable of taking 

 the sportsman five hundred miles in a single day to the place where 

 good shooting or fishing is reported; airplanes that still further ac- 

 celerate the process; traps and scents that lessen the chances for 

 unwary fur animals to escape; huge juggernauts, called tree-dozers, 

 to remove the jungles which in some cases afford the only remaining 

 protection to some of our most interesting forms of wildlife ! 



Man has thoughtlessly removed the dead trees and brush which are 

 so necessary to such forms as woodpeckers, owls, and raccoons, as well 

 as to game; he has "cleaned up" the native plants on which the bob- 

 whites principally feed at certain times of the year; he has cam- 

 paigned against the marsh hawks and other hawks and owls that must 

 be relied on to help keep the snakes, rodents, and insects in a proper 

 balance ; he has at times eliminated rodents that are the necessary food 

 of fur animals and valuable raptores; he has fought the predators, 

 sometimes quite unnecessarily, seeming not to realize that in them- 

 selves the predators hold possibilities, on certain areas, of developing 

 into as high class objects of sport as can be found anywhere, as well 

 as being one element in a balanced wildlife program. 



Man has devleoped an agricultural system so efficient that a seem- 

 ing overproduction is one of its acute problems. He has built rail- 

 roads, bridges, cities, and mechanical devices of all sorts that enable 

 the well-to-do to live on a scale of luxury scarcely imaginable in other 

 days. In short, he has developed the mightiest mechanical civiliza- 

 tion of all time. 



