Tell me about your first book.

The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. I read the book when it came out more than 10 years ago. It is superb. David is a very scholarly but brilliant journalist who can tell scientific stories with the kind of panache you’d expect from a novelist. The Song of the Dodo is now a classic. It’s about island biogeography, about Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and how their theories are demonstrated in closed ecosystems. That is, Darwin’s famous study of the finches of the Galapagos – how in a closed ecosystem, like an island, any animals arriving or introduced will have unforeseen consequences on that ecosystem. For instance, on the island I’ve written about in When The Killing’s Done, Santa Cruz island, we have a scrub blue jay there, related to our blue jay here [in the American mainland], only because of the principles of island geography it is one third larger and much bluer. It’s a different subspecies because it’s in a different environment, and it grew larger because it had less competitors. By the same token we have the island fox, which is the size of a house cat. It became a dwarf variety for the same reasons. It didn’t have enough resources to grow bigger.

Quammen’s book talks about this kind of thing on islands around the world. One of the stories he tells is of the Komodo dragon on Komodo island. This is a monitor lizard that has grown to gigantic proportions. It’s so wonderful how nature works outside of our agency. It’s theorised that it originally fed on the dwarf elephant. Of course, those things are long extinct, so what is it eating now? Deer. Deer introduced by humankind. It’s a very fascinating book and it tells you all about Darwin’s and Alfred Lord Russell’s theories about evolution, especially as applied to island biogeography.

Does he actually talk about the dodo?

Yes, he tells the entire story of the dodo quite beautifully.

Tell me something about the dodo. The only thing I know about it is that it’s extinct.

Well, you know all about it from your reading of Alice in Wonderland. The dodo was related to the pigeon. Flight is very expensive, to be able to fly costs a lot of calories. Birds fly to escape enemies. On the island of Mauritius the dodo did not have any enemies, so it grew much larger and lost the ability to fly. It was utterly defenceless when people first came to the island and it was quickly decimated. Can you imagine? Sailing ships came by looking for food, having eaten dried fish and salt pork for months, and here is this huge, fat, delicious pigeon standing there looking at them. There is also a term for island animals – naïve. That is, they are naïve of predation so they are rather tame. This is true of the foxes on Santa Cruz island to this day. No-one has hunted them, no-one has disturbed them, they have no natural enemies, nothing eats them so they are almost tame.

So, people ate all the dodos?

They ate the dodos, but people also introduced pigs and dogs, and the pigs and dogs took care of what people didn’t. The pigs in particular ate the eggs.

Tell me about Out of Eden.

This is a delightful book by Alan Burdick. It has the subtitle “An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion”. Burdick is talking about invasive species throughout the world. My favourite is the story of the brown tree snake. The brown tree snake has invaded Guam. The theory is that it got there in the undercarriage of a light aircraft during World War II. These snakes came from Indonesia where they live in a balance with the rest of the creatures because they evolved there, and so have natural enemies and natural controls. In Guam there was no such thing and they are everywhere on this island. They are impossible to remove, they have decimated the bird population, they are eating other invasive species like cane toads and rats, and they’re eating each other. There is no end to them! The great fear is that they will get to other islands like Hawaii.