Checked. I stand corrected. It was a few months, not two years and the seabird was not an endangered species globally (but can be locally).
It happened in the National park of Timanfaya almost twenty years ago. At the end of June-2003, a trail of depredated corpses of Scopoli's shearwaters started to appear.
The area is dry and the invisible predator left no traces and almost no faeces to examine. The National Park staff suspected a ferret as main candidate. Dogs, cats or even badgers were also in the list, some camera traps were set and eventually show a racoon.
Until caught at the end of the summer, the final "bodycount" was 100 shearwaters killed (plus the orphaned chicks unable to survive without the parents). This just by one single racoon in a single summer. The animal was tame, not afraid of people and was clearly a released pet. If it hadn't happened in a national park no one would have bothered to hunt it.
I only found a link in Spanish, you can use google translate if you are curious about the details.
"Wild" North American raccoons here in their native range are also completely unafraid of people. Or even dogs. At least in urban areas. They basically "know" that they can't really be messed with, because it's not typically legal to shoot them, they have nasty teeth and claws, and they're ridiculously smart.
You aren't joking about them being unafraid of people. I was sitting out on my back deck one evening here in $RELATIVELY_BIG_CITY and had two adolescent racoons approach me and start engaging in playful behavior. One of them even ran up and snagged the slipper off my foot before I protested and it dropped it and ran away.
A couple of housecats multiplied and wiped out a bunch of native species on California's San Clemente island a while back. A friend of mine was a contractor doing work for the Navy on that island (it's USG property) and told me stories about how some of the other folks stationed there would grab a shotgun and Jeep and go cat huntin'
Different cases and different places. Mallorca Island is located south of France. Lanzarote Island is located to the west of the Sahara.
The Mediterranean Islands had pygmy elephants, endemic goats, bunny like rodents with short ears and forests with many trees that were extinct long time ago. All fauna now is similar to the continent, and seabirds know since long time ago that there are small carnivores roaming; and that some places are safe to nest and other not.
Canary islands have their own biodiversity area and remained much more isolated with no native wild carnivore predators.
That's crazy. Do you have a link to that?