Fauna Series No. 1 Cover Contents Foreword Approach Methods Analysis Conspectus Suggested Policy

Fauna of the National Parks of the United States CONSPECTUS OF WILD-LIFE PROBLEMS OF EACH PARK As desirable as it would have been to make the preliminary study inclusive, circumstances did not permit visits to every one of the national parks. Therefore there are a few which do not appear in this section. Most emphatically this does not mean that they are not significant as regards wild life nor that they have no faunal problems. Some of the parks which were said to have no important vertebrate animals were found, on the contrary, to have unusual interest from this standpoint. Nearly every park can add some forms to the quota which will some day give the national parks a full representation of all the fauna of our country. The assumption should be that every park and monument shall be carefully studied for the animal life that it either has or, by restoration, should have. Lest the wrong significance be accredited to the treatment of faunal problems by parks in this section, the reassertion is made that the survey did in no case make a complete study of the thoroughgoing sort outlined in the chapter on Methods Adapted to Faunal Investigations. Where only weeks were available in any one place for the preliminary survey, it will take months and years to make the exhaustive studies. However, it was possible to get a general picture of the status of wild life in each of the parks visited. Some of the basic conditions causing faunal maladjustments in each park were noted and some suggestions on how to attack the problems were formulated. These observations are recorded here not to take the place of further work but to stimulate it and perhaps to serve as a prospectus. It is because there is a useful significance to the arrangement, from a biotic standpoint, that the parks have been grouped here by regions. The Southwest parks are alike to the extent that analysis of faunal relationships in one of them will be helpful to a study of others in the group. Eastern parks show a greater disparity, yet even here there are similarities of topography and climate which give them a unit character and the grouping has administrative value. PARKS Southwest | Rocky Mountain | Pacific Coast | Eastern | Territorial

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