Rat Island is a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, in the Bering Sea midway between Alaska and Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands.
Now, on this and hundreds of other remote islands around the world, a massively controversial wildlife rescue mission is under way. To save these endangered islanders, academic ecologists have teamed up with professional hunters and semiretired poachers, bent on annihilating the invaders.
