Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World's Greatest Wildlife Rescue

By William Stolzenburg

Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a
mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and
Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the
island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the
nesting birds by the thousands. Now, on this and hundreds of other
remote islands around the world, a massive - and massively
controversial - wildlife rescue mission is under way.

Islands,
making up just 3 percent of Earth's landmass, harbor more than half of
its endangered species. These fragile ecosystems, home to unique species
that evolved in peaceful isolation, have been catastrophically
disrupted by mainland predators: rats, cats, goats, and pigs ferried by
humans to islands around the globe. To save these endangered islanders,
academic ecologists have teamed up with professional hunters and
semiretired poachers in a radical act of conservation now bent on
annihilating the invaders. Sharpshooters are sniping at goat herds from
helicopters. Biological SWAT teams are blanketing mountainous isles with
rat poison. Rat Island reveals a little-known and much-debated side of today's conservation movement, founded on a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy.

Touring
exotic locales with a ragtag group of environmental fighters, William
Stolzenburg delivers both perilous adventure and intimate portraits of
human, beast, hero, and villain. And amid manifold threats to life on
Earth, he reveals a new reason to hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781408825174

William Stolzenburg

William Stolzenburg has written hundreds of magazine articles about the science and spirit of saving wild creatures. A 2010 Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellow, he is the author of the books Where the Wild Things Were and Rat Island. He is also the screenwriter of the documentaries Lords of Nature: Life in a Land of Great Predators and Ocean Frontiers: The Dawn of a New Era in Ocean Stewardship. He lives in Reno, Nevada.

Reviews for Rat Island

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This non-fiction book, written in the breathless journalistic style, tells of the impact of feral introduced species on the native wildlife of islands. While the Rat Island of the title is in the Bering Sea, much is also told of New Zealand and the awful impact of rats, stoats, cats and other introduced animals on flightless birds in particular. A good book, and a good read, if you can look past the occasional passages of overblown prose.Read July 2014

[satyridae · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

So much of this book is chilling and horrifying and graphic- be warned that if you have a hard time reading about teeming waves of rodents leaving carnage in their wake, you may want to be careful with this one. A tale worth reading- it's about hubris and inattention and making things worse under the guise of making them better. It's also, gladly, about learning from mistakes sometimes. And doing better over time. Well worth reading if you are the conservation-minded sort.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Many environmental books have an eat your vegetables feel as they portray humans destroying nature. And, if you read enough of them, it's rare to come across something original, a repetition of bad things leading to a loss of hope for the future. This book is different. It's about a few people who have saved entire species from extinction by removing invasive species from islands. It could be as simple as shooting all the pigs on an island in an afternoon, or a massive helicopter campaign to poison millions of rats over the course of months. It's very rewarding, both the removal of the pests and the aftermath as native species return from the brink of extinction. I also supplemented using Google Maps as a visual geography of some of the wildest islands on the globe. These islands, which I'd never heard of before, are now part of my mental map of the world in picture, name and events. I'd normally read this book in three days but was so enthralled it took only a day and a half. Great story, great writing, educational and cutting edge developments. If I was in college this book would inspire me to take up a new career, globe trotting to remote islands and saving species in one fell swoop. Of course the idea has caught on with others and is gaining momentum by the year. Go humans.