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On Sept. 1, 1914, the last passenger pigeon on earth died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. The species, once numbering in the billions, had been hunted to extinction.

Around the same time, another iconic North American species, the bison, was also being hunted past the point of no return. But the bison didn’t die off steadily until the last one perished in an enclosure. The species rebounded, and today shaggy herds meander through Yellowstone National Park, blissfully unaware of how close they came to being wiped out.This week, the story of the passenger pigeon and the bison is being highlighted halfway across the globe, at a conference organized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Jeju, South Korea. The Wildlife Conservation Society has circulated a list of Asian species that are at a “conservation crossroads” and are desperately in need of the sort of concerted effort that prevented the bison from going the way of the passenger pigeon.