Off the coast of Mauritius sit a string of small, mostly uninhabited islands that once told a very different story than they do today. For decades, animals brought there by ships, rats, cats, goats and rabbits among them, quietly wiped out native plants and drove seabird colonies to near collapse. Then, starting in the late 1970s, conservationists and the Mauritian government began a long, painstaking effort to remove these invasive species from islands like Round Island, Ile aux Aigrettes and Gunner's Quoin. It took decades of careful work, but the results speak for themselves. Seabirds that had all but vanished from these shores are now nesting again, and native forests are slowly reclaiming ground they had lost more than a century ago.
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