(407) 622-6657

Shipping is just $4.99

Product Image

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

Author William Stolzenburg

Format Hardcover

Publisher Bloomsbury USA

Category Science

Out of Stock

Notify Me

If you have an account we can notify you when we add a copy of this item to our inventory.

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.

Authors

William Stolzenburg

Additional Info

  • Release Date: 2011-06-21
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
  • Format: Hardcover
  • ISBN: 9781608191031

No copies of this item are currently available.