WHEN I was a kid, everyone thought that the Pacific Ocean islands had never had many bird species, and that those that had been lost died at the hands of European sailors and their cats, rats and goats. This book shows how wrong we were. The islands once abounded with birds, and their extinction was almost entirely due to the Lapita people. Their 鈥渂litzkrieg鈥� approach to exploiting natural resources often exterminated most of an island鈥檚 larger birds in a century or less. Steadman鈥檚 remarkable volume reveals what may have been the greatest vertebrate extinction of modern times.
Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds
University of Chicago Press
