In Guam, nearly all the birds and a few endangered species have been devoured by the species of brown tree snake that arrived from Australia in the middle of the last century. This snake is the reader’s introduction to the world of invasive species explored in a new book, “Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion,” by alumnus Alan Burdick, Class of 1988.

Burdick, who designed his own major — history and philosophy of science — once he transferred to Stanford, worked at The Stanford Daily during his time on the Farm. He moved on to work as a restaurant reviewer and finally ended focusing his career efforts in science journalism. Burdick is currently a senior editor at Discover magazine in New York City.

“Out of Eden,” his first book, was released in May. After the release, Burdick spent about a week in the Bay Area on a book tour. The question-and-answer portions of these talks were most interesting, he said, because people often are aware of one particular invasive species, like the kudzu vine, and are interested in talking about their ecological implications.

A number of books about ecological diversity and the transplantation of exotic species such as the brown tree snake or the troublesome zebra mussel have led to the popularity of what is known as invasive biology. Burdick said he was concerned by the tendency to focus only on the damage invasive species can cause. Instead of automatically judging a phenomenon that he calls, “the homogenization of the world,” he wanted to explore and describe the impact of global travel on ecosystems that are the recipients of new, non-native species.

“I didn’t want to write a doom-and-gloom book,” said Burdick. “A lot of these invading species cause problems, but a lot of them don’t. Again that kind of raises some fundamental questions about how ecosystems are structured and whether they are as tightly knit as we thought they were.”

Burdick first started working on “Out of Eden” 10 years ago as an offshoot of an article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1994. To research, he visited biologists in Guam, in Hawaii and at the San Francisco Bay, among other places, and spent months following them and exploring their research.

“Writing about science is kind of like being a travel writer,” he said. “If you can just kind of bring back some of the texture of what goes on [in any location] and find out why people are passionate about living there and studying the things that they study, then you’ve done a good job.”

That was precisely the focus Burdick took in his book: He focused on the work of one or two central scientists in each of the major sections. Conversations with biologists studying the brown tree snake in Guam guide the first third of the book. In Hawaii, he talked to a soil biologist who studies the impact of environmental changes on invertebrate species in the soil, and explores species like fruit flies and carnivorous caterpillar.

The last major area covered in “Out of Eden” is marine biology. In the San Francisco Bay, which is home to more than 250 non-native species, Burdick followed a group of marine biologists who study the movement of marine species in the ballast water of oil tankers and other large ships.

In the course of his book research, Burdick even talked with a decontamination specialist in NASA’s spacecraft-assembly facility, where the concern is to prevent the transplantation of earth life forms to other planets during space travel.

Burdick’s analogy of science writing to travel writing was built into a book that reviewers and Burdick himself described as part science book, part travelogue, part personal narrative. Integrated into the exploration of invasive species in “Out of Eden” are questions and musings about what nature is, what natural means and how mankind’s relationship to nature is defined.

“In a lot of ways, it’s kind of an extended essay, an extended travel piece,” Burdick said. “Traveling and seeing these amazing places and thinking aloud about the urge to travel and pondering what the implications of the urge to travel are. So it gets pretty metaphysical towards the end.”