He was responsible for the first modern maps of the area. Mortality rates were very high due to the spread of malaria. In 1882, a traveler wrote that the region was "among the finest hunting grounds in Syria," home to "panthers, leopards, bears, wild boars, wolves, foxes, jackals, hyenas, gazelles and otters." During World War II, officers of the British Army wrote about hunting birds there. In 1908, the Ottoman government granted a concession to drain the marsh to a French firm, which sold it to Lebanese businessmen. In 1933, during the British Mandate, the Zionist Palestine Land Development Company was awarded this concession by the Mandatory government and drew up plans to drain and irrigate the valley which brought scientific expeditions to the area. A visitor to the area in the 1930s reported that the villages in the area harvested the papyrus for weaving. They used two distinct styles of loom: one for fine mats for interior use, and a second producing longer, coarser mats which were used for constructing huts and shelters. The first modern Jewish settlement in the Hula Valley, Yesud HaMa'ala on the western shore of the lake, was established in 1883 during the First Aliyah. In 1948 there were 35 villages in the Hula Valley, 12 Jewish and 23 Arab. The draining operations, carried out by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), began in 1951 and were completed by 1958. In 1955 the Israeli government invited John Zuckerman to visit Israel as advisor on a project. It was achieved by two main engineering operations: the deepening and widening of the Jordan River downstream; and two newly-dug peripheral canals diverting the Jordan at the north of the valley. The drying out caused the extinction of the unique endemic fauna of the lake, including the cyprinid fish "Acanthobrama hulensis" and cichlid fish "Tristramella intermedia". Though perceived at the time as a great national achievement for Israel, with the advent of the modern environmental movement, it became evident that the transformation of the swamp into agricultural land involved significant trade offs and had effects on the ecosystem that had not been perceived in the first half of the twentieth century, when the major concerns had been the reduction of malaria-bearing mosquitoes and improving economic productivity. In 1963, a small (3.50 km²) area of recreated papyrus swampland in the southwest of the valley was set aside as the country's first nature reserve.