THE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE PROGRAM OF THE 

 FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE ' 



By Ira N. Gabeielsokt 



Director, Fish and Wildlife Service 

 United States Department of the Interior 



[With 3 plates] 



Every ornithologist is by now familiar with the flyway concept 

 that has resulted from the return records of birds banded over 

 a long period of years. Briefly, this visualizes the birds of cer- 

 tain regions as moving in four wide zones of migration over the 

 country. Some of these flyways overlap somewhat, particularly in 

 the breeding grounds. The birds in the Atlantic flyway, for example, 

 after they reach Chesapeake Bay and from there on south, follow 

 almost entirely a narro^v^ strip of coastal marsh, the great bulk of 

 them moving down the coast or across the Great Lakes and down 

 the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers. The same is true of the 

 Mississippi Valley, where, although the migration of birds covers a 

 wide band, south of Minnesota it is restricted rapidly to the valleys 

 of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, this being largely due to the 

 lack of water in other parts of the flyway. The Central, or mountain, 

 flyway is followed by a smaller group of birds that visit intermittent 

 lakes and sloughs through the Great Plains. The Pacific flight fol- 

 lows the system of great lakes and marshes through eastern Oregon, 

 Washington, and Nevada, but narrows down as it reaches California. 



One of the tragic facts in the history of migratory waterfowl has 

 been the shrinkage of their breeding ranges. The region extending 

 north into central Canada from central United States represents the 

 choicest and in some ways the most productive of all the breeding 

 areas. There is a serious decrease in the area available for optimum 

 populations. Another significant fact that must be considered in 

 studying the migratory waterfowl and the development of the na- 

 tional wildlife refuge system is that there is a tremendous concen- 



' Reprinted by permission, somewliat revised, from an article entitled "The Refuge 

 Pro-am of the Biological Survey," published in Bird-Lore, vol. 41, pp. 325-332, 1939. 

 [The Bureau of Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries were consolidated on 

 June 30, 1939, to form the Fish and Wildlife Service, U. S. Department of the Interior.] 



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