Certain of the forest reserves should also be made preserves for the wild forest creatures.  All of the reserves should be better protected from fires.  Many of them need special protection because of the great injury done by live stock, above all by sheep.  The increase in deer, elk, and other animals in the Yellowstone Park shows what may be expected when other mountain forests are properly protected by law and properly guarded.  Some of these areas have been so denuded of surface vegetation by overgrazing that the ground breeding birds, including grouse and quail, and many mammals, including deer, have been exterminated or driven away.  At the same time the water-storing capacity of the surface has been decreased or destroyed, thus promoting floods in times of rain and diminishing the flow of streams between rains.

In cases where natural conditions have been restored for a few years, vegetation has again carpeted the ground, birds and deer are coming back, and hundreds of persons, especially from the immediate neighborhood, come each summer to enjoy the privilege of camping.  Some at least of the forest reserves should afford perpetual protection to the native fauna and flora, safe havens of refuge to our rapidly diminishing wild animals of the larger kinds, and free camping grounds for the ever-increasing numbers of men and women who have learned to find rest, health, and recreation in the splendid forests and flower-clad meadows of our mountains.  The forest reserves should be set apart forever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not sacrificed to the shortsighted greed of a few.

The forests are natural reservoirs.  By restraining the streams in flood and replenishing them in drought they make possible the use of waters otherwise wasted.  They prevent the soil from washing, and so protect the storage reservoirs from filling up with silt.  Forest conservation is therefore an essential condition of water conservation.

The forests alone cannot, however, fully regulate and conserve the waters of the arid region.  Great storage works are necessary to equalize the flow of streams and to save the flood waters.  Their construction has been conclusively shown to be an undertaking too vast for private effort.  Nor can it be best accomplished by the individual States acting alone.  Far-reaching interstate problems are involved; and the resources of single States would often be inadequate.  It is properly a national function, at least in some of its features.  It is as right for the National Government to make the streams and rivers of the arid region useful by engineering works for water storage as to make useful the rivers and harbors of the humid region by engineering works of another kind.  The storing of the floods in reservoirs at the headwaters of our rivers is but an enlargement of our present policy of river control, under which levees are built on the lower reaches of the same streams.