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Rating: 
Summary: Trouble in Paradise
Review: This account of efforts to understand and deal with threatened bird extinctions on Guam is a gem of a book. The paperback's blurbs focused on Jaffe's "ecological detective thriller." But I found most compelling the seamlessness of the book's widely-informed joined elements -- including biographical and political sketches of great pith, accessible population biology, and a good-scientists-versus-stupid-and-finally-thwarted-others story. The ecological culprit was not some natural substance, and not even one of homo sapiens' products (the book's index lists only three references to DDT). Nor was he us. But he was (and is) one of our fellows -- a little predator incredibly well adapted to feeding on birds' eggs. After the paucity and untimeliness of the governmental response to the Guamanian situation had sunk into my consciousness, it seemed ironic that the book ends with the United States Air Force establishing a 50-acre "environmental reclamation experiment" which Jaffe hopes will provide the setting for much more effective research on the culprit. Like The Lord of the Flies ends with her majesty's warship rescuing the island-stranded, warring boys from themselves.
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