Special to the Sun-Gazette
PHOTO PROVIDED
This is the 1930 photograph which enraged Rosalie Edge and led to her purchase of the land now known as Hawk Mountain. It is used with permission of the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Association (https://www.hawkmountain.org/)
The Hawk Mountain Sanctuary near Kempton is well-known to bird watchers, and especially those who enjoy birds of prey (raptors).
A new book review recently stirred my interest in learning more about the creation of the sanctuary. The popular raptor migration viewing site has existed for nearly 90 years, yet many people know little about the feisty woman who made it all possible. And not only did she enable the creation of the sanctuary, she also challenged, and eventually changed, the raptor protection policies of the Audubon Society.
The Long History of Those Who Fought to Save the Animals nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This article originally appeared on Undark.
Today s conservationists are taxed with protecting the living embodiments of tens of millions of years of nature s creation, and they face unprecedented challenges for doing so from climate change and habitat destruction to pollution and unsustainable wildlife trade. Given that extinction is the price for failure, there s little forgiveness for error. Success requires balancing not just the complexities of species and habitats, but also of people and politics. With an estimated 1 million species now threatened with extinction, conservationists need all the help they can get.
Yet the past a key repository of lessons hard learned through trial and error is all too often forgotten or overlooked by conservation practitioners today. In Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, journalist Michelle Nijhuis shows that history can help contextualize and guide modern conservation. Indeed, arguably it s only in the last 200
Human nature and âBeloved Beastsâ
How best can we protect and defend the same animal kingdom we endanger?
By Dan Cryer Globe Correspondent,Updated March 4, 2021, 2:38 p.m.
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On Oct. 29, 1929, at the annual meeting of the National Association of Audubon Societies [
sic], a hitherto-unknown upper-crust birdwatcher from Manhattanâs Upper East Side rose from the audience to address the societyâs directors. Rosalie Edge, a former suffragist, wasnât intimidated. As a writer in The New Yorker later noted, her habitual demeanor was âsomewhere between that of Queen Mary and a suspicious pointer.â
Why, she demanded, was the organization tacitly supporting the killing of bald eagles? The genteel gentlemen she faced dismissed her as impertinent and out of line. It was not until the mid-1930s that they changed their tune.
Local Boy Scout
Eli Edwards of Oakton earned the prestigious William T. Hornaday Badge for his 18-month conservation project to remove the invasive plant pachysandra from Fairfax County Park Authority land along the Gerry Connolly Cross County Trail in Oakton.
Over the course of 18 months, Edwards mobilized 164 volunteers to spend more than 400 hours removing 124 large bags of pachysandra that was carpeting parkland and preventing native plants from surviving and thriving.
He and his volunteers planted 170 native plants to restore the parkland and provide food for local wildlife.
Edwards partnered with Fairfax County Park Authority Invasive Management Area program on the initiative.