You are beyond excited as you arrive in port at Flying Fish Cove on Christmas Island for your summer research internship. You have been travelling on the local ferry, A Christmas Coral, for 12 days and have had plenty of time to investigate the history of this remarkable island, which sits to the east of the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Indonesian archipelago (see Figure 1).
The first human settlement on the previously uninhabited Christmas Island did not occur until 1888, much later than for many other isolated islands. The endemic flora and fauna have, therefore, not suffered quite the same catastrophic damage as on islands that were discovered and settled by European explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a consequence, Christmas Island is considered to be a key refuge for wild birds.
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