Many of us tend to think of conservation efforts as a large-scale project that a big organization or perhaps a government agency might undertake. But that’s not always the case. One only has to look at the courageous examples out there — the man who single-handedly saved a species of snail, or the man that courted a rare whooping crane for three years in an effort to get her to lay eggs — to see that sometimes, one person can make a huge difference in ensuring the survival of an endangered species.
San Francisco-based Tim Wong is yet another one of these inspiring individuals who didn’t wait for someone else to act. Twenty-eight-year-old Wong, who is an aquatic biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, has also been passionate about butterflies since he was young, capturing caterpillars and breeding them into butterflies in his spare time.
Well, Wong has parlayed that childhood passion into an one-man effort saving San Francisco’s population of California pipevine swallowtail (Battus philenor hirsuta) butterflies from disappearing completely. According to Vox, the exquisite butterflies have made the San Francisco area their habitat for centuries — that is, until it started developing rapidly last century. It’s now rare to see these butterflies in the city.
For more about this, see http://www.treehugger.com/conservation/pipevine-swallowtail-butterfly-conservation-san-francisco-tim-wong.html
