Application deadline: April 28, 2006
The story is familiar to every school child in the San Francisco Bay Area. On April 18, 1906, at 5:12 a.m. the city of San Francisco and the surrounding countryside were shaken by a powerful earthquake. Buildings toppled, streets buckled, and a train was thrown from its tracks. Fires quickly broke out, and the ensuing conflagration grew into a firestorm that destroyed much of the city, killed thousands of people, displaced tens of thousands more, and dramatically altered the lives of Northern Californians.
The Aleutian Canada Goose, once thought to be extinct, is one of the rare success stories of the federal Endangered Species Act. Recognized as an endangered species in 1967, they numbered fewer than 500, so few that they went unseen for nearly 25 years and were presumed extinct. They were "rediscovered" by an intrepid lone biologist and researcher called Bob "Sea Otter" Jones, who rowed out in a wooden dory to the rocky, wave-tossed remote island in the western Aleutians where he suspected -- and found -- a small remnant population hidden away. Today, they number more than 60,000, and are one of only about a dozen species ever recovered enough to be taken off the endangered species list.