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The first time poet Craig Santos Perez encountered a bird native to his homeland of Guam it was in a cage at San Diego zoo. Growing up on Guam in the 1980s and 90s, Perez, a native Chamorro, had learned about the island’s lost birds at school. Children studied pictures and listened to audio recordings of their calls – but by then, the island’s forests were silent. Of Guam’s original 12 species of forest birds, ten had been eaten to extinction by the invasive brown tree snake.
