The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

they discovered, has no resident mammals, unless you count the
scientists themselves or a pig that was once brought over and kept in a
cage until it was barbecued. The monograph that resulted from this
research ran to four hundred pages. It opened with a poem attesting to
the charms of the tiny cay:
An island slumbering—
Clasped in a shimmering circlet
Of waters turquoise and blue.
Guarding her jewel from the pounding surf
On her coral rim.
On my last day at One Tree, no snorkeling trips were planned, so I
decided to try to walk across the island, an exercise that should have
taken about fifteen minutes. Not very far into my journey, I ran into
Graham, the station manager. A rangy man with bright blue eyes, ginger-
colored hair, and a walrus mustache, Graham looked to me like he would
have made an excellent pirate. We fell into walking and talking together,
and as we wandered along, Graham kept picking up bits of plastic that the
waves had carried to One Tree: the cap of a bottle; a scrap of insulation,
probably from a ship’s door; a stretch of PVC pipe. He had a whole
collection of these bits of flotsam, which he displayed in a wire cage; the
point of the exhibit, he told me, was to demonstrate to visitors “what our
race is doing.”
Graham offered to show me how the research station actually
functioned, and so we threaded our way behind the cabins and the labs,
toward the island’s midsection. It was breeding season, and everywhere
we walked, there were birds strutting around, screaming: bridled terns,
which are black on top and white on their chests; lesser crested terns,
which are gray with black and white faces; and black noddies, which have
a patch of white on their heads. I could see why humans had had such an
easy time killing off nesting seabirds; the terns seemed completely
unafraid and were so much underfoot it took an effort not to step on
them.