Kate Wilder, age 15, of Rockford, I11., for her question:
WHEN DID WILDLIFE CONSERVATION START?
Wildlife conservation includes all of man's efforts to preserve wild animals and plants and save them from extinction. The first game reserves were set up by rulers of ancient civilizations as ways to protect their own personal hunting grounds. It became a practice that was continued by the medieval kings of Europe.
Realizing that it was important to protect wildlife so that game would be available in future years, laws were passed by the British colonies during the 1600s and 1700s to limit hunting. Unfortunately, most of the colonists ignored these laws.
It wasn't until the late 1800s that effective wildlife conservation in Canada and in the United States was started.
The world's first national park was established by Congress in 1872. It is Yellowstone National Park which lies in the northwest corner of Wyoming and spreads into Idaho and Montana.
Also during the late 1800s, many of the states began to pass and enforce game laws. And during the 1890s, millions of acres of forest were protected by the national forest system.
Then in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt established the nation's first federal wildlife refuge on Pitcan Island in Florida.
The national park system wasn't set up by Congress until 1916. It was then under the direction of the National Park Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior.
The government created the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940 in the same department to strengthen the wildlife conservation program. The service manages the federal wildlife refuges, which in 1966 were organized into the National Wildlife Refuge System.
Canada created its first national park, Banff National Park, in 1887.
Sabi Game Reserve, which is now Kruger National Park, was established in what is now South Africa in 1898. Now an extensive network of parks and reserves protects African wildlife.
Historians tell us that various species had become extinct even before people appeared on the earth. However, in the past other species developed and replaced those that died off, and the total variety of life did not diminish.
Today, human activities unfortunately kill off species with no hope for their replacement. Wildlife conservation, therefore, became very important.
Since 1600, a number of kinds of wildlife have become extinct in North America including the Carolina parakeet, the passenger pigeon, the California grizzly bear, the Florida black wolf, the Franklinia tree of Georgia and a birch that once grew in Virginia.
Care must be taken since several hundred species of animals and thousands of species of plants even now face the danger of extinction. Included are such animals as the Asiatic lion, the Bengal tiger, the blue whale, the whooping crane, the California condor, the ivory billed woodpecker and all the Asian rhinoceroses.
Plants facing extinction include the black cabbage tree, the Ozark chestnut, the St. Helena redwood, several kinds of California manzanitas and the frankincense tree of Africa.