Voter Girl Project - Need Teachers

Rosalie Barrow Edge was such a ferocious advocate for the protection of wildlife that The New Yorker once called her “the only honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation.” After developing an interest in birdwatching in the 1920s, Edge was horrified to discover that 70,000 bald eagles were being slaughtered in the Alaskan Territory, but that existing conservation groups didn’t care because bald eagles weren’t rare at the time. She founded the Emergency Conservation Committee, which was dedicated to protecting all species of birds and animals, common and rare alike, in 1929. She also ended decades of hawk and eagle shootings on a ridge in the Appalachian Mountains — by buying the property in 1934 and turning it into the world’s first refuge for birds of prey. Her legacy also helped another pioneering environmentalist: in 1960, the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary provided scientific data to Rachel Carson, helping her link the decline in the juvenile raptor population to the unregulated spraying of DDT.