Henry Hough, editor of a local newspaper, blamed human chauvinism for the bird’s demise. The last Heath Hen, Booming Ben, disappeared in 1932. In the 1920s, the Heath Hen population went into a decline from which it never recovered. The sanctuary reduced these pressures but only within its 612 acres. Predictions for the remnant population on Martha’s Vineyard were so dire that a sanctuary was created to reduce the pressure of hunting and habitat disturbance. The Heath Hen, a ground-dwelling bird, related to Prairie Chickens, had been extirpated from the mainland in the 1870s. In 1908, the United States began one of its first serious attempts to prevent an extinction with the creation of a sanctuary for the Heath Hen on the island of Martha’s Vineyard (Massachusetts).
Great Britain’s Society for the Protection of Birds (later the Royal Society for Protection of Birds) began in 1892, followed by the Vogelbescherming Nederland (1899), the Audubon Society (1905), and La Ligue pour la protection des oiseaux (1912) (Boardman 2006). By the end of the nineteenth century, societies for the protection of wildlife, especially birds, began to form in Europe and North America. After the disappearance of the Dodo and the Great Auk, events in which humans were clearly implicated, government regulations to control over-hunting and fishing of game birds and animals were expanded in many European countries and extended to their colonies abroad but did little to diminish the impact of habitat disruption and over-hunting on many species. It was another century before the possibility of anthropogenic extinctions was recognized (Cowles 2012). However, it was not until the late eighteenth century that scientists realized that species could become globally extinct (Barrow 2009). Human beings are responsible for many species’ extinctions since our own first appeared on the planet. We caused its extinction we are responsible for bringing it back. By all means, bring the Heath Hen back and undo the horrible mistake of letting this animal go extinct in the first place.
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