GERONIMOUSE! Managers throw mice toxic to brown tree snakes from a helicopter. USDA APHIS WILDLIFE SERVICES
Guam has brown tree snake problems. Alien, secretive, and extremely hungry, the reptiles snuck onto Guam as unintentional cargo on docking ships decades ago, possibly as early as the 1940s. And now snakes bite sleeping babies, cripple electrical grids by slithering into conductors, and wreak ecological havoc.
Although most island residents never encounter the nocturnal tree-dwelling snakes, they’ve have had a particularly woeful impact on Guam’s native bird, lizard, and flying-mammal species. The Micronesian kingfisher now exists only in captivity, and the Guam flycatcher is extinct. Only one of Guam’s three native bat species has been sighted since 1968, and endemic lizards have been decimated.
Birds are critical for dispersing and digesting seeds, says Haldre Rogers, an ecologist at Rice University in Houston who studies ...
