Islands have long been risky places for ground-nesting birds because, for most of evolutionary history, they had few predators to fear. That safety unravelled when humans began arriving by ship, because rats stowed away on vessels and found island seabird colonies easy prey. Few places show the damage more clearly than Langara Island, a remote island off the northern tip of Haida Gwaii in British Columbia, where one seabird population collapsed and later rebounded within a few decades.
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