How have 10 of the Guams 12 native forrest bird species been extirpated since World War II?
The forest on Guam is silent. Sometime after World War II the brown tree snake arrived as a stowaway on this U.S. Pacific island territory 6,100 kilometers west of Hawaii. It has since extirpated 10 of the island’s 12 native forest bird species. The remaining forest birds have been relegated to small populations on military bases, where the snakes are kept in check. In the first study of its kind, a rugby-playing researcher named Haldre Rogers is documenting how the forest itself is changing.
The forest on Guam is silent. Sometime after World War II the brown tree snake arrived as a stowaway on this U.S. Pacific island territory 6,100 kilometers west of Hawaii. It has since extirpated 10 of the island’s 12 native forest bird species. The remaining forest birds have been relegated to small populations on military bases, where the snakes are kept in check. In the first study of its kind, a rugby-playing researcher named Haldre Rogers is documenting how the forest itself is changing. “There’s nothing in the forest on Guam,” Rogers says, “and when you hear anything you have to stop and say, ‘What was that?'” Rogers is a doctoral student at the University of Washington in Seattle who once had a cell phone with the number 777-HISS during the three years she worked for the U.S. Geological Survey’s brown tree snake rapid response team. From 2002 to 2005, she estimates she nabbed about 100 snakes out of a population estimated in the hundreds of thousands. These days, between tournam
