Predators and how they balance the landscape

I just finished a book on the ecology of predators as controls keeping the herbivores in check. It had many good points, and while somewhat depressing, wasn't any worse than some of my other recent reads. Book was Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg. It started with the basics of ecology and food webs and how everything is connected to something else. The author went on to discuss what happens when you remove the apex predator and the middle opportunists begin proliferating. Likely we can blame raccoons and the like for the decline of the Eastern US songbirds, as them not being in check keeps egg thieves more abundant than they once were. It covered the reintroduction of the Wolves to Yellowstone nicely, though not as detailed as Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone by Douglas W. Smith & Gary Ferguson, which I read a few months ago. Both books detailed how the return of the wolf has positively affected the landscape of Yellowstone. Plants that were being grazed to the ground every year by deer and elk are now recovering, and beavers have returned to Yellowstone. Pronghorn antelope have been making a comeback due to Wolves not putting up with coyotes, who had devised ways to kill the much faster pronghorn. Anyway, both books were a good if slightly depressing read.