#CALIFORNIA NATIVE GAME ANIMALS PROFESSIONAL#

This yellow-flowered plant in the cabbage family is a classic example of the kinds of things that make push some California plant species toward extinction. Get a Grip, Folks: Cheerios' 'Mistake' is Actually a Teachable Moment for Gardeners

#CALIFORNIA NATIVE GAME ANIMALS PROFESSIONAL#

As one conservation professional said to us as we prepared this article, вЂњthere are a lot of endangered species tied for first place.вЂќ As a nod to this subjectivity, we've listed other species for each entryВ that could reasonably have been profiled instead. There are plenty of other species that could have made the list as well, and this list might even provoke argument among conservationists who consider other species to be in more trouble. WeвЂ™re billing this as a вЂњten most endangered speciesвЂќ list for the state, but thatвЂ™s obviously a subjective assessment. Some of them are closer to death's door than others. And since California is not only home to more than its share of unique species but also a place where development has changed a majority of the stateвЂ™s landscape, it makes sense that quite a few California species are facing extinction. The whole idea of endangered species is based on extinction: an endangered species is one for which extinction looms. How? By consuming more and more of the planet for our own purposes. All species go extinct eventually - by dying out or evolving into something else - but weвЂ™ve sped that process up to perhaps several hundred times its normal rate. Since then, weвЂ™ve gotten a lot more familiar with the concept of extinction. The year 1662 was the last time anyone reliable recorded a sighting of a certain flightless bird on the island of Mauritius by the mid-19 th Century, scientists realized that that bird - the dodo - had in fact been wiped from the face of the earth by human activity. ThatвЂ™s despite the fact that Western science had a solid example of extinction by the early 1700s. This view held sway even as recently as the 19 th Century: Thomas Jefferson, who had written a scientific treatise on fossils of a giant ground sloth, instructed explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to keep their eyes peeled for ground sloths west of the Missouri. During the Renaissance, philosophers argued that the animals that fossils represented must still be alive somewhere in the planetвЂ™s unexplored regions, as a benevolent Creator certainly wouldnвЂ™t let any of His creations die out. People once had no concept of extinction.

At extinction's door the Amargosa vole | Photo: UC Davis

California native game animals