07

Starting a Wild-Life Sanctuary

Dallas Lore Sharp

Do you recall reading about the great Albert National Park that Carl Akeley helped establish in Africa? If wild animals need protection in that vast, unsettled continent, think how badly they must need it in our land of cities and farms! Many people are today greatly alarmed because the wild life of our country is disappearing so rapidly.

Dallas Lore Sharp, a famous preacher, teacher, and writer, tells how you and I can help save wild life from destruction. He set us a good example during his life by making a seven-acre refuge for birds near his home in Massachusetts.

What is a wild-life sanctuary? What does the making of one require? Such a sanctuary ought to be, if possible, the wildest piece of land within or near the borders of your town. To make a sanctuary of it means simply that the owner will give it over to wildness and to all wild life, posting it with notices to everyone that this piece of land is free from all harm and all alarm to every wild thing.

Thus one can turn his farm into a sanctuary. There would be no more plowing and planting done on a farm that was actually turned over to wildness and all wild things. One can also turn his city house-lot into a sanctuary—by simply adding a bird-bath and seeds and a piece of suet. Of course, there would be trouble in keeping prowling cats away.

Both farm and city house-lots are excellent sanctuaries; but they are not the best kind for several reasons, chief of which is their lack of wildness. Originally, the whole land was wild and was covered with wild life, and with wild Indians besides. The Indians have been removed from us, very largely. With them have gone some of the larger animals, as well as many of the lovely smaller ones, and many plants, while the danger of complete destruction hangs like a dreadful shadow over many more.

So the sanctuary ought naturally to take the wildest, swampiest, roughest and most forsaken piece of waste land anywhere about the town. If there is one wetter, darker, more abandoned piece of country near at hand than any other, choose that for the sanctuary. If it contains hills and a stream, a pond, or a spring, as well as trees and a sunny opening, so much the better. If there happens to be any waste land about the town, then that is the best place for a wild-life sanctuary.

Such land is cheap, and many an owner will be glad to give it outright for sanctuary purposes. If the leaders of the community are led to see that a wild place for wild life is just as necessary as a cultivated park for cultivated things, then the town might make of such waste land a public sanctuary. But if there is a local bird-club or any other organization interested in the nation-wide movement for conservation of wild things, then that is the organization to take over the purchase and upkeep of the sanctuary.

Any amount of land will do, but the more the better, for wild life requires considerable room. It likes a stretch of woods so deep that it cannot see daylight on the distant side. It likes ripe seeds enough by the river for the bobolinks and redwings to flock in, and for the breeze to play in, making running ripples all summer long. There must be room for the fox, the skunk, the snake, and then the muskrat swimming down the silvery surface of the pond. The sanctuary must be big enough for all these wild things to move about.

The more varied the kinds of land in the sanctuary, the greater is the variety of wild things that can grow and den and build there. What a number of strange kinds of wild life can be found in any bit of water! How many ferns and lichens will grow on the north walls of a rocky slope! On a single piece of swamp land as many as eight different wild orchids may grow, and near at hand perhaps twenty-four kinds of ferns may be found. The catbird likes a low, briery tangle for his nest; the brown thrasher likes the higher, hardwood sproutlands; the crow wants a tall pine; the broad-winged hawk, a big hard-to-climb white oak. Get an old, wild-apple tree into the sanctuary for the bluebird, the king-bird, the tree-swallow, and the chebec. Have a bit of pasture-land for the vesper sparrow and the meadowlark; and for the song spar-row put a patch of wild roses in the middle of it.

In this sanctuary, so far as possible, you wish every tree to dwell, every shrub, flower, fern, and lichen that were here in the beginning. You want every bird and beast and reptile, every fish and frog and crab and shellfish, worm and smallest thing that formerly called the neighborhood his home, to find a dwelling place here, now and always. This will be a place as wild and natural as it originally was, into which you can slip now and then to watch the wild things all about you.

If arbutus never grew here, do not plant it, though it may grow in the woods not more than twenty miles away. Don't build cages for wild animals that never belonged here. This is not a wild-animal zoo. You don't want any stuffed "specimens" or boxes of insects and butterflies, for this is not a museum. It is a wild-life sanctuary for all wild living things which know it as their home.

You must post it with notices against hunters and all kinds of destroyers who break and pick and carry away. If you live in Massachusetts, the state Audubon Society will furnish you at small expense with excellent cloth warnings to tack up about the borders of the sanctuary. In some states the fish and game commissions will take over the land and post and police it for a time. Over the entrance, on the twin pines or upon a big overhanging limb, should be placed a sign reading, PLEASE DO NOT HARM NOR MAKE ALARM.

Within the sanctuary you will open narrow trails running crisscross to every different part and particularly interesting place and thing. And under a cover at the entrance a map of these trails may well be hung, showing not only the way they go and their names, but also the whole size and shape of the land. In addition to this map, it will be a good thing to post a list of the birds known to nest within the sanctuary; another list of the winter birds that visit it, together with those that stay the year around. So with the flowers, the shrubs and trees, the animals, and other wild forms.

Many of us do not get away from our own villages and out of our towns for any kind of vacation. We cannot go far for Nature, but Nature can be brought close to us. A small sanctuary of a few waste acres, or a few rich man's acres, within easy reach of town and village, will soon win the confidence of bird and flower and beast, and before we know it, they will all be living happily within its protecting borders.

The possession of such a place, the sharing of such a place with all wild inhabitants, would be a blessing to our village, and to us. We American people deeply need the freedom and friendliness of the open spaces, and we need to get this touch of nature in our earliest childhood. Nature, along with books and friends, should be a chief source of happiness to everyone.

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

1. In one sentence tell Dallas Sharp's purpose in writing this selection.

2. In this selection Dallas Sharp answers some important questions. Write five questions that he answers. You may begin this way:(a)What is a wild-life sanctuary?Be sure your questions tell the main ideas.

3. How would you know from this selection that the author was a close student of nature? You can prove it from what is said on page 54.

4. In this story are the names of a number of different animals, birds, trees, and flowers. Make a list of those that are found near where you live. Make another list of those not named by the author that would live in a sanctuary near your home.

5. Tell of some place near your home that might be made into a sanctuary, or tell of a place where wild life can now be found.

6. The author makes clear why wild life needs our help. Be ready to read lines in which he tells why wild-life sanctuaries are valuable to us.