national parks and refuges, wildlife refuges, United States, wildlife management areas 

Early in this century, the cowboy artist C.M. Russell, alarmed at the diminished numbers of buffalo on the western plains, wrote a friend: "for over a hundred years he fed and made beds for our frountier an it shure looks like we could feed an protect a fiew hundred of them. . . ." President Theodore Roosevelt shared Russell's concern. In 1903 he created the nation's first wildlife refuge, Florida's Pelican Island, to protect nesting birds; two years later he established a sanctuary for buffalo in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma.

Today there are more than 400 wildlife refuges in the United States, where managers carefully maintain habitat, food supplies, and water especially for the animals. Some refuges plant crops for their charges; some build levees to conserve wetlands. Still others preserve or try to restore native grasses, food of prairie dogs, buffalo, and elk.

Though less famous than our national parks, the refuges are larger in total acreage and include an astonishing variety of ecosystems - swamp and desert, prairie and forest, seashore and tundra. Wild Lands for Wildlife explores these havens from the smallest - backyard-size Mille Lacs in Minnesota - to the largest refuge in the system, 19.6-million-acre Yukon Delta in Alaska. Author Noel Grove joins a night patrol to rescue loggerhead turtle eggs in Georgia, watches a "world of silhouettes" come alive at dawn in the plains of Kansas, and hikes a sweep of emptiness in Alaska. From sandy Atlantic beaches and waving central grasslands to sunbaked stands of saguaro cactus in Arizona, photographer Bates Littlehales captures close-ups of refuge animals and vistas of their diverse domains.

Pressures increase and management intensifies as cities, farms, and industries creep closer to our refuges. Yet several endangered species owe their existence to these protected islands, and virtually every wild animal native to this continent finds a haven there. From Key West to Hawaii, Noel Grove reminds us, refuges are the world of the animals. Man is "a visitor, a student, and a beneficiary." Wild Lands for Wildlife reveals the "problems, promise, and pleasures" in one of this nation's least-known treasures - our wildlife refuge system.

Taken from the front inside flap.