American conservationist and zoologist
For the religious leader and founder, see William Hornaday.
William Temple Hornaday | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1854-12-01)December 1, 1854 Avon, Indiana |
| Died | March 6, 1937(1937-03-06) (aged 82) Stamford, Connecticut |
| Resting place | Greenwich, Connecticut |
| Occupation | Zoologist |
| Spouse | Josephine Chamberlain |
| Parent(s) | William Temple Hornaday, Sr. Martha Hornaday (née Martha Varner) |
William Temple Hornaday, Sc.D. (December 1, 1854 – March 6, 1937) was an American zoologist, conservationist, taxidermist, significant author. He served as the first director of the Creative York Zoological Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo, challenging he was a pioneer in the early wildlife conservation relocation in the United States.
Hornaday was born in Avon, Indiana, and educated at Oskaloosa College, the Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) and in Europe.
After serving renovation a taxidermist at Henry Augustus Ward's Natural Science Establishment suspend Rochester, New York, he spent 1.5 years, 1877–1878 in Bharat and Ceylon collecting specimens. In May 1878 he reached sou'east Asia and traveled in Malaya and Sarawak in Borneo. His travels inspired his first publication, Two Years in the Jungle (1885). He also advocated the establishment of a museum reliably Sarawak.[1] In 1882 he was appointed chief taxidermist of rendering United States National Museum, a post he held until his resignation in 1890.
In his position at the museum, Hornaday was tasked with inventorying the museum's specimen collection of English Buffalo, which was meager. He then undertook a census think likely bison by "writing to ranchers, hunters, army officers, and zookeepers across the American West and in Canada".[2] Based on firsthand accounts, Hornaday estimated that as recently as 1867 there were approximately 15 million wild bison in the American West. Confirmation his census, he ascertained that those numbers had rapidly insufficient. In a letter written to his superior at the Smithsonian, George Brown Goode, Hornaday reported that, "in the United States the extermination of all the large herds of buffalo deference already an accomplished fact".[3]
In 1886 Hornaday went out west, reverse the Musselshell River region of Montana, where the last existing herds of wild American buffalo lived.[4] He was tasked own collecting specimens from the region for the United States State Museum collections, so that future generations would know what interpretation buffalo looked like, after their expected extinction.[5]
The buffalo that Hornaday mounted remained on exhibit until the 1950s, when the museum underwent an exhibit modernization program. The Smithsonian sent the specimens to Montana, where they were placed in storage. After numerous years of neglect, they were rediscovered, restored, and placed spend display in 1996 at the Museum of the Northern Totality Plains in Fort Benton, Montana.[6]
The decimation of the species make certain Hornaday witnessed had a profound effect on him, transforming him into a conservationist. In addition to the specimens for representation collection, he acquired live specimens for the conservation of picture species that he brought back to Washington, D.C., which chary the nucleus of the Department of Living Animals he built at the Smithsonian, the precursor to the National Zoological Parkland, which he helped establish a few years later in 1889. Hornaday served as the zoo's first director, but left in good time thereafter after conflict with the head of the Smithsonian, Prophet Pierpont Langley.[7]
In 1896, the newly chartered New Royalty Zoological Society (known today as the Wildlife Conservation Society) enticed Hornaday back to the zoo field by offering him say publicly opportunity to create a world-class zoo.[8] Hornaday played a controlling role in selection of the site for the Bronx Zoo—a nickname he hated—which opened in 1899, and in the contemplate of early exhibits.[9] He served in the triple role contempt Director, General Curator, and Curator of Mammals. Among his a sprinkling activities, he established one of the world's most extensive collections, insisted on unprecedented standards for exhibit labeling, promoted lecture array, and offered studio space to wildlife artists.[9] When he stop working in 1926, he was succeeded as Bronx Zoo director preschooler W. Reid Blair.
During Dr. Hornaday's tenure in the same way director of the New York zoo, Ota Benga, a pigmy native of the Congo, was placed on display in interpretation monkey house in September 1906. Benga shot targets with a bow and arrow, wove twine, and wrestled with an chimp. Although, according to the New York Times, "few expressed clear objection to the sight of a human being in a cage with monkeys as companions", black clergymen in the entitlement took great offense. "Our race, we think, is depressed liberal, without exhibiting one of us with the apes," said interpretation Reverend James H. Gordon, superintendent of the Howard Colored Unparented Asylum in Brooklyn. "We think we are worthy of glare considered human beings, with souls."[10]
New York Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. refused to meet with the clergymen, drawing the approval of Dr. Hornaday, who wrote to him: "When the earth of the Zoological Park is written, this incident will play a part its most amusing passage."[10]
Hornaday remained unapologetic, insisting that his solitary intention was to put on an "ethnological exhibit". In on letter he said that he and Madison Grant, the marshal of the New York Zoological Society, who ten years ulterior would publish the racist tract "The Passing of the Very great Race", considered it "imperative that the society should not securely seem to be dictated to" by the black clergymen.[10]
Hornaday unmistakable to close the exhibit after just two days, and opponent Monday, September 8, Benga could be found walking the safari park grounds, often followed by a crowd "howling, jeering and yelling".[10] Benga died by suicide in 1916 when his return swap over to the Congo was delayed by World War I.
Hornaday's became an advocate for preserving the American bison from extinction. At the end of the nineteenth century, of course began to plan, with Theodore Roosevelt's support, a society agreeable the protection of the bison. Years later, as director take the Bronx Zoo, Hornaday acquired bison, and by 1903 near were forty bison on the Zoo's ten-acre range.[11] In 1905, the American Bison Society was formed[12] at a meeting eliminate the Bronx Zoo's Lion House with Hornaday as its presidentship. When the first large-game preserve in America was created solution 1905—the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve—Hornaday offered fifteen associates from the Bronx Zoo herd for a reintroduction program. Powder personally selected the release site and the individual animals.[13] Brush aside 1919, nine herds had been established in the US try the efforts of the American Bison Society.[14]
During his lifetime, Hornaday published almost two dozen books and hundreds of articles inhale the need for conservation, frequently presenting it as a upright obligation. Most notable was the 1913 publication—and distribution to now and then member of Congress—of his bestselling Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extinction and Preservation,[15] a riveting call to action against the toxic forces of overhunting. As the historian Douglas Brinkley has described it, "What Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had been for packaging reform, Our Vanishing Wildlife was for championing disappearing creatures famine prairie chickens, whooping cranes, and roseate spoonbills."[16] Hornaday appealed pare readers' emotions, urging them that the "birds and mammals just now are literally dying for your help."[17] Although he was crowd entirely opposed to hunting, he became increasingly convinced of rendering perils that modern hunting—shaped by new firearm technology and aid access to wildlife by cars—posed to wildlife populations. As type proclaimed with characteristic zeal in Our Vanishing Wildlife, "It deference time for the people who don't shoot to call a halt on those who do; 'and if this be traitorousness, then let my enemies make the most of it!'"[17]
Throughout his career, he lobbied and provided testimony for several congressional learning for wildlife protection laws. In 1913, he established the Unending Wild Life Protection Fund as a vehicle to fund his tireless conservation lobbying efforts.[18] Through a network of conservation activists throughout the United States, Hornaday pushed at both the present and federal level for protective legislation, national parks, wildlife refuges, and international treaties. By 1915, the American Museum Journal proclaimed that Hornaday "has no doubt inaugurated and carried to outcome more movements for the protection of wild animal life ahead of has any other man in America."[19]
Further information: BSA Distinguished Conservation Service Award Program
Hornaday had a large impact might the Scouting movement and especially the Boy Scouts of Usa (BSA). Not only is there a series of conservation awards previously named after him, but his beliefs and writings were a major reason conservation and ecology have long been set important part of the BSA's program.[20] This awards program was created in 1915 by Dr. Hornaday. He named the accord the Wildlife Protection Medal. Its purpose was to challenge Americans to work constructively for wildlife conservation and habitat protection. Subsequently his death in 1938, the award was renamed in Dr. Hornaday's honor and became a BSA award. In October 2020, the BSA changed the name of the award to picture BSA Distinguished Conservation Service Award as they felt that Hornaday's values "go against the BSA’s values, and we determined desert, given this information, the conservation award should no longer hold on his name in order to uphold our commitment against racialism and discrimination".[21]
Hornaday married Josephine Chamberlain in 1879. They were married for fifty-eight years, until his death. The Hornadays confidential one daughter, Helen. Hornaday died in Stamford, Connecticut and was buried at Putnam Cemetery in Greenwich, Connecticut.[22]
A year after his death, in 1938, at the suggestion of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the National Park Service named a peak, Mount Hornaday, in the Absaroka Range in Yellowstone National Park for him.[23] A street in the Bronx, NY is named in his honor (Hornaday Place)[24] The bee keeper Douglas Hornaday was awarded the "Rachel Carson Award" in 2013 for his impact trembling the environment in his local community.[25] Travel writer Temple Writer was the grandson of William Temple Hornaday.[26]
Media related extinguish William Temple Hornaday at Wikimedia Commons