ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
17 
love California. The illustrations are numerous 
and adequate. This volume is plainly intended 
to interest and inform the general reader, but of 
scientific classification there is quite enough. It 
is the millions who need to be instructed, not the 
scientific few. 
We heartily congratulate Mrs. Myers upon 
the character and appearance of this volume. 
W. T. IP. 
A WILD CONNECTICUT SANCTUARY 
By Richard Outwater, Jr. 
A S many other and better writers have re¬ 
marked, it is exceedingly remarkable 
how quickly the wild folk learn to 
know of places where they are assured of pro¬ 
tection and where unhampered they may return 
to their natural state. Seemingly the nearness 
of man and his works are forgotten or at least 
put aside in the intense joy of finding a refuge 
where the bang of guns and the snap of traps 
comes to them only as a bitter memory. 
In Greenwich, Connecticut, there is a wooded 
tract, locally known as Anderson’s Woods, 
bounded on the north by the Boston Post Road, 
on the south by the New York New Haven and 
Hartford Railroad and on the east and west by 
busy thoroughfares where traffic is practically 
incessant and where the screech of the auto 
siren is seldom absent. A goodly woodland this, 
with a lake and divers small ponds and streams 
where members of the finny tribe abound. A 
tract of ancient, uncut trees, of undergrowth 
and thicket, a place where barbed wire is a thing 
unknown and where the few faint trails are 
rapidly becoming overgrown for want of use. 
Here one may behold the flash of wing or see 
the furry creatures in the thickets. 
To one’s ears come the cry of bird and the 
splash of the bass in the lake. The place is 
teemingly, intensely alive; a place of joy un¬ 
confined. A casual observation nets the follow¬ 
ing list of living creatures: 
Raccoon, muskrat, weasel, cottontail, skunk, 
gray fox, red fox, woodchuck, red squirrel, gray 
squirrel, chipmunk, varying hare, various bats, 
mice, moles and shrews. 
Canada goose, black duck, wood-duck, mal¬ 
lard, bittern, sea gull, little green heron, great 
blue heron, loon, belted kingfisher, barred owl, 
screech owl, great horned owl, crow, red-tailed 
hawk, ruffed grouse, woodcock, quail, blue jay, 
dove, catbird, bluebird, robin, red-winged black¬ 
bird, downy woodpecker, red-headed wood¬ 
pecker, flicker, kingbird, English sparrow, song 
sparrow, Baltimore oriole, purple grackle, mar¬ 
tin, barn swallow, wood thrush, house wren, 
reedbird, scarlet tanager, chickadee, snowbird, 
and a host of others. 
Also, garter snake, water snake, black snake, 
green snake, little brown snake, milk snake, red 
bellied snake, and numerous frogs, toads, newts 
and turtles and a great variety of the native 
insect life. 
AMERICA’S LEAST KNOWN BIG GAME 
ANIMAL, THE GIANT TAPIR 
Preliminary Notice by William T. Hornaday. 
I CALL the giant tapir (Tapirella bairdi ) 
our least known big game animal, not 
because it is absolutely unknown, but be¬ 
cause to 990 out of every 1,000 persons in the 
United States, it is as much unknown as the 
unicorn. The other one-tenth of one per cent, 
know it vaguely and forgetfully from the four 
solitary mounted specimens that exist in the 
museums of the United States, and from hearsay, 
plus a trace of observation in the animal’s own 
territory. 
Fancy, if you can, an animal as heavy at its 
maximum as a small horse, almost impossible 
to a sportsman who has no dogs, and yet quite 
reasonably plentiful in its own territory, re¬ 
maining for the past two centuries more com¬ 
pletely unknown to the American people than 
the extinct imperial mammoth and the latest 
discovery in dinosaurs. 
Throughout fifty years of museum making in 
the United States, only five preserved specimens 
exist today on exhibition. These are distributed 
as follows: one mounted skin each in the 
Carnegie Museum at Pittsburgh, the Field 
Columbian Museum at Chicago, and the Public 
Museum in Milwaukee; one skeleton in the 
United States National Museum, and one 
mounted head in the National Collection of 
Heads and Horns at the Zoological Park. But 
there is a worse record than this to follow: 
Up to this time only two live specimens ever 
have reached any of the zoological gardens of 
the world. In 1865 a spotted and striped baby 
giant tapir found its way into the London Zoo, 
and lived there for five weeks. In 1922, after 
four or five years of diligent inquiry and per¬ 
suasion, the New York Zoological Park achieved 
a young specimen which reached the Park alive 
