NONFICTION - June 26, 1994

AND NO BIRDS SING: The Story of an Ecological Disaster in a Tropical Paradise by Mark Jaffe (Simon & Schuster: $23; 282 pp.). In 1984, when a young biologist presented a paper theorizing that Guam’s birds were being wiped out by an imported snake, many other scientists found her conclusions hard to swallow. “I just sat there thinking this is all bull,” a tropical bird expert told Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Jaffe. “I’ve been on Guam several times and I’ve never even seen a brown tree snake.” Well, so much for the experts: Julie Savidge, the biologist in question, was not only correct, but further shook up biology’s conventional wisdom by demonstrating that snakes can thrive on processed food (her captive tree snakes loved balled-up hamburger meat) and by supplementing her field work with seemingly unrelated evidence (Savidge found statistics on snake-induced electrical outages that confirmed not only the reptile’s rapid growth in range and population but also its remarkable, if sometimes counterproductive, agility). The brown tree snake, a thin but fierce native of the South Pacific--it’s been known to take chicken off barbecue grills and attempt to eat sleeping children--in many places found no natural enemies or competitors, and on Guam pushed some native birds, mainly through egg predation, into extinction. Jaffe chronicles both Savidge’s attempt, with numerous colleagues, to make her case against the snake, and by other conservationists to save the Micronesian kingfisher and the Guam rail through last-ditch captive breeding programs. He can’t provide a happy ending, however; the snake has been found on Hawaii in recent years, probably brought there aboard military transport planes. “And No Birds Sing” is not an eloquent book--the style is daily newspaper-ese--but Jaffe has stumbled on an absorbing story, one that highlights the dangers inherent in man’s tampering with the natural world.