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SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 
UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20560 
St. George Village 
Pribilof Islands 
16 August 1964 
Komrads 
It looks to me like the ATP men ought to reintroduce cats or poison mice 
before the ratter eat up all the vegetation and allow the soil to blow away. 
Laysan's experience should be enough to convince us that bird-predators are 
not as dangerous as herbivorous mammals without predator checks. 
We needn*t worry here — the dozen foxes I've shot so far don't dent 
their population, and lemmings are so low that I've only managed to capture 
one. About ten years ago USF&F tried to exterminate foxes on St. Paul, but 
failed to even knock the population down much on that large island. It might 
have been better had they concentrated on Otter Island, which has foxes but 
no herbivores and. is only 200 acres or so. Without preditors or man, birds 
might nest shoulder to shoulder in the open there as they do on little Walrus 
Island. 
Speaking of mammals, I have long wanted to write of the plight of the 
walrus. These great docile beasts, the oddest member of their order, are 
extinct on the Pribilofs now, but Mr. Banko and I saw them in June near St. 
Lawrence Island where they are still fairly common. One wonders how long 
they'll be found there with their low reproductive potential, high value, and 
poor conservation practises by those who hunt them. Besides the ivory tusks, 
the male walrus is valued for his long, gently-curving baculum, or oss-penis. 
Till® 
bone is sometimes as much as three feet long, and when polished and 
mounted with a carved ivory head and tail, it is called an "oosik". Tourists 
will buy every one the eskimos can get. Hefting such a sheleighle, one thinks 
that if Sampson held off the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, he could 
have conq.U«red the world with this! Perhaps it is lack of a baculum, rather 
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backbone as the saying goes? that makes man a coward_ 
Shifting to birds? we have collected two ruff (one was a reeve)? Philo- 
nachus pxxgnax , a Eurasian shorebird only § five specimens of which have been 
previously collected in Alaska (the last in 1933)# Our biggest thrill so far 
came from a ruddy turnstone among one of the first batches we cannon—netted. 
On its left leg was a thin? old band with characters, the word JAPAIT and the 
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