evidence: Rats had lived on the island, an overseas territory of France, for hundreds of rat generations. The rodents likely arrived in the late 1700s, when a French ship—carrying Malagasy people kidnapped for the slave trade—wrecked there, says Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island, a French overseas region off the coast of Madagascar. Tromelin Island was probably home to at least eight different seabird species before the rodents arrived, including hundreds of thousands of frigatebirds, terns, and boobies. But, like on hundreds of other islands around the world, the rats ate their way through those birds’ eggs, eventually decimating the populations. By 2005, when French authorities finally began eradicating the rodents, only two bird species were left: a few hundred pairs of masked and red-footed boobies. [...] On Tromelin Island, which is just one square kilometer, uninhabited save for a small scientific research station, French authorities eradicated the rodents in a month using poisoned bait. [...] Despite the promising start, Tromelin Island’s seabirds still face the same threats that imperil seabirds worldwide: they can be caught accidentally in commercial fisheries, plus overfishing and changing ocean conditions rob them of food. But small as it is, Tromelin Island shows that seabirds are resilient. If people can get rid of invasive predators, island restoration can work—sometimes stunningly.