Disregarding the Pacific coast form of Vancouver and the Olympian Mountains, the wapiti is now a beast of the Rocky Mountain region proper, especially in western Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Throughout these mountains its extermination, though less rapid than on the plains, has nevertheless gone on with melancholy steadiness. In the early nineties it was still as abundant as ever in large regions in western Wyoming and Montana and northwestern Colorado. In northwestern Colorado the herds are now represented by only a few hundred individuals. In western Montana they are scattered over a wider region and are protected by the denser timber, but are nowhere plentiful. They have nearly vanished from the Big Horn Mountains. They are still abundant in and around their great nursery and breeding-ground, the Yellowstone National Park. If this park could be extended so as to take in part of the winter range to the south, it would help to preserve them, to the delight of all lovers of nature, and to the great pecuniary benefit of the people of Wyoming and Montana. But at present the winter range south of the park is filling up with settlers, and unless the conditions change, those among the Yellowstone wapiti which would normally go south will more and more be compelled to winter among the mountains, which will mean such immense losses from starvation and deep snow that the southern herds will be woefully thinned.[5] Surely all men who care for nature, no less than all men who care for big game hunting, should combine to try to see that not merely the States but the Federal authorities make every effort, and are given every power, to prevent the extermination of this stately and beautiful animal, the lordliest of the deer kind in the entire world. Footnote 5: Steps in the direction indicated are now being taken by the Federal authorities. The wapiti, like the bison, and even more than the whitetail deer, can thrive in widely varying surroundings. It is at home among the high mountains, in the deep forests, and on the treeless, level plains. It is rather omnivorous in its tastes, browsing and grazing on all kinds of trees, shrubs and grasses. These traits, and its hardihood, make it comparatively easy to perpetuate in big parks and forest preserves in a semi-wild condition; and it has thriven in such preserves and parks in many of the Eastern States. As it does not, by preference, dwell in such tangled forests as are the delight of the moose and the whitetail deer, it vanishes much quicker than either when settlers appear in the land. In the mountains and foothills its habitat is much the same as that of the mule-deer, the two animals being often found in the immediate neighborhood of each other. In such places the superior size and value of the wapiti put it at a disadvantage in the keen struggle for life, and when the rifle-bearing hunter appears upon the scene, it is killed out long before its smaller kinsman.