Life
Nobody Hunted These. They Still Vanished.
Three extinctions in this Short were caused not by hunters but by animals that hitched a ride. Cats brought by a lighthouse, rats escaping a shipwreck, and a snake carried to Guam after the war each wiped out island birds. The message is that every one of these killers arrived as a passenger.
The numbers
- Cats arrived on Stephens Island with a lighthouse in 1894; its flightless wren soon vanished.
- Rats from the 1918 SS Makambo grounding wiped out five Lord Howe Island bird species.
- After World War Two, brown tree snakes on Guam erased ten of twelve native forest birds.
