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National Geographic : 1982 Sep
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(Continuedfrom page 344) flatlands near Lawton. The buffalo hunted by the Kiowas, Comanches, and other tribes had vanished when the area, championed early by the Boone and Crockett Club, was proclaimed a game preserve by Roosevelt in June 1905. T. R. was intensely interested in bringing back the buffalo to the Wichita. So was Quanah Parker, the old chief of the Coman ches, who said wistfully, "Tell the President that the buffalo is my old friend, and it would make my heart glad to see a herd once more roaming about Mount Scott." In October 1907, 15 prime specimens cho sen from the New York Zoo were specially crated and loaded on railroad cars at Ford ham Station. As the train rolled 1,858 miles toward Cache, Oklahoma, newspapers touted the event and festive crowds lined the tracks. At Cache, a group of Indians camped out for days near holding pens, awaiting the re turn of the "Great Spirit's cattle." Emotions ran high when the animals arrived. Onetime warriors pressed against a wire fence to view a few of the shaggy giants that once had blackened their plains. Elk and wild turkey, by then exterminat ed from the region, were also successfully reintroduced, along with a herd of Texas longhorn cattle, carefully selected to pre serve the best representatives of a dying breed. Today, within the fenced refuge's 59,000 acres, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains about 300 longhorns and 600 buffalo, auctioning roughly 100 head from each group yearly to breeders. Elmer Parker knows each animal by number, if not by name (one fetching cow became Belle Starr). Elmer is called a bio logical technician, which is like labeling corn whiskey as undenatured ethyl alcohol. The fall buffalo roundups have branded him with more than a few scars. "I'm gettin' older and slower, I guess," he sighed, as three young bulls nosed around his truck one morning. "Few years ago a buffalo got me down on the ground. I just had to play dead while he worked me over. At least he never gotahorninme. Hedidbustupmyknee caps and tore up my clothes pretty bad." While Elmer and others ride herd on the wildlife, refuge manager Bob Karges has fought a running feud with the Air Force 350 and Fort Sill Military Reservation next door. The issue: noise. Since 1972 jet fight ers circling practice targets at Fort Sill have also overflown parts of the refuge. "To have wilderness, you have to have solitude," said Karges. For Fort Sill, Lt. Col. A. T. Brainerd re sponded. "These are Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard pilots, and they try not to fly over densely populated areas. It's a trade-off." Each year 12,000 people hike through Charon's Garden, a wilderness with a splen did little amphitheater of fractured rock where buffalo, elk, and deer wander amid blackjack and post oak. Bobwhites were calling around my camp one morning when an F-105 came screaming out of the sun, fol lowed by three more a few seconds apart. Well into the afternoon the roar of the jets filled Charon's Garden. Surely, on days like this, when grisly old Charon was ferrying the souls of the dead across the river Styx, the passengers awakened and bade him hasten the departure, as I did mine. N A THREE-ACRE ISLET of man groves in the Indian River on Florida's east coast, the first seed of the National Wildlife Refuge System was planted on March 14, 1903. "Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation?" Roosevelt que ried. Told the island was federal property, he delivered a fiat: "Very well, then I so de clare it." It was to the bird-loving President that Frank M. Chapman of the Audubon Society and others had brought the island's case. To adorn fashionable ladies' hats, plume hunt ers were slaughtering the area's birdlife, chiefly the egrets. A one-man crusade on be half of the birds had long been carried on by Paul Kroegel, a German boatbuilder who had settled nearby. Paul Kroegel's modern counterpart, Lawrence Wineland, kept an eye on the birds for 17 years until his recent retirement. "Why would a pelican want to nest here? Only the pelican knows," he ruminated in an Arkansas drawl as his boat nudged the is land, its mangroves bedraggled by decades of flapping wings and guano deposits. Brown pelicans merit the endangered National Geographic, September 1982
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