Real passenger pigeon1/7/2024 ![]() ![]() Half of the entrance fee to Auckland Zoo goes directly to in-situ conservation, (and the zoo’s campaigning has removed palm oil from many NZ products). In Australia, swamp tortoises and bilbies are amongst those brought back from the brink. Predator-free islands are allowing for release of captively-bred animals. Captive facilities in New Zealand have raised and released 25,000 endangered kiwis, and have so far prevented the extinction of the kakapo and the tuatara. The black-footed ferret, the golden lion tamarin, the Aldabran tortoise, Californian condor, red wolf and the Przwalski’s horse were all saved by zoos and captive breeding. ![]() Research in zoos on reproduction in the short-beaks is highly likely to save the wild long-beaks. These are not endangered, but their wild cousins, the long-beaked echidnas, are. Here’s one: short-beaked echidnas in Australian zoos. In terms of contributing to conservation, it depends on the zoo, and on what they are doing, and it doesn’t take a lot of searching to find positive examples. There seems to be a lot of anti-zoo sentiment in the news and on blogs lately, but the only thing black and white about zoos is zebras (or pandas). I am not a big fan of the concept of captivity, but it has its place. Martha (and the story of her species), it seems, is well worth remembering. But they proved no match for humans, whose rapidly advancing technology drove the birds to extinction in a matter of decades. As recently as the mid-1800s, deafening flocks of billions of passenger pigeons swarmed across the eastern half of the United States. But on that first day of September a century ago, Martha no longer had to put up with such humiliations. As Joel Greenberg writes in his recent book A Feathered River Across the Sky, some threw sand into its cage to try to force it to walk around. People coming to the zoo to see the last passenger pigeon were disappointed by the bird, which barely budged off its perch. Here is how Zimmer describes Martha’s life in the Cincinnati Zoo: The difference between a wild passenger pigeon and “Martha” is like the difference between a facsimile and the real, dynamic, thing. That work has to take place in the wild.Īnd that is completely apart from the question of whether a species can be considered “preserved” or in “existence” if it only exists in a zoo. But the point is that zoos and captivity are not a way to save or preserve a species. That will affect how long a species can “cling” to existence. Some species will presumably be easier to breed in captivity than passenger pigeons. That history should be kept in mind the next time you hear a zoo or marine park justify captivity and their business model by saying they are helping preserve species that might be threatened or endangered in the wild. ![]() Martha, the last of her kind, was barren. But the birds proved to be poor breeders in captivity. They never saw another one in the wild again.įor the next 14 years, the species clung to existence in a few zoos. In 1900, the year in which the act was made into law, naturalists spotted a single wild passenger pigeon in Ohio. The Lacey Act would eventually help protect many species, but for the passenger pigeon it came too late. Its decline was so worrisome that Congress passed the Lacey Act, one of the first laws to protect wildlife in the United States. Soon this technology-driven slaughter was decimating the passenger pigeon. There are lots of interesting lessons (most of them cautionary) in the extinction of the passenger pigeon 100 years ago, and most of them are raised in Carl Zimmer’s excellent story about why it happened and what scientists are doing to try and bring the species back (did you know social media played a role in wiping the passenger pigeon out?).īut here’s a point that really caught my attention: ![]()
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