Introduced Predators - Leave A Trail Of Extinction

Introduced mammals can be devast-ating for birds.

- Andrew Mckechnie

The invasive house mice that eat seabird nestlings alive on sub-Antarctic islands such as Marion and Gough provide one example with which many readers of this magazine will be familiar. New Zealand’s flightless and phylogenetically distinct Stevens Island Wren was extinct by the time it was described to science because of feral cats (but probably not just a single lighthouse keeper’s cat named Tibbles, as the apocryphal version of the story goes). Even the Dodo, the most iconic extinct bird of all time, was very likely hastened to its demise by feral pigs and monkeys preying on eggs and nestlings.

Although the conservation literature is replete with accounts of how introduced mammalian predators have been calamitous for birds, until recently no single study had comprehensively synthesised these impacts at a global scale. Writing in the