Secret Garden
Behind me lay a secret garden.
And in this garden with wheelbarrow turned down,
I do play, everyday.
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Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge
The Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge is a 59,020 acre refuge in Oklahoma that hosts a variety of rare native species including the near extinct American Bison, white tailed dear, Rocky Mountain Elk and Texas Longhorn cattle. The area has been preserved due to the 550 to 600 million year old rock formations that create the craggy hills of the refuge which were too dense to plow for agriculture during the land runs of frontier times. This natural characteristic lead to the creation of a “forest preserve” region by President McKinley in 1901. In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt attended a wolf hunt in “The Big Pasture” in hopes of witnessing Jack “Catch ‘M Alive” Abernathy hunt and catch wolves with his bare hands. This, and his encounter with the legendary Quanah Parker, supposedly acted as inspiration for Roosevelt to change the designation of the region into a wildlife refuge to return bison to their natural grazing land.
My experience wasn’t as raw and real as catching wolves with my bare hands, however it did provide a unique experience to encounter animals, that are usually pinned behind barbed wire, in free-range hills. My first encounter was with the Longhorns. Being a Texan, Longhorns have a statewide significance like no other and I’m familiar with the docile creatures. I approached them opposite a pond they were drinking from and they gave me the familiar “eh” look that animals accustomed to human intervention tend to give. They were beautiful, strong creatures and I felt pity that, in their “freedom” they were confined to grazing in designated zones laced with roads. After all, the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge is also home to the Wichita Mountains Scenic Byway, basically a drive-thru nature park. Equally startling was the fact that military helicopters from nearby Fort Sill performed exercises over the refuge, though the cattle seemed accustomed to the noisy intrusion.
Aside from these negative attributes, the refuge did expose me to a natural process I had never witnessed first hand: a large snake hunting, killing and eating a small mammal. It happened suddenly as I was climbing on the rocks surrounding the lake, the high pitched squeal of a small rodent echoed nearby. I turned and there it was playing out before me, a small black critter ran past with an approximately five foot brown colored snake in close pursuit, head raised. It didn’t take long before the snake was constricting the creature, subduing it with it’s keen suffocation strategy. The squealing stopped and the snake was engorged with its prey. It was swift and disturbing as natural occurences tend to be.
Overall the refuge was a magnificent and accessible escape from the strip malls and fast food drive-thrus of the towns nearby. I would recommend all in the vicinity to at least take a day trip through the refuge as most of it is accessible without a fee. My only critique is, as with all designated natural areas, that these experiences are confined to a designated space instead of occurring unrestricted as they once did on the American frontier.
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References:
http://www.fws.gov/southwest/refuges/oklahoma/wichitamountains/
