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National Geographic : 1993 Jul
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Society, at his office at the Bronx Zoo. It is a corner office with arched windows; a portrait of a snow leopard looks on from behind his desk. Conway is a lean man of patrician bearing with an aquiline nose hint ing of a raptor. He is the doyen of American zookeepers. For 40 years he has worked as ornithologist, globe-trotting research er, stern taskmaster. Under his guidance the New York Zoological Society operates not only the Bronx Zoo and four others but also 158 conservation projects in 41 nations, and it has made possible the cre ation or survival of more than a hundred wildlife parks and reserves. To emphasize its far-reaching activities, the society recently changed its name to NYZS/The Wildlife Conservation Society. It also changed the names of its zoos: The Bronx Zoo is now officially the International Wildlife Conservation Park. "Conservation is a matter of buying time," Conway said. "That's essentially what zoos are doing. In many instances we are going to buy time for creatures that will have no place in nature ever again, and at some point we are going to face some very tough decisions. "For instance, the beautiful little Guam kingfisher became extinct in nature in 1987, killed out by a snake introduced to that island. But zoos still breed them. How long shall we continue?" And where can we keep all the species? "All the animal spaces in all the zoos of the world," he said, "could fit comfortably within the borough of Brooklyn. That's not much space." But Conway continues to push zoo breeding. He believes some con servationists-those who would let a species become extinct in nature rather than breed it in a zoo-are mistaken, if well-meaning. "It was only about eight years ago that the Javan tiger was the New Zoos
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