History of the Wildlife Conservation Society
The Wildlife Conservation Society traces its origin to April 26th 1895 when New York State chartered the New York Zoological Society. The charter empowered the Society to create a zoo in order to encourage the knowledge of zoology, promote research in zoology and related subjects, and furnish education and recreation to the general public.
In the New York Zoological Society's first annual report, issued in 1897, the Society re-stated its purposes as public education, research in zoology, and the preservation of wildlife. It was one of the first wildlife conservation organizations in the United States. The Society adopted its present name in 1993 to better describe its mission -- saving wildlife throughout the world.
Among the founders of the Society were Andrew H. Green, best known as the father of greater New York City, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, Columbia University professor and curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Theodore Roosevelt and the hunters of the Boone & Crockett Club were other notable New Yorkers involved in the Society's creation.
The founders of the New York Zoological Society designed it along the lines of other cultural organizations in the New York City, such as the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden. The city provided the land for the new zoo and some funding for buildings and annual operating costs. From private donors, the Society raised most of the funds for construction and operations. It also selected scientific and administrative leadership for the enterprise. This partnership of city government and cultural organization has endured and grown for more than one hundred years.
To direct the effort to build the zoo, the Society selected naturalist William Hornaday, well known as a founder of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and an expert on the extermination of the American bison. Hornaday chose the Bronx site for the zoo and selected curators and keepers and other staff who helped open the facility on November 8, 1899.
The success of the new zoo, nicknamed the Bronx Zoo, fostered stronger ties with the city govenment. In 1902, the Society took over management of the New York Aquarium, then located at Battery Park in Manhattan. In the mid-1950's the Society built a new aquarium at Coney Island, Brooklyn.
Later, New York City again turned to the Society to renew and manage three city-run facilities in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. The redesigned Central Park Zoo opened in 1988, followed by the Prospect Park Zoo in 1992 and the Queens Zoo in 1993.
Conservation and the world outside the zoo
Even before the Bronx Zoo opened its gates, the New York Zoological Society became active in conservation and field research. Zoo Director William Hornaday carried out a direct-mail survey of wildlife conditions through the United States. He publicized the decline of birds and mammals in the annual reports of the New York Zoological Society. In 1897 Hornaday also hired field researcher Andrew J. Stone to survey the condition of wildlife in the territory of Alaska. On the basis of these studies, Hornaday led the campaign for new laws to protect the wildlife there and the United States as a whole.
Starting in 1905, when the American Bison Society was organized at a meeting in the Lion House at the Bronx Zoo, Hornaday led a national campaign to reintroduce the almost extinct bison, or buffalo, to government sponsored refuges. The Bronx Zoo sent 15 bison to Wichita Reserve in 1907 and additional bison in later years. The saving of this uniquely American symbol is one of the great success stories in the history of wildlife conservation.
Hornaday campaigned for wildlife protection throughout his thirty years as director of the Bronx Zoo. Other victories in the struggle for wildlife include banning of the importation of birds' feathers for hat making and a ban on the sale of native game animals in meat markets. His writings and campaigns inspired later conservationists such as Aldo Leopold. Hornaday retired as director in 1926.
William Beebe, the zoo's first curator of birds, began a program of field research soon after the Bronx Zoo opened. His research on wild pheasants took him to Asia from 1908 to 1911 and resulted in a series of books on pheasants. Beebe's field work also resulted in the creation of the Society's Department of Tropical Research, which Beebe directed from 1922 until his retirement in 1948.
Beebe's research in an undersea vessel called the bathysphere took him half a mile under the ocean floor off Bermuda in 1934 to record for the first time human observations of the bottom of the deep sea. The bathysphere is currently displayed at the New York Aquarium. Beebe's many books and expeditions inspired devotion to nature and wildife around the world.
After World War II, under the leadership of Fairfield Osborn, a best selling writer on conservation and son of Society founder Henry Fairfield Osborn, the organization extended its programs in field biology and conservation. In 1946 the Society helped found the Jackson Hole Wildlife Park, which became part of the Grand Teton National Park in 1962. In 1948 it launched the Conservation Foundation, which ultimately merged with the World Wildlife Fund-U.S.
In the late 1950's the Society began a series of wildlife surveys and projects in Kenya, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Burma, and the Malay peninsula. In 1959 it sponsored George Schaller's seminal study of mountain gorillas in Congo. Since that expedition, Schaller has gone on to become the world's preeminent field biologist, studying wildlife throughout Africa, Asia and South America.
The conservation activities of the Bronx Zoo and WCS continued to expand under the leadership of William Conway, who served first as director of the zoo in 1962, then general director and president of WCS. Active as a field biologist in Patagonia, Conway promoted a new vision of zoos as conservation organizations.
Today, in addition to its network of wildlife parks in New York City, WCS manages several hundred field conservation projects on four continents. WCS is entering its second century under the guidance of President and CEO Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, former dean of Emory College in Atlanta and a noted expert in conservation science policy.
