Rat Island (14 page)

The cat's global wanderings were to be exceeded only by the rat's. But the speed with which the cat could ravage island faunas was exceeded by none. In the hierarchy of Oceania's invading predators, the cat came to be classified as a superpredator. Its mouth was a butcher's array of artery-slicing canines and meat-shearing molars, its paws concealing twenty switchblades. The weaponry was directed at times by a brain hardwired and hair-triggered for repeated attack regardless of hunger. Such was the nature of the beast behind the gruesome slaughters so commonly greeting the seabird biologist, the dead lying en masse with broken necks and missing brains and hardly a feather otherwise ruffled.

Among grounded gatherings of nesting birds, the litany of cat carnage ran long. On the New Zealand island of Raoul, a rookery of sooty terns likely numbering hundreds of thousands when the first cats were put ashore in the 1800s was gone by the 1990s. In the Kerguelen Archipelago, a subantarctic wilderness of penguins and petrels and albatross, cats at the peak of their killing were calculated to be removing nearly one and a quarter million seabirds per year. On Ascension Island, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, cats delivered by European colonists would by the twentieth century drive a gathering of some twenty million seabirds to within 2 percent of annihilation, the survivors left clinging to the sheerest cliffs and offshore sea stacks.

By the time Bill Wood arrived in Baja, feral cats of the world had extinguished at least thirty-three bird species and decimated uncounted others. And birds were only the more obvious victims. In the era of the feral cat the Mexican islands had thus far lost more than ten of their unique rodents. Distinctive forms of lizards and snakes had all grown scarce or disappeared with the coming of the cat. This was the buzzsaw of biological diversity that Wood was hired to destroy.

For Wood the transition from Sierra Nevada bobcats to Baja house cats entailed certain adjustments, the least of which involved retooling for the new quarry. Never mind that these stray cats were animals a third the size of his specialty, demanding smaller traps, lighter triggers, and more delicate placements. For Wood the ultimate challenge was maintaining his coveted independence.

Tershy had started Wood off, handing him the latest scientific papers on the subject, prescribing orderly grids of traps, mathematically configured to cover every square inch of cat territory. Wood secretly put them aside. His tool of choice was the scalpel, not the sledgehammer. As Wood went to work, meticulously setting his traps, Tershy would sometimes follow, camera in hand, documenting every detail. Wood stifled a desire to throw Tershy and his damned camera in the ocean. He could imagine his trapping secrets, so painstakingly earned and rabidly guarded all these years, splashed on a big screen before a packed auditorium. What Wood could not imagine then was that one day the man spilling it all at the podium would be he.

A
MBASSADOR
B
ILL

Much as he might have wished otherwise, there were feral cats enough in Baja to defeat even the single greatest trapper in the land, and only one Bill Wood to go around. If Wood was going to finish his job, he was going to need help. And others were going to need his.

Wood began appearing before Tershy and Croll's Mexican counterparts like some strange sort of shaman from the North, sent to cure their curse of cats. The Mexicans were primarily shooters, hunting by night with rifles and headlamps. Few seemed particularly interested in learning Wood's mysterious leghold weaponry. Safe enough with his secrets, he would lay the lines, setting the traps in his inimitable way, and with the help of an interpreter would instruct the others to check them. Then on to the next island he went.

As Wood toured the islands, the purpose of it all began to sink in. The stakes in Baja figured not in the profit of bobcat pelts but in million-year lines of evolution. These were no longer fishing trips disguised as work. This was a noble cause he had stumbled into. Applying his singular skills to saving wildlife gave Wood a satisfaction he'd never known as a commercial fur trapper. “It got to where I realized I'd done a lot of damage catching and hunting things,” he would later say. “To give something back—that was important to me.”

Wood, the iconoclast bobcat trapper turned grassroots extinction warrior, began recruiting troops to his new mission. He looked for outdoor sorts requiring no handholding—hunters, fishers, people of the land. Experience with traps was optional. (Wood figured it would take more work to untrain bad habits than to teach the right ones from scratch.) Allowing that there would still be night shooting to bag trap-shy cats, Wood looked for those handy too with the rifle and spotlight. And allowing that such night hunting was illegal in Mexico, the résumé Wood was seeking fairly well described the poacher.

Which fairly well described Miguel Angel Hermosillo. Hermosillo was working as a crew member of an eradication attempt already under way, directed by Tershy and Croll's Mexican partners from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He was also a part-time worker with a Mexican railroad company. His skills also involved shooting deer for money and for meat, under cover of darkness and out of earshot of the law. Unlike others Wood would attempt to train, Hermosillo grasped not only the intricacies of Wood's technique but their purpose. Hermosillo was no longer hunting for money but for the cause.

Wood took Hermosillo under his wing, taught him his techniques and trapping sets, trusted him to run the lines in his absence. Hermosillo spoke no English. Wood spoke no Spanish. Wood spoke to Hermosillo using his Spanish-English dictionary and a stick, drawing pictures in the dirt. The two understood each other perfectly. When Wood reported back, the first thing he recommended to his bosses was that they hire Hermosillo. The first employees of Croll and Tershy's fledgling island campaign thus comprised a retired bobcat trapper from California and, now, an itinerant deer poacher from Mexico.

And so, Wood began adding to his little ragtag battalion of island conservationists. By night the hunters would lure their quarry, squeaking like mice and wailing like wounded rabbits, aiming their headlamps and .22 rifles into the cat's incandescent green eye-shine. By day they checked their traps and ran the dogs. Jack Russell terriers—two-thousand-dollar dogs from elite hunting lines that had proved their mettle on U.S. mountain lions—joined the teams, tracking Baja cats and rabbits and flushing them into the gunners' sights.

As Wood made the rounds, his reputation transcended from that of master trapper to that of Baja's patron saint of island fauna—St. Francis with a twist. It turned out that Wood the cat whisperer had a magical way with people too. Wherever he stopped, he would pull out his little book of photos, filled not only with telling scenes of the feral cat's seabird carnage but also with images from back home—pictures of animals he'd hunted, fish he'd caught. With his pointing finger and phrase book Spanish he charmed all hosts. By his second visit to Baja, Wood never again needed to book a motel or hail a taxi. His new best friends wouldn't think of him staying anywhere but in their homes.

And if Wood wasn't ambassador enough, he came with his sidekick Freckles. Early on Wood had picked up the little white terrier as his hunting companion. Freckles was a bit of a runt, the last pick from an otherwise star-studded litter. Her grandfather was none other than Wishbone, of TV fame, a talking, daydreaming, well-versed-in-classic-literature kind of dog. Wishbone's undistinguished little granddaughter Freckles overcompensated for her size with a tenacious talent rounding up island cats and rabbits, and a star power that threatened to steal her master's stage. Tourists cruising the islands would occasionally spot the now-legendary Bill Wood on his rounds and come running, gripped in celebrity fever. “Where's Freckles?” they would yell.

S
URFBOARDS
AND
B
IRKENSTOCKS

Within two years of Bill Wood's arrival, Croll and Tershy's team had gathered two more linchpins to their Baja campaign. Brad Keitt had come to the team as a young college graduate and old buddy of Tershy's, with the résumé of an itinerant windsurfer, kayaker, eco-tour guide, and fellow seabird junkie. When Tershy offered Keitt a project in need of a student—involving a mysterious ocean-wandering seabird named the black-vented shearwater, nesting almost exclusively on a little island called Natividad (which also happened to feature a world-class surf break)—Keitt's decision wasn't one of yes or no, but whether to pinch himself.

Keitt's academic questions concerned the natural history of a bird hardly known to science, and in danger of remaining that way forever. The black-vented shearwater bred nowhere else but the northern coast of Baja. More precisely, 95 percent of the world's black-vented shearwaters gathered each season on the single island of Natividad, an island now swarming with cats.

The original sources of those cats—as hoped-for hunters of mice—were the four hundred or so people of Natividad's fishing community. The island's fishermen had come to consider the shearwaters as just another kind of
nocturno
, a generic term lumping together all burrowing seabirds of the night. Keitt gave them another way to think of the shearwaters. He shared with them his discoveries, of a bird with wings that could fly it all the way to Canadian latitudes, then propel it to incredible depths of the sea in pursuit of little fish. He would relay such tidbits to those making their living diving for abalone and lobster and watch for that aha moment when the particulars hit home. “You mean these birds dive deeper than we go in our scuba gear?”

Keitt took school groups on field trips to the shearwater colony, snaking fiber-optic probes into the birds' burrows, amazing the kids with live videos of shearwater chicks never before imagined. It was a secret village of birds, hidden all this time, right beneath their feet.

He convinced Natividadans young and old that this amazing and beleaguered bird living in their midst was
their
bird. Isla Natividad was soon sprouting billboards and T-shirts emblazoned with images of the black-vented shearwater. The school and its soccer team had a new mascot.

When Keitt then showed the villagers what the feral cats were doing to their shearwaters, the massacres amounting to one hundred birds per week, the islanders didn't just agree that the cats should go; they demanded it.

Keitt's arrival at island conservation was soon followed by that of Josh Donlan, a long-haired, footloose biology major out of Virginia's James Madison University. Donlan had capped his college career with a twenty-year moment, deciding that before any grad school or meaningful employment he would sample the good life. After crossing the United States, adventuring all the way to Alaska, he eventually found himself paddling a kayak the length of Baja, on a four-month tour of the Gulf of California. He was drawn to the islands, putting ashore and exploring their miniature universes of evolution. For a young biologist looking to make sense of an otherwise complicated world, this was the holy land. But for all the seductive rawness of Baja, it was one decidedly unromantic evening on an island called San Jorge that finally hooked him to the place. On his first night on San Jorge, Donlan awakened to the scurrying of little feet and the thumps of little bodies jumping against the walls of his tent. There went the holy land.

As Donlan continued his tour of the islands, the pattern repeated. It became more the rule than the exception to find the Baja wilderness running with urban rats and feral cats, its fabled seabird colonies littered with carcasses. And if it wasn't the rats and cats eating Baja alive, it was crews of donkeys, goats, and rabbits mowing the delicate island flora to nubs. This was a paradise in need of rescue.

Donlan, like Keitt, was soon thereafter enrolled in the graduate program at UC Santa Cruz, ostensibly as a master's student of biology under Tershy and Croll, in practice a new recruit to their eclectic squad of island saviors. Donlan declared that his first official order of business was to return to his baptismal shores of San Jorge and rid that island of rats. He loaded up his truck, snuck a load of brodifacoum across the Mexican border, enlisted a crew of local fishermen to help spread it, and within the year had made the island safe again for its seabirds. For the twenty-five-year-old aspiring biologist in Birkenstocks, having enlisted in conservation's losing war against extinction, it was a heady initiation to the front lines. With a truck full of poison, a few fishermen, and no fanfare, Donlan had rescued an island.

And so it came together, this unlikely coterie of conservationists—a veritable motley crew of egghead academics, professional poachers, ex-hippies, trappers, Latinos, and Yanks—allied in the cause of island species. The team officially became the Island Conservation and Ecology Group, mirrored in name and mission by their Mexico comrades, Grupo de Ecología y Conservación de Islas. Bankrolled by shoestring budgets and unjaded optimism, the island conservationistas started clearing islands of their animal threats, one after the other.

The crews would one day look back fondly on those halcyon days of misadventure among the Mexican islands, of runaway hunting dogs and run-ins with drug runners, of tense moments at the border, their trucks loaded with guns and ammo. There would be breakdowns in the middle of the desert, breakdowns in the middle of the sea, little vessels full of island crusaders with their little dead engine in pieces on the floor, drifting helplessly toward the black horizons of the Pacific. There was an inadvertent collision with a whale. The prevailing philosophy for coping with the daily dangers was epitomized by Wood's wife, Darlene. “She didn't say too much,” said Wood. “She just raised my life insurance.”

Within five years of their opening salvos in Baja, the cross-border team of island conservationists had cleared invaders from nine islands. They'd eradicated rats from San Roque and Rasa islands, rabbits from Natividad, and goats and burros from two of the San Benito Islands. They'd eliminated cats from the islands of Isabel, Asuncion, Coronado Norte, San Roque, and Todos Santos Sur, with those harassing the shearwater haven of Natividad soon to follow.