Guam's ecological fate is in the hands of the U.S. military

"It was about 8 p.m. and under total darkness. I was standing with a group of eight scientists and volunteers in the middle of the forest, sweating from the humidity and peering into the dense tree branches with a headlight that was making my forehead even hotter. A snake biologist standing next to me called out, “There’s one!”

She had spotted the thing we had come to find: a brown tree snake. The animal is an invasive species brought to Guam in the 1940s, probably by the U.S. military. It’s a rapacious nocturnal feeder that, just a few decades after it was introduced, had eaten so many of the eggs of the native bird populations that 10 of the 12 species went functionally extinct. By some estimates, there are 2 million brown tree snakes on Guam, about 9,500 per square mile.

Scientists, Congress, local residents—everybody wants them gone. One of the volunteers in my outing, a member of the United States Department of Agriculture rapid response team created specifically to get rid of those snakes, collected the two serpents we found in an hour’s worth of searching. After weighing and measuring them, he put them both in a cloth sack, to be euthanized back at the lab (though, usefully, he explained how we should kill them on the spot should we encounter others on our own)".