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tnmK mat muy stuart, wno woraea at the Beltsville, Md., research station and introduced many types of grapes and fruit trees to his neighbors, may have been responsible.
In the years — and it can be a century or so — before the bamboo seeds and die, it spreads beneath the ground and sends new shoots up each spring, so it doesn’t take long to establish a sizeable patch.
Ms. Eagan spotted the large bamboo grove and mentioned it tc the center as a possibility as theii supply of winter bamboo dwindled. The pandas were delighted to get it, and so were the very rare birds living at the center, the Guam rails and Micronesian kingfishers.
Ms. Eagan works with the birds in the center’s indoor rare bird house and wanted the fresh bamboo to provide care for the shy rails, who hide in it, build their nests beneath it, and use the leaves to cushion their nests.
The story of the center’s rails is a fascinating one.
In the 1960s and 70s, said Ms. Eagan, wildlife specialists began to notice a decline in the population of native birds on this tiny (10-by-20mile) island.
There were six native species in Guam. Between 1982 and 1984, 80 percent of the rails were gone, the kingfishers had dwindled significantly, and three species had disappeared entirely.
Ms. Eagan said that alarmed biologists studied the factors that contribute to extinction — the encroachment of man, disease and pollution, but could find nothing to explain such a dramatic loss.
Finally they noticed a snake existing in the same patterns as
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