Saving Wildlife - and Ourselves

If you have children, care about animals, or need any further reasons  to accept that wildlife extinction is a fact of life on our planet,  please watch this truly compelling, appalling, breath-taking talk by Colin O'Maura, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. 

My interest is professional as well as personal. In my biography Nature's Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess, I devote a full chapter to the relationship and collaboration of Burgess and Dr. William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Society and a brilliant conservationist. In 1913 Hornaday published Our Vanishing Wild Life, a 411-page book  which, more than 100 years ago, documented sweeping wildlife loss and extinctions in all 48 states , none more graphically than the passenger pigeon.  Hornaday was deeply grateful to Thornton Burgess, a renowned naturalist, children's author, and Cape Cod native, for his powerful and influential promotion of wildlife protection through newspaper articles and children's books, particularly The Adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack.