Kenneth E. Stager
Kenneth E. Stager (January 28, 1915 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania – May 13, 2009 in West Los Angeles)[1] was an American ornithologist who served as a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.[2]
In 1958, Stager visited Clipperton Island and saw that the breeding colonies of brown boobies and masked boobies were being devastated by feral pigs that had been introduced to the island by earlier travelers. To protect the booby populations, Stager personally shot and killed every pig on the island, for a total of 58;[3] the booby populations subsequently recovered.[4]
However, according to the book "Clipperton" by Jimmy M. Skaggs[5], Stager's expedition arrived outside the nesting season, and apparently did not take into account the seasonal variations in seabird populations present on the island. With no personal experience or scientific measurements, they relied merely upon earlier, non-scientific accounts citing "millions of birds" and the current paucity of resident specimens to arrive at the opinion that the bird population had been devastated by the feral pigs.
Also according to Skaggs, the members of the expedition recorded that they transplanted coconut palms from other areas of the island for the hopeful comfort and convenience of future human expeditions to the island at the area they used as a base camp. Apparently they had no qualms about modifying the island's ecology in this manner, although coconut palms are also an introduced species.
The 1958 expedition recorded quite lush vegetation in contrast to earlier accounts, apparently due to the pigs preying upon and controlling the massive population of "voraciously omnivorous" land crabs. These crabs (johngarthia planata) are the primary natural predators of seabird eggs and chicks n the island. Subsequent to Stager's Slaughter the land crab population once again exploded out of balance and devoured most of the vegetation.
Stager's arbitrary actions served to inspire the ecological group Island Conservation, which focuses on removing introduced species from islands.[2]
References
- ^ Kenneth E. Stager dies at 94; curator of birds and mammals at L.A. County Natural History Museum, by Dennis McLellan, at the Los Angeles Times; published June 2, 2009; retrieved March 31, 2015
- ^ a b Ending Extinction or Playing God?, at the Atlantic; published December 27, 2012; retrieved July 13, 2014
- ^ CLIPPERTON ISLAND: PIG STY, RAT HOLE AND BOOBY PRIZE; by Robert L. Pitman, Lisa T. Ballance, and Charly Bost; published in Marine Ornithology, volume 33, page 193-194
- ^ Eradicating introduced mammals from Clipperton Island led to dramatic recovery of seabirds, at BirdLife International; published 2012; retrieved March 31, 2015
- ^ Clipperton: A History of the Island the World Forgot ISBN 0-8027-1090-5 published byWalker and Company, New York 1989
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