It was the farthest landbound trek ever recorded for a wild animal in America, by a barely weaned teenager venturing solo through hostile terrain. The lion was three years old, with a DNA trail embarking from the Black Hills of South Dakota on a cross-country odyssey eventually passing within thirty miles of New York City.

But a more fantastic scenario of facts soon unfolded. Speculations ran wild, the wildest of which figured him a ghostly survivor from a bygone century when lions last roamed the eastern United States. Beside the road lay a 140-pound mountain lion. The creature appeared as something out of New England's forgotten past.

And amid manifold threats to life on Earth, he reveals a new reason to hope.Late one June night in 2011, a large animal collided with an SUV cruising down a Connecticut parkway. Touring exotic locales with a ragtag group of environmental fighters, William Stolzenburg delivers both perilous adventure and intimate portraits of human, beast, hero, and villain. Rat Island reveals a little-known and much-debated side of today's conservation movement, founded on a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy. Biological SWAT teams are blanketing mountainous isles with rat poison. Sharpshooters are sniping at goat herds from helicopters. To save these endangered islanders, academic ecologists have teamed up with professional hunters and semiretired poachers in a radical act of conservation now bent on annihilating the invaders. These fragile ecosystems, home to unique species that evolved in peaceful isolation, have been catastrophically disrupted by mainland predators - rats, cats, goats, and pigs ferried by humans to islands around the globe. Islands, making up just 3 percent of Earth's landmass, harbor more than half of its endangered species. Now, on this and hundreds of other remote islands around the world, a massive - and massively controversial - wildlife rescue mission is underway. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands. Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and Siberia.

Heart of a Lion by William Stolzenburg