The Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge is part of the United States system of National Wildlife Refuges. It is located in Alfalfa County in northern Oklahoma, north of Jet (pop. 230), along Great Salt Plains Lake, which is formed by a dam on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River.
The refuge was established March 26, 1930 by executive order of President Herbert Hoover and contains 32,080 acres (130 km2) of protected land as habitat to approximately 312 species of birds and 30 species of mammals. It was designated a National Natural Landmark in June 1983.
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Famous quotes containing the words salt, plains, national, wildlife and/or refuge:
“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”
—Bible: New Testament Matthew 5:13.
From the Sermon on the Mount.
“The Plains are not forgiving. Anything that is shallow—the easy optimism of a homesteader; the false hope that denies geography, climate, history; the tree whose roots don’t reach ground water—will dry up and blow away.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”
—Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)