Kenneth E. Stager (January 28, 1915 in

Uniontown, Pennsylvania Uniontown is a city in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, United States, southeast of Pittsburgh and part of the Greater Pittsburgh Region. The population was 10,372 at the 2010 census, down from 12,422 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat and ...

– May 13, 2009 in

West Los Angeles West Los Angeles is an area within the city of Los Angeles, California. The residential and commercial neighborhood is divided by the Interstate 405 freeway, and each side is sometimes treated as a distinct neighborhood, mapped differently by di ...

) was an American ornithologist who served as a

curator A curator (from la, cura, meaning "to take care") is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the parti ...

at the

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is the largest natural and historical museum in the western United States. Its collections include nearly 35 million specimens and artifacts and cover 4.5 billion years of history. This large col ...

Clipperton Island

In 1958, Stager visited

Clipperton Island Clipperton Island ( or ; ) is an uninhabited, coral atoll in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It is from Paris, France, from Papeete, Tahiti, and from Mexico. It is an overseas state private property of France under direct authority of the Minis ...

and saw that the breeding colonies of

brown boobies The brown booby (''Sula leucogaster'') is a large seabird of the booby family Sulidae, of which it is perhaps the most common and widespread species. It has a pantropical range, which overlaps with that of other booby species. The gregarious brow ...

and masked boobies were being devastated by

feral pig The feral pig is a domestic pig which has gone feral, meaning it lives in the wild. They are found mostly in the Americas and Australia. Razorback and wild hog are Americanisms applied to feral pigs or boar-pig hybrids. Definition A feral ...

s that had been introduced to the island by earlier travelers. Appalled at the depredations visited by

s upon the island's brown booby and

masked booby The masked booby (''Sula dactylatra''), also called the masked gannet or the blue-faced booby, is a large seabird of the booby and gannet family, Sulidae. First described by the French naturalist René-Primevère Lesson in 1831, the masked boo ...

colonies (reduced to 500 and 150 birds, respectively), Stager procured a shotgun and removed all 58 pigs. By 2003, the colonies numbered 25,000 brown boobies and 112,000 masked boobies, the world's second-largest brown booby colony and largest masked booby colony. However, according to author J. M. Skaggs, 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. Without the pigs to keep them in check, land crab (''

Johngarthia planata ''Johngarthia planata'', sometimes known as the Clipperton crab, is a bright orange species of land crab that lives on Clipperton Island in the eastern Pacific; on Malpelo Island, west of Colombia; and on Socorro Island in the Revillagigedo I ...

'') populations surged, devastating the island's vegetation. Stager's actions served to inspire the creation of a biodiversity conservation NGO called

Island Conservation Island Conservation is a non-profit organization with the mission to prevent extinctions by removing invasive species from islands. Island Conservation has therefore focused its efforts on islands with species categorized as Critically Endangere ...

, which has as a mission to prevent extinctions by removing invasive species from islands.

References

1915 births 2009 deaths American ornithologists United States Army personnel of World War II University of California, Los Angeles alumni 20th-century American zoologists {{US-ornithologist-stub