By Julian Aguon, Illustration: Kate Nolan/The Guardian, The Guardian, October 31, 2022
For about as long as I’ve been alive, there have been no sihek on the island of Guam.
The sihek, or the Guam kingfisher, is a beautiful blue-gold songbird that’s been extirpated in the wild since the 1980s. Like most of Guam’s native birds – 10 out of 12 native species – the sihek rapidly declined after the introduction of the invasive brown tree snake brought to the island after the second world war as a stowaway on military ships.
It is hard to articulate the trauma that is the absence of birdsong.
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