And No Birds Sing: The Story of an Ecological Disaster in a Tropical Paradise by Mark Jaffe, Simon & Schuster, $23, 283 pages.
The News & Observer
June 19, 1994
WHEN NATURE DEVOURS ITSELF
By Phillip Manning
A year ago, I revisited the summit of Mount Mitchell. I've been
there many times, so I knew what to expect, but as always the
reality shocked me. The twisted gray trunks of dead Fraser firs
and the brown needles of dying ones looked more like a scene from
a war zone than a vista in our first state park. The ecological
disaster that struck our tallest mountain is similar to the one
that befell Guam, the "Tropical Paradise" referred to
in the subtitle of this book. Both places suffer from "exotics"
-- imported alien species -- that have badly damaged their ecosystems.
The devastation created by exotics could become a serious threat
to the diversity we need on this planet -- as serious as the cutting
down of rain forests or the extinction of rare species. When nature
devours itself, what do we do then? What can we do?
The book begins in the 1960s, when the birds started disappearing
from Guam, a 209 square-mile island 3,000 miles west of Hawaii.
By 1974, the forest birds were gone from the southern end of the
island. A few years later, they were almost gone from the north
end, too. In 1978, the Guam Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources
(DAWR) proposed adding 10 of Guam's 12 species of land birds to
the federal endangered species list. But even the DAWR didn't
know the answer to the big question: What was killing the birds
of Guam?
Mark Jaffe, an environmental reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer,
chronicles the ensuing detective story, as government and academic
biologists searched for answers. In 1982, the DAWR assigned Julie
Savidge, a zoology graduate student at the University of Illinois,
to work on the problem. The DAWR's bosses at the Federal Wildlife
Service thought that pesticides were responsible (U.S. military
planes regularly sprayed DDT and other pesticides on Guam after
World War II), so Savidge and her colleagues ran test after test
on soil, guano, and wildlife.
The tests all came back negative; pesticides weren't the problem.
They then studied bird diseases, habitat loss, typhoons, and poaching;
again, the results were negative. Desperate, Savidge began asking
the island's residents what they thought was killing the birds.
Their answers were surprising and nearly unanimous: snakes, they
said, check out the brown tree snakes.
Herpetologists believe the snake was inadvertently introduced
to Guam from New Guinea during World War II, a stowaway in the
military supplies that were being moved from one Pacific island
to another. But identifying the problem was only half the battle;
they were unable to develop a workable snake control program --
a situation that exists to this day.
In this well-researched, competently written book, Jaffe points
out that Guam's tree snake is merely one more exotic on an ever-growing
list, the price we pay for increased international travel and
trade. The exotic that is killing the Fraser firs I saw on Mount
Mitchell is the balsam woolly adelgid, an aphid brought to this
country on nursery stock from Europe. The zebra mussel, an import
from the Caspian Sea, is also moving toward North Carolina, destroying
fishing grounds and clogging water pipes as it comes. And the
great chestnut trees of the Appalachian Mountains are already
gone, victims of a blight from Asia.
The brown tree snake is still moving around, too. It is not native
to Hawaii, but on September 3, 1991, two brown tree snakes were
found near the Honolulu airport.
###