Controversy
Human history is replete with examples of island species that were being persecuted by farmers, ranchers, hunters, sailors; were being harvested unsustainably; and were being decimated by introduced species. By comparison, scientific collectors were relatively few in number and seldom took large numbers of specimens of any one species, but competition between museums and private collectors to acquire the rarest of the rare put disproportionate collecting pressure on species whose populations were teetering on the brink.
Rollo Beck has been blamed for having collected a sample of Guadalupe Caracaras in 1900 which were being exterminated by goat herders who viewed the bird as a predator. At the time he assumed the birds were common on Guadalupe Island, but in retrospect he wrote that those he collected might have been the last. Beck also killed three of the last four individuals of the subspecies of Galápagos tortoise Geochelone nigra abingdonii, which is native to the Galápagos Islands.
Read more about this topic: Rollo Beck
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