A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 507 



is under management for one purpose or another, some of it with the 

 primary objective of wild-life conservation. Where the timber 

 resource is a principal objective, such management in the main is 

 beneficial to the welfare of wild life. In the national parks wild life 

 is one of the important attractions. The development of the wild- 

 life resource on all of these Federal lands, including parts of the public 

 domain in its proper relation to other resources and use values, will 

 add materially to the public benefits, social, as well as economic, 

 derived from their management. 



STATE, COUNTY, AND MUNICIPAL OWNERSHIP 



The nearly \1% million acres of State, county, and municipal forest 

 lands amounting to 3 percent of the total forest area, of which roundly 

 11 million acres is in the Eastern and 6K million in the Western Unitecl 

 States, include many areas used especially for wild-life purposes, and 

 most of the areas utilized for wild life in parks and zoological gardens. 

 In the Middle Atlantic and Lake regions they include large areas of 

 public shooting grounds. 



Although comprising only a small percentage of the total forest land 

 area of the country, these areas afford probably the best opportunity, 

 particularly through State forests and parks, for the proper coor- 

 dinated development of wild-life values. This is especially the case 

 in the East where most of the forest lands are in private ownership, 

 and the management of wild life is thereby a much more complicated 

 problem. 



With the increase in area of these lands, owing to reversion of tax- 

 delinquent lands and other forms of State acquisition, the develop- 

 ment of the wild-life resource under coordinated multiple-use manage- 

 ment will have great possibilities in alleviating the financial burden 

 that such lands entail and in furnishing other public benefits that are 

 afforded by wild life. 



PRIVATE OWNERSHIP 



Of the privately owned forest land amounting to about 444 million 

 acres, the large acreage in farm woodlands in the Eastern United 

 States, and more especially in the Lake, Central, Middle Atlantic, 

 and South regions (table 3), is particularly significant in relation to 

 the management of small game species such as quail, certain species 

 of grouse, pheasants, and rabbits the last mentioned of which fur- 

 nishes shooting, according to the Biological Survey, for by far the 

 majority of the hunters of the United States. Again, the large areas 

 of farm woodland are in the Eastern United States, the area of the 

 greatest concentration of population. Because of their general dis- 

 tribution, these lands to a great degree furnish the forest-land part 

 of the game habitat for these regions. Other lands in private owner- 

 ship not classifiable as farm woodlands play their part in the same 

 manner, but are probably not as important in this respect because 

 they are not of such general distribution, and because they contain 

 considerable acreages of more or less unbroken timber or woodland, 

 more suceptible of use by big game. Such privately owned lands 

 contain areas available for lease and management by individuals and 

 clubs as private hunting preserves. 



Here again recognition of wild-life values and their development 

 under coordinated multiple use land management may be made to 



