As I understand it, virtually all of the Pacific and South Pacific Islands have undergone massive waves of extinctions--often and demonstrably at the hands of humans.

It is understandable. Imagine birds who grow to populate human-free islands, and who eventually develop species-specific niches, never once in hundreds of thousands of years coming into contact with the human ancestry.

These birds, as on the islands now called New Zealand, Hawaii, Easter, and so forth, eventually ramify into species which roughly approximate the places on the food/predator chain that are generally occupied by mammals in Eurasia and the Americas . . .

And then humans eventually boat up to the shore to find all these food sources (the birds) basically adapted to ignore humans . . . which leads to the demise of many bird species. Imagine hungy humans, some 1,500 years ago, being able to walk up to an enormous bird and simply conk it on the head. The premise isn't that far-fetched.

And the humans, perhaps forgivably, don't understand that by wiping out these birds, they are perhaps needlessly destroying something that can't be undestroyed.

Read Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE and perhaps GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL if this topic interests you.

Herring405