In The Field

ESA: Seeds without wings

US military cargo ships from the Admiralty Islands brought the brown tree snake to Guam. It ate 10 forest bird species to extinction; the last two native species are clinging to life. “What we have is an island with no birds,” says Haldre Rogers of the University of Washington in Seattle. “I found an conservationists nightmare, but an ecologist’s dream.” Rogers was able to imagine a world without birds, “the fate of a silent forest” without birds to eat bugs and disperse seeds. Looking at seed dispersal, Rogers reckoned that seeds and seedlings would no longer be found far from 

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