CONSERVING ENDANGERED WILDLIFE SPECIES 



By Habtley H. T. Jackson 



In Charge, Biological Surveys 

 Fish and Wildlife Service, U. S. Department of the Interior 



[With 13 plates] 



Most of us are familiar with such expressions as "gone like the dodo," 

 or "as extinct as the dodo." The dodo was a huge, grotesque, aberrant 

 member of the pigeon tribe, reported to have first been discovered in 

 1497 by Vasco da Gama on the island of Mauritius. For many years 

 it carried the appropriate scientific name Didus ineptus, for of all 

 birds it was most inept to meet the competition with humans that was 

 to confront it. About the size of a swan, ungainly, pot-bellied, wings 

 so aborted that it lost the power of flight, ground-nesting and laying 

 only a single egg, and unsuspicious to the point of stupidity, it fell an 

 easy prey to the crews of Dutch ships that visited Mauritius during 

 the first quarter of the seventeenth century and to the Dutch who 

 settled the island in 1644. By 1693 the dodo was extinct. Likewise, a 

 closely related bird species, the solitaire of Rodriguez Island, became 

 extinct about the middle of the eighteenth century. These are striking 

 examples of what has happened to many species in the history of the 

 world fauna, sometimes, as in these cases, with known cause, but more 

 often with cause unknown. It is regrettable to have to record the 

 passing of any wildlife race, even though the form may be of only 

 esthetic or educational value. Once a type becomes extinct, it never 

 reappears. It behooves us to care for what we have. 



POSSIBLE CAUSES OF WILDLIFE REDUCTION AND EXTINCTION 



Many factors have probably been involved in the extinction of 

 animals. In the geologic past before the advent of man we might 

 theorize on the causes of such extinctions not attributable to man. 



1 Based on a lecture delivered on January 15, 1941, to the elasa in wildlife conservation 

 of the Graduate School of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Reprinted by permission, 

 with additional illustrations, from Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, 

 Arts, and Letters, vol. 35, 1943. The photographs are from the files of the U. S. Fish 

 and Wildlife Service, unless otherwise Indicated in the legend. All maps were prepared by 

 Mrs. Katheryn Tabb, of Biological Surveys, Fish and Wildlife Service. 



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