Wildlife Refuge

* Re “Quail Release Triggers Range War,” April 2: Three cheers for Wayne Shifflett and his effort to transform some of our Western landscape into something other than a cattle ranch or a mine. I enjoy traveling throughout Arizona, California and Nevada, but it never fails to amaze me how much land is off-limits. Hundreds of miles of barbed wire and “No Trespassing” signs, and when you do find an open place to maybe hike or fish, the telltale signs of a cattle ranch are always there to greet you: earth trampled, broken-down river banks, polluted streams. Worse is the attitude of these people that somehow this Bureau of Land Management land belongs to them and that we so-called outsiders shouldn’t have anything to say about it.

Well, I pay my taxes to a government that says this property should belong to all of us. Let the land serve some other purpose, and if the quail don’t survive, well, so what. Shifflett and the Fish and Wildlife Service did their best.

RICHARD REX

Yorba Linda