Birds of Wake

Wake Island Rail

Status: Critically endangered.

Prior to World War II, the Wake Island Rail, a species of flightless bird found only on the islands of Wake and Willes, though not on Peale, was unknown outside of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. Numbers of these only native bird to Wake are nonexistent before ecologists visited the island in the 1950s. The species struggled through the Japanese invasion and occupation; their curious nature making them easy to catch. They almost did not survive the American recapture of the island in 1943, with much of their habitat destroyed, along with that year’s nests and breeding pairs. In 1957, only seven breeding pairs were discovered on the island, out of a total of seventeen known birds. In a publicity move, the joint Navy-Air force custodians of the island adopted the bird as the base’s mascot. Construction of an expanded airfield on Wake forced the relocation of the surviving birds to Willes Island, where Naval, Air Force and Interior Department personnel began a captive breeding of the bird. By 1977, the numbers have risen to thirty breeding pairs, which ended the captive breeding program. Despite the unintentional introduction of rats to the islands, the Rail has made a slight come back, topping out with one hundred three breeding pairs by 2011, with a few of the birds finding their way back to Wake. Willes continues to be off limits to unauthorized personnel, and the species is still at risk of extinction by rats or even a rouge tsunami.

The Great Auk

Status: Critically endangered

The Great Auk once roamed the whole of the North Atlantic, making itself at home in the Grand Principality of Norway, State of Iceland, Greenland, Quebec and the British isles. They are a penguin-like bird, in fact the word penguin is derived from an old Celtic language and was in reference to the Auk, and spend most of their time at sea. It is there, that they are relatively safe. However, they nest on rocky islands across the ocean. The Auk has been hunted by indigenous peoples for millennia, but it was not until a thousand years ago that a wide-scale hunting was enacted. A demand for their down drove the hunting industry. The Little Ice Age (circa 1350 to 1850) also had an impact on their populations. During the 18th Century, collectors began harvesting eggs and taking adult for taxidermy. By 1850, the Auk teetered on extinction. The United Provinces declared hunting the Auk off-limits until their populations rebounded. As is, today, the Great Auk can only be found on a handful of rocky islands off the coasts of Iceland and Greenland. It is estimated that less than five thousand Great Auks still exist in the wild. The United Provinces, along with international wildlife organizations have declared the species to be Critically Endangered. A single disastrous tsunami in the North Atlantic could wipe the species out. The World Wildlife Fund along with Zoos in the U.P., Canada, United States, Sweden and France, have initiated a breeding and reintroduction program for the species.

Passenger Pigeons

Status: Extinct in the Wild

Passenger pigeons once flocked across the North American continent in the millions. An estimated two billion were living in the year 1800. One hundred years later, only a handful of these birds remained in the wild. There are two primary reasons for their decline; 1) commercial hunter; 2) habitat destruction. In the eastern United States (and Confederate States at the time), much of the former unbroken forest had been stripped from the landscape and replaced by farmland. Remaining habitats and sanctuaries in Tennessee and Kentucky were torn to pieces by the Great War, and soldiers from both sides poached the birds to augment their poor quality rations. By 1920, there were none left in the wild. The survival of the species ironically depended on the wide-scale commercial hunting operations of the 19th Century. At one point, entire freight cars full of the birds were delivered to market in New Amsterdam, Philadelphia and Boston. The decline in numbers caused some hunter to begin rounding up live pigeons to breed and attempt to domesticate. Domestication has been a mixed success, with almost all of the several million surviving passage pigeons being bred on commercial aviaries for eventual slaughter. A smaller pet market has arisen since the 1950s to offer the captive animals a more comfortable living. It is believed that some birds have escaped from captivity over the years, but no confirmed sightings have been recorded.

Orangutan

Status: Threatened

The orangutan is a great ape that is found only on the island of Sumatra. They were found on Borneo as recently as 1940, but deforestation and poaching eliminated that population. On the less populated island of Sumatra, it is estimated that some 60,000 orangutan still live in the wild. Large portions of the island have been declared nature preserves, but those that have not are under increasing exploitation. Clear cutting is destroying much of the forest and the species native to Sumatra. The apes are also under threat of poaching by both the exotic pet trade in East Asia as well as for medical laboratories. Their proximity in relation to humans makes them one of the prime choices to conduct medical research upon.

Gorilla

Status: Critically Endangered

Unknown to science before the end of the 19th Century, the Gorilla is now the rarest ape on the planet. In Central Africa, civil war and poaching all but wiped out the Mountain Gorilla, which has not been seen in the wild since 1984, though over 400 still exist in captivity. In West Africa, the population hovers around 2000, in enclaves in Biafra. However, the bushmeat trade and logging threatens their remaining habitat. World Powers have their own captive breeding programs in order to ensure the gorilla’s survival. Some proposals have been introduced to relocate the surviving gorillas to a more stable country, possibly even to another continent.

Giant Panda

Status: Extinct

With an isolated communist China, the Chinese were forced into a crash industrialization in order to support themselves. This development of the country devastated the environment before and environmental awareness swept the world in the 1970s, China included. It was only then that China launched an effort to restore the bamboo forests and save the Panda. Unfortunately, so much land was destroyed that the remaining Pandas were taken into captivity. The last wild Panda spotting was in 1974. Foreign organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund (which uses the Giant Panda as its symbol) offered to aid in saving the Panda, but the Chinese government refused any aid. In zoos and breeding centers across the country, attempts were made to breed the Panda, but with such an abysmal infant mortality rate, the program seemed doomed from the start. There were never enough Pandas born and survived to maintain a viable population. The last Panda died in the Chengdu Breeding Center in 2004.

Cook Sea Cow

Status: Critically Endangered

Only a few hundred of these arctic manatees can still be found in the Cook Sea, mostly in the west of the sea, around the Commander Islands (as named by James Cook). They are related to manatees of the Carribean, but are much larger, between 8 and 10 tonnes. These gentle marine grazers have always been hunted by the Aleuts and other tribes around the Cook Sea. Only their relatively recent discovery, 1778, by Europeans preserved the species. Their bodies contain much oil that would have made them targets of whalers. Both Kamchatka and Canada have banned all hunting of the sea cows (Kamchatka went further to declare the Commander Islands a nature preserve), but their populations are still threatened by orcas, which with diminishing salmon populations, are forced to turn to other food sources. The Seattle Aquarium, and other marine institutions along the American Pacific Coast, have launched a breeding program starting in the 1980s. Seattle has five of these dugongs in captivity, the most in any one institution.

Bowhead Whale

Status: Extinct

The Bowhead Whale, along with several other species of baleen whales, underwent extreme persecution during the 18th and 19th Century as whalers wiped out entire pods. The Bowhead Whale’s range within the Arctic made it a prime target for British, Dutch, American and Swedish whalers. The populations took such a crash during the mechanization of whaling during the late 19th Century that soon whalers were forced to seek out easier targets, such as the Right Whale, which was hunted to extinction by the 20th Century. The Bowhead population was so depleted that by the time commercial whaling was banned in the 1960s, an estimate one hundred specimens existed. Getting accurate data on the Bowhead was difficult due to their scarcity. The best know sample was that of a dead Bowhead that washed ashore in northern Norway. A harpoon head was extracted from the corpse that dated back to the 1840s, making the animal well over one hundred years old. As of today, the Bowhead holds the record as the longest lived mammal. A comprehensive study launched in 1983, by the University of Bergen spotted one Bowhead off the eastern coast of Greenland. When the team returned to following year in order to track down this or others to be tagged, they spotted none. The last known spotting of a Bowhead was that off a fishing troller in the Norwegian Sea in 1991. Since then, no Bowheads have been spotted and International Wildlife Fund listed them as presumably extinct in 2000.

The American Bison

Status: No Danger/Reduced

Once traveling in herds numbers in the tens of millions across the Great Plains, the American Bison, or “buffalo” as they are often called, has since been reduced to largely inhabiting the State of Lakoda, along with portions of Montana and Wyoming. The name buffalo is misleading, since bison are more a kin to sheep, and cattle are more a kin to true buffalo. The bison was long since hunted by the Plains Indians. Even after the coming of the White Man, the Indians in Lakoda Territory, lead by the Souix, continued their practice of hunting. Introduction of domestic cattle across much of the west has crowded the bison out of its former range. At the start of the 21st Century, the only part of America where large herds (numbering more than ten thousand members) can be seen in the wild is in the western Indian State. Though many of the Plains Indians have taken to domesticating the bison, the citizens of Lakoda still practice the hunt, although they no longer depend upon it for their very lives. Wildlife management departments of the three states have done such an excellent job of maintaining the population by allowing limited hunts in Wyoming and Montana, along with the Indians taking only what they need, that the bison is in no danger of going extinct.

Symbol of Abyssinia

Abyssinian Wolf
Status: Critically Endangered

The Abyssinian Wolf is the rarest Canine in the world. They range has been greatly reduced to only a few Royal Parks and Preserves in the Ethiopian Highlands. At most, 500 remain in the wild. Before the Dutch conquest of Ethiopian, the Abyssinian Wolf had a precarious relationship with the Ethiopians. Some tribes in the north of Abyssinia would use the wolf’s liver as a traditional medicine. Aside from that, there was little persecution since they prey mostly on the various species of rodents and, compared to hyena and jackals, they pretty much left livestock alone. When Dutch colonists flocked in during the 1890s, they brought their European prejudice of wolves. In the early 20th Century, bounties were placed on the heads of the wolves, whom were feared to destroy the livestock of the newcomers. The species was nearly wiped out by 1939, with an estimated 37 left alive. The wolves that lived in excess of 3,000 meters above sea level were protected due to lack of human inhabitation. By the 1970s, naturalists finally realized the nature of the Abyssinian Wolf and its importance in the ecosystem. Since then, they have been protected, and viewed as a national symbol by some Abyssinians. The wolf has become a cultural icon, appearing on stamps, Abyssinian-printed Dutch Guilders (10 guilder note) and even appeared in a 1990s cartoon serial. There are no captive breeding programs, nor any Abyssinian Wolves in zoos. They are kept on their preservations. This may change in years to come, as a rabies outbreak in one of their preserves resulted in a 67% fatality rate of the local population.