Which extinctions could have been prevented ?

[dropbearabroad]

The Stephen island wren in NZ. Apparently it was the only species thought to have been wiped out by a single creature - a lighthouse keeper's cat in 1894. Solution - shoot the cat.

 

[1940LaSalle]

The quagga is decidedly possible with cooperation of African colonial authorities. In the US, with possible earlier conservation-oriented thought, the passenger pigeon might still survive albeit in small colonies here and there--say, in the more remote parts of northern New England, or upstate NY and PA. With intervention by TR and Gifford Pinchot, quite possibly the heath hen and Carolina paroquet might well still be with us.

 

[el t]

Extinctions

Not sure if passenger pigeons would be able to survive in huge numbers much later than OTL. If things happen the way they did OTL and chestnut blight gets introduced to the US around 1900, a major source of food for the pigeons gets wiped out. The American chestnut population went from around 4 billion to a few hundred at most in 40 years.

I agree. There colonial breeding habits did'nt help either.

 

[el t]

Extinctions

Debate rages on the topic. Personally, I think they are extinct.

It seems that what was actually sighted was the closely related Pileated Woodpecker rather than an Ivory-billed. I also feel that they no longer exist.

 

[Berus]

its really sad, once there wer billions of passenger pigeons, now they ar extinct.
I also think that the quagga, bluebock and the thylacine could be good canditates.

 

[twovultures]

There's a lot of talk about 'alternate domesticates' in the Americas on this site and this could be a good way of preserving an animal that went extinct IOTL. I think that the passenger pigeon is a good candidate for domestication since they're apparently easy to catch. Trouble is, they eat nuts that humans eat which makes them competition for food-you'd have to give Native Americans an alternate source of plant food to make domesticating passenger pigeons really worthwhile.


I think the Carolina Parakeet got domesticated as a pet in General Finley's "From Blight We Rise" timeline.

 

[Tocomocho]

The passenger pigeon was once one of the most common animals in the world in fact. Its persecution and extinction is one of the most random and surrealist things to ever happen.

The last colony of the great auk in Iceland would at least had lasted more if it wasn't for an ill-timed eruption that linked the island it was on to the "mainland".

The bubal hartebeest adapted very easily to captivity and could have been saved and returned to the wild like the European bison or Pere David's deer IOTL if anyone had cared to form a captive herd.

The Chinese tiger's extinction is plainly the fault of Mao. And the Chinese river dolphin's the fault of the current ChPR leadership.

And I'd always though that the Falklands wolf and the Tasmania tiger would have survived if their homeland had been colonised by anyone but the British.

 

[Berus]

where the british more nasty to animals than other colonial powers ?
also do you think it would be possible for giant lemurs like Megaladapsis to survive ?