If only a handful of collectors in the past had been motivated with the
same obsessive desperation to have live specimens in their collections
as modern ones do regarding a species like the Hyacinth Macaw for
example, we'd still have Passenger Pigeons, Great Auks, Carolina
Parakeets, Dodos, Pink Ducks, Eskimo Curlews, Heath Hens, Quaggas, and
Tasmanian Wolves alive today. Not to mention the many other species
extinct by the hands of man. It seems preserving living individual
specimens was just an afterthought when it was the case at all for the
above, the idea of creating breeding colonies by institutions or private
collectors seems to have never raised its head save a very few
exceptions. If the Czar of Russia had not taken a liking to the
European Bison and kept a herd on his hunting lodge in Bialowieza it too
would have been a mere memory now.
This is not to condone the evils of smuggling today, when there are
already captive breeding members of a species in existence further wild
plundering is abhorrent, it just points out the importance of
cultivation, propagation and distribution of endangered species while we
still have time, hoping that small populations in a couple of bogs in
Alabama will survive in perpetuity is a risk we shouldn't take.
The fact is every plant you have in your collection is the result of wild
collected seed or field collected plant material. Whether or not this took
place generations ago or last week it is still the case. Every pet you have
comes from field collected stock, even though the original wild parent might
have been collected several thousand years ago. There are already far more
oreophila in the hands of private collectors, heck, probably in the hands of
the readers of this list, than exist in the wild, a very sad statement but one
that ensures no matter what happens to the wild populations this species will
never become extinct. I wish it weren't the case, but the fact there are
private growers of these plants is the strongest chance they have for
survival.
Regards,
Demetrios