Rat Island (15 page)

In an age of endless bureaucratic delays and budgetary overruns, the little crew of academics from Santa Cruz and their unlikely allies from the rowdier side of the tracks would eventually protect eighty-eight species of Baja's singular fauna, along with 201 seabird colonies. For less than fifty thousand dollars per rescue, the island saviors had quietly engineered one of the most potent and streamlined campaigns for conservation ever imagined.

Yet those halcyon days of anonymity were not to last. With success came stature, and a call for help from a besieged island called Anacapa, an island lying within sight of Los Angeles.

Chapter 8

ANACAPA

I
N
1853,
TWELVE
miles off the coast of Southern California, the paddle steamer
Winfield Scott
wrecked upon the rocky shores of Anacapa Island. In the year 1990 an oil tanker named the
American Trader
had an unrelated misfortune, running over its anchor off the coast of Huntington Beach. Separated by more than a hundred years and nearly as many miles, the two events would eventually converge to trigger a landmark battle in U.S. conservation history.

The
American Trader
's punctured tanks disgorged four hundred thousand gallons of Alaska crude, which would very publicly kill some thirty-four hundred seabirds. Of the thirteen-million-dollar settlement the court imposed on the tanker's owners, one and a half million was to go toward undoing some of the damages.

The most worrisome mortalities from the spill had been borne by the Xantus's murrelet, a robin-size seabird numbering just a few thousand breeding pairs short of extinction. One obvious way for the offenders to make amends was to make someplace safe again for the murrelets to breed. And one obvious place to do so was Anacapa.

Anacapa is three slips of jagged rock in the archipelago comprising Channel Islands National Park. Bearing a footprint of little more than one square mile, Anacapa's physical dimensions belie its biological capacity. Its razor-edged cliffs, pocked with caves and crevices and surrounded by forbidding moats of seawater, constitute what would otherwise be prime real estate for nesting seabirds. If not for the rats.

The long-forgotten wreck of the
Winfield Scott
, like that of the
American Trader
, also disgorged a bit of cargo, albeit in the form of a stowaway rat or two. The results of that little uncelebrated landing on Anacapa—adding more strange blood to an island already beset by immigrant cats, sheep, and rabbits—would dwarf the
Trader
's oil-slick body count.

By the end of the twentieth century the black rats of Anacapa had decimated the Xantus's murrelet in one of its final refuges. Moreover, the whole of Anacapa's specialized biota had apparently fallen under the rodents' giant shadow. Crabs and urchins on the beaches, lizards, grasshoppers, and wildflowers on the hills and headlands—all had become easy prey.

The rats of Anacapa had more intimately impressed themselves upon East Anacapa's park rangers and tourists as the ubiquitous little gremlins forever breaking into foodstuffs and camping gear. Park workers had tried fending off the rats with a few snap traps and the poison warfarin. Their weaponry and resolve proved too weak. They invariably left the wilder reaches of Anacapa unguarded, leaving an eternal wellspring of rats to spill forth wherever the coast was clear. Time went on, the rats kept coming, money ran short, and the white flag went up.

With the serendipitous spilling of the
American Trader
's oil, and the windfall of mitigation money that washed ashore in its wake, the National Park Service got serious about taking Anacapa back. It sent for help from a troop who'd recently been making a reputation for themselves on similar terrain south of the border, in Baja, calling themselves the Island Conservation and Ecology Group.

T
HE
B
ELLY OF THE
B
EAST

By now it was clear to both the Park Service and the band of island conservationists from Santa Cruz that to merely control the rats was to forever bail the leaking boat. The only permanent fix for Anacapa's rat problem was, to their minds, eradication. And the only practical means of accomplishing that was the potent blood-thinning poison brodifacoum, broadcast by helicopter and blanketing Anacapa shore to shore.

The aerial technique had begun working wonders down under in New Zealand, where the Kiwis were clearing rats from islands tens of times larger and hundreds of times more remote than Anacapa. But this was the United States, land of legal hurdles, bureaucratic hoops, and litigation. Its citizenry had grown suspicious of those professing to perform noble acts of public service while raining dangerous chemicals upon their heads. Their society had been rudely awakened by Rachel Carson's 1962 classic exposé,
Silent Spring
, which raised the specter of a world blithely poisoned by the pesticide industry—of a toxic world where no birds sang, where cancers ran wild, and where the well-being of humanity itself lay in doubt.

Americans had become suspicious as well of their own government's ongoing war against wildlife. Troops of tax-funded trappers, shooters, gassers, and poisoners had been slaughtering American wildlife by the millions every year for nearly a century. Operating under the official sanctions of the U.S. agency Animal Damage Control (later rebranded as Wildlife Services), the exterminators went after blackbirds, prairie dogs, coyotes, cougars, and wolves and a host of similarly pigeonholed vermin across the country. Too often they killed indiscriminately, too often to the demise of innocent bystanders, and too often arrogantly, in the face of repeated rebukes from scientists and humanitarians. It had become all too easy to lump such government-sanctioned fouling of American soils and wanton slaughters of wildlife with the island saviors' ironic mission of killing for conservation. Anacapa would of course be questioned. To think of dropping truckloads of poison on a national park within sight of the sixteen-million-person megalopolis of Los Angeles was to aim a slingshot at a hornet's nest.

The Anacapa campaign was to be led by a newcomer to the Island Conservation crew, a rising expert on brodifacoum, the predominant anti-rat weapon of the day. Gregg Howald had conducted his graduate research on Langara Island, off the coast of British Columbia, probing for chinks in brodifacoum's solid record. Langara's eradication history had been triggered by the arrival of ship-jumping rats, which over the decades had reduced a world-class colony of some two hundred thousand ancient murrelets to less than fifteen thousand. With the advent of brodifacoum and Rowley Taylor's bait-station protocol, in 1995 the rats were attacked in turn. Langara, measuring thirteen square miles, was a project nearly twenty times the size of Taylor's battle for Breaksea, and more than ten times the size of Howald's Anacapa campaign to come. But the issue raised by Howald's investigation created concerns beyond the mere upping of acreage.

Among the dead of Langara, Howald had uncovered a small but especially worrisome number of rats lying exposed to the scavengers—rats that were supposed to have died in their dens. One rat was found hanging thirty feet high in a hemlock, its hindquarters and internal organs ominously missing. Testing their suspicions, Howald's team captured a sample of bald eagles. Each had brodifacoum in its blood. So too did the thirteen dead ravens they came upon. One dead raven appeared to have been scavenged in turn. Lying dead beside it was a bald eagle.

The Langara eradicators went on to accomplish their primary objective with yet another record-smashing performance, all thirteen square miles cleared of immigrant rats in less than four weeks. But Howald's work had added an unofficial asterisk to the record book. “We conclude that there is a very real risk to some avian predators and scavengers,” reported Howald and colleagues, “from both primary and secondary exposure to brodifacoum when used to remove rats from seabird colonies in the Pacific Northwest environment.”

S
HELTER FROM THE
S
TORM

The cautions from Langara didn't bode particularly well for those now looking to remove rats from seabird colonies in the Southern California environment of Anacapa. Anacapa came with big potential for collateral casualties, the biggest in the form of a mouse. The Anacapa deer mouse was a Channel Islands native, a Dumbo-eared, doe-eyed mouse with an endearing touch of island tameness. Its DNA profile set it slightly but significantly apart from all other deer mice, but unfortunately for the purposes of the eradication crews it was still at core a rodent, a chisel-toothed opportunist every bit as vulnerable as every rat they were out to kill.

Not to mention what an island littered with poisoned rodents might mean for Anacapa's native suite of raptors—its barn owls and burrowing owls, its red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, and peregrine falcons—none of them necessarily averse to taking advantage of a dead or dying rat, all of them rigidly protected by law.

In a world of islands under siege by invaders, Anacapa was not by a long shot the most physically intimidating to defend. But on the scales of biological complexity and in the courts of public opinion, it loomed enormous.

The planning alone promised years of work. There would first be an environmental impact statement and reams of permits and paperwork explaining in numbing detail this atypical conservation proposal. If all was approved, the poison was to drop from an industrial grain hopper slung beneath a Bell 206 helicopter, showering bait with computer precision and leaving no rat-worthy patches of refuge on Anacapa unpoisoned. That was the easy part.

For the natives sure to be caught in the firestorm, there would need to be a separate operation. The island mice were to be gathered by the hundreds and caged out of harm's way until the poison had cleared. The raptors too would be trapped and sequestered, or released on the mainland. As a final layer of fail-safe, the poisoning of Anacapa's three islets was to be staggered a year apart, allowing recovery of one before the next was bombed.

Such was the plan eventually approved. It was all very avant-garde, employing the latest special weapons and tactics of eradication technology, melded with endangered species husbandry and a hint of high-stakes shell game. It was, after all, the continent's first-ever rat poisoning to be attempted by air. And that, for better or worse, would attract attention from more than admirers.

S
ABOTAGE

On October 24, 2001, a week before the first bait was scheduled to hit the ground, field crews conducting last-minute checks spotted two men landing their inflatable dinghy on a beach on East Anacapa. Through binoculars they watched one of them reaching into his backpack and flinging something, as if tossing a Frisbee. Later that evening, when the men found themselves stranded by a broken motor, the Coast Guard paid a visit and took names. Word got back to Park Service headquarters, and the phones started lighting up:
Puddicombe's on the island!

Rob Puddicombe—whose varied résumé included stints as a commercial diver, a bus driver, a volunteer wildlife rehabilitator, and, more important of late, an outspoken critic in the local papers of the impending poisoning of Anacapa—was by then a familiar name to the eradication team. When Howald heard that his crew had seen either Puddicombe or his accomplice throwing something, the toxicologist had an immediate hunch: “Go back and tell me if you find any pellets.”

Howald's crew found the ground littered with rat kibble, almost identical in appearance to the poison bait awaiting deployment. Lab tests came back confirming his suspicions. The pellets had been infused with vitamin K, a standard remedy for brodifacoum poisoning. “My god,” thought Howald, “these guys are attempting to spread the antidote.”

Puddicombe soon had allies. Five days later the Park Service received notice from the Fund for Animals, a national animal rights organization based in New York, that the Fund and Puddicombe intended to sue. They objected to the killing, to the poisoning of the Anacapa wilderness, as “arbitrary and capricious.” They questioned whether the rat was really a threat to the Xantus's murrelet.

The project ground to a halt while a federal judge deliberated. “It caught us off guard,” said Kate Faulkner, the Park Service's chief of natural resources. A few years earlier Faulkner's agency had felt a similar sting of societal venom while eradicating feral pigs from the neighboring island of Santa Rosa. “We thought we had very compelling reasons for eradicating rats on Anacapa,” she said. “We knew we had to do a little explaining. But we thought rats would be more acceptable than pigs.”

A N
ICER
W
AY TO
D
IE

For those out to save the last of Anacapa's murrelets, when deciding between an individual rat and an entire colony of seabirds, there was no choice. To allow a work of evolution eons in the making to be extinguished by a ubiquitous species of rat running amok was to stand complicit in a crime against nature.

“To some people it might seem kind of extreme,” said murrelet biologist Darrell Whitworth, whose surveys on Anacapa had become a repeating tour of plundered nests and emptied caves. “But rats are everywhere. This is where murrelets nest. They're going to nest here, or they're not going to nest anywhere. I'd much rather see a lot of murrelets here than a lot of rats.”

Not so the rat's defenders. “And who are humans to call another species invasive, huh? That is a joke,” Puddicombe told a reporter from the
Washington Post
. “Species go extinct all the time. That's the philosophical difference. These animals are here and alive now. Their lives have value.”

From somewhere between the poles came a more nuanced question, of conservation with compassion. Asked Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “Is this the most humane way?”

Bekoff came with a rather rare and, some might say, conflicted résumé, as a noted scientist of animal behavior and an outspoken advocate for animal rights. (Early in his career he had dropped out of med school, refusing to kill the house cats required by his experiments.) “I have a really big problem with this carte blanche, overriding theory that invasives should be killed,” said Bekoff. “It's become a numbers game, the argument being there are so many rats it doesn't matter if we kill some of them. It's the veil they hide behind. I can't tell you how many times I've heard, ‘I'm a conservationist, this is how we do it.' ”