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42 4 University lare Pla a 
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Mr ,  Douglas"                  +   +..  .            '++  - ++  +;
 + + 
Wildlife 9onstrvat Son Bilding'; 
Columbia, Missouri 
Dear Doug: 
I have a serious suggestion for the Wildlife New". I wish you would
start 
a section, to be called *The Packnat", in which collectors of wildlife

literature can exchange gossip. 
I realize, of course, that the average wildlife manager does not oollct 
literature. He has access to an official library, which spares him the 
pains of packratting on his own account. On the other hand, most official

libraries are about as well-stocked as Mother Hubbard's shelves. Libraries

suffer from the current American hallucination that to collect literature

requires dollars rather than imagination and enthusiasm. The net result 
is that the average professional conservation office suffers from pernicious

literary anemia. 
I hasten to add that McAtee's *Wildlife Review" is a model guide to
the 
literature of our profession. But who reads it? Certainly not the wildlife

managers for whom it is written. We need a Kindergarten Korner, conducted

in a more personal vein, to educate us to appreciate the austerities of the

Wildlife Review. The collecting instinct exists willy-nilly in MV 
vertebrates, including not only packrats but also crows, squirrels, and 
wildlife managers. It is the common attribute which could be used to induct

us into professional literacy. 
Not a month goes by without offering some new and shiny tidbit to tempt the

collector. At the moment, for example, there is Dewey Soper's 6orthern 
Bison", reposing solemnly on the shelves of Zological Monogaphs. How

many takers? Is it thinkable that we, as a profession, are so engrossed 
with pheasants and trout that we lack interest In the sole wild survivors

of the thundering herd? Then there are such catch-as-catch-can items as 
Lee Yeager's "Bibliography of Par Animals", flashing into brief
visibility 
as a mimeograph, but soon lost to sight. He who suffs it on the first 
throw will later do without, or pay a pretty penny for his awkward fingers.

Not long ago we all had a chance at Trautman's "Blirds of Backeys Lake".

Doubtless many of us let it pass as "Just another bird-book". Titles
are 
tricky things. This title hides a thorough treatise on the ecology of 
geographical pin-point#   Ten thousand pin-points are America, and ten 
thousand Trautman's are, I hope, the conservation movement. 
 
(ova)