Big Game Animals of the Yellowstone 409 



though he is a pensioner at the hotels and camps during the 

 tourist season. There is ahvaA'S a hard spring to weather if he 

 remains in the Park; but if he wanders outside he must dodge 

 the bullets of ranchmen as best he can until with the coming of 

 June the Park hostelries open and he can return to his happy 

 summer home in the forests near their refuse dumps. 



The hoofed animals, being less fortunate by nature than the 

 bears, must struggle through the winter precariously, but if the 

 snows are not too deep and the grass too sparse beneath, they 

 manage very well. Park officials now have the awkward problem 

 thrust upon them of saving or preserving game animals in great 

 numbers in an area which Nature never intended for a winter 

 game refuge. Every fall the Park sta.fi has a hard fight to prevent 

 the herds of elk and the diminishing band of antelope from 

 wandering out of the Park into the neighboring States where they 

 are sure to be destroyed in one way or another, legally or illegally. 

 This exasperating situation can be remedied in only one way, that 

 is, by enlarging the Park to the north and to the south along the 

 lines of march of the downward migrating animals, so as to include 

 sufficient winter range to enable them to survive the severest season. 

 This proposed enlargement of Yellowstone Park, making a better 

 geographic unit, will enable the ranger force to more readily pro- 

 tect the game from hunters who now line the boundaries during the 

 open season and strive to slaughter every individual and band that 

 ventures outside in search of food. 



In the fall of 192 1, I visited a National Park, the Yellowstone, 

 for the first time. At the invitation of Dr. Charles C. Adams, 

 Director of the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station of 

 the New York State College of Forestry, I engaged in a pre- 

 liminary survey of its big game animals for this institution. I 

 had met with the game species of the Yellowstone elsewhere in 

 the hunting field years ago and had collected most of them as 

 specimens for our natural history museums, but I have never before 

 passed time more pleasurab'ly and profitably than in this present 

 natural history investigation. I learned more about the habits of 

 the animal species observed during these few months than in all 

 my previous hunting experience. 



As our oldest and best stocked game sanctuary Yellowstone Park 

 is an ideal field for the study of large mammals. For forty years 

 elk, bison, antelope, mountain sheep, deer, moose, bear and beaver 

 have lived here in comparative safety, and their protection is now 

 almost absolute so lono- as thev do not strav outside the Park. 



