After years of invasive rats threatening island wildlife, Tuvalu removed them from six islets; residents are now seeing birds and coconut crabs return

• On small islands scattered across the Pacific, changes in wildlife can be surprisingly easy to notice.
• A few more birds along the shoreline, coconut crabs appearing where they had become scarce, or native animals moving through places they once avoided can all point to a shift in the balance of an ecosystem.
• In Tuvalu, that shift has followed a large-scale effort to remove invasive species from several islets.