Rat Island (16 page)

“I'd like to get people thinking about humane alternatives,” he continued. “Too many people just don't know about the studies.”

The studies to which Bekoff referred were those raising new ethical questions about the conservationists' lethal new means. It seemed there was more pain and suffering for the cause than was readily appreciated, and much of it inflicted by the workhorse weapon of the rat eradicators.

Brodifacoum had been commonly assumed to be a relatively peaceful way of passing. The poison evoked the image of a woozy rat retiring to its burrow and curling up for the final sleep. Dale Kaukeinen, the man who'd ushered brodifacoum into the limelight of rodent control, who'd watched more than his share of rats die, had come away with tentative assurances. “With internal bleeding I'm sure there is some discomfort,” he said. “But I never saw rats vocalizing or thrashing about.”

Some who had looked a bit closer had come away less comforted by brodifacoum's reputed kindness. Kate Littin, a physiologist and a technical adviser to the Animal Welfare Group of New Zealand's Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, had tested brodifacoum specifically for that elusive quality of humaneness. Littin herself poisoned her rats and documented in detail their demise. Death did not always come comfortably or quickly. As the poison took hold, listless rats took to crouching, backs hunched and heads drooping. Littin watched rats lying half paralyzed for hours, pushing and pulling themselves across the floor. The rats under her observation took, on average, a week to die. Brodifacoum's delayed onset of fatal symptoms, the very quality that made it so diabolically perfect for overcoming the rats' hypersensitive danger meter, also made it one of the nastier ways to die.

Littin would later team with her colleague Georgia Mason on a broader investigation of humanity's anti-rat artillery, which, besides doing little for brodifacoum's benevolent reputation, revealed how scarce were the sympathies for a rat. Rodents were regularly being gassed with eye-searing acid, crushed by snap traps and mired in glue traps (sometimes skinning themselves in their panic to escape). Trappers would find survivors hours into their ordeals, covered in their own excrement and screaming.

Finally, there was brodifacoum and its family of anticoagulants. Brodifacoum's painful hemorrhaging and slowness of death, not to mention its tendency of killing unintended victims, left the most popular modern weapon in the war on rats flunking its humaneness exam.

“We can see that rodents are routinely subject to cruelty,” Mason and Littin concluded, then adding a measured dash of diplomatic understatement. “This highlights an interesting paradox in the way we treat different animals.”

Littin readily noted that there were times when humaneness might understandably be shelved for more pressing human concerns. This was, after all, a creature accused and guilty of chewing holes through homes, biting infants in cribs, and carrying disease. The rat—as germ-spreading accomplice to the Great Plague—had its vermin's image burned into humanity's historical memory. Rodents were every year intercepting as much as a third of the human world's food supply; people were going hungry for want of fewer rats. For these and a host of other, less compelling reasons, the rat owned a reputation among Western cultures as low as the scale reached. A survey of American college students in the 1970s, rating their fondness for fourteen common animals, ranked the rat dead last, trailing even such cultural favorites as the worm, the shrew, and the spider. And rodents, as the island squads were now making clear, had been abundantly demonstrated to be taking a serious bite out of the world's roster of life-forms.

But was this an animal whose corporal punishment invariably fit the crime? “For most people it's a no-brainer,” said Littin. “Don't worry about poisoning. The line we take, in New Zealand and Australia as well, is rather than totally ignoring animal welfare and saying these pests aren't worth considering in that regard, at least be aware. Is there something you can use that has less impact on animal welfare?” Littin's concerns, like Bekoff's, were colored by a startling body of neuroscience revealing, in the mind of the rat, traits of a disturbingly personal nature.

T
HE
J
OY OF
R
ATS

One day in 1997, a psychobiologist named Jaak Panksepp walked into his lab at Bowling Green University and announced, “Let's go tickle some rats.” Panksepp and his students had for years been eavesdropping on their lab rats, tuning in with ultrasonic sensors and a growing curiosity about the high-pitched chirpings emanating from young rats as they played. What they were hearing they could only describe as rat laughter. So to test, they started tickling. Panksepp and his labmates would reach in with their hands, pouncing playfully, tumbling the little rats, tickling their bellies. The acoustic sensors went ballistic. The rat children were giggling themselves silly.

To Panksepp's ear it was the gleeful shrieking of kids playing tag in the school yard. In time the rat ticklers needed only to present their hands and the little rats came running as if answering the opening bell of recess.

Panksepp's curiosity had revealed a disturbingly endearing alter ego of one of the least loved animals not named the mosquito. He had discovered in the rat an emotion once believed to be the sacred province of humans and only lately and begrudgingly bestowed upon such perennial human favorites as the dog and the chimp: Panksepp had discovered in the rat the emotion most aptly defined as joy.

And where there was joy, could such emotions as fear and anxiety, sorrow and empathy, be far away? That question would soon after be answered by the rat's little cousin, the laboratory mouse, albeit through an ironic mode of sadistic inquiry. Researchers at McGill University, in Canada, had come upon the idea of injecting a mouse with acetic acid, therewith setting the creature to writhing in burning pain. Most important, they made sure its cagemate was watching. The scientists then likewise injected the cagemate. It too writhed, but more frantically than the first, its torture magnified by the memory of having watched its companion suffer the same fate. It was one mouse feeling the other's pain. In 2006 the researchers reported their astonished observations as the first evidence of any animal beyond humans and their fellow primates showing the emotion of empathy. (No mention was made of whether those administering the pain experienced any empathy of their own.)

The Canadians' empathic mice only added to a growing canon of research rapidly closing the supposed gap between the lofty universe of human emotions and the less-exalted domain of the animal kingdom's lower ranks. As early as the 1950s caged rats had been documented deliberately forgoing food to spare their fellow rats an electric shock. When rats witnessed their neighbors being decapitated, their blood pressures soared, their hearts raced.

Inside the heads of some of the most reviled creatures on the planet were sensitive minds harboring emotional kinship to the species so blithely torturing them. So concluded the studies buttressing Littin's and Bekoff's concerns, begging questions rarely discussed in eradication circles. Death had become accepted as a necessary ingredient of the conservation prescription, the mantra among the island saviors being that the ends justified the means. Interlopers were attacked, natives rescued, mission accomplished. To spare the island invader its singular pain of death was to inflict eternal suffering on the endless procession of its victims.

But it wasn't merely rats suffering the big-picture rationale. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's ongoing eradication of arctic foxes from the Aleutian Islands, widely hailed as one of the paragons of island restoration, had been inflicting pain on both aggressors and victims. Ed Bailey, who had led the campaign for years, had often found himself in the predicament of a wildlife admirer obliged not only to kill but to work beside those who liked nothing better.

“I didn't relish eradicating foxes,” said Bailey. “I knew it had to be done. But some of the people who went along—some of the Animal Damage Control people—they just got a big bang out of blowing away foxes. It was kind of disturbing to me. Some of the people in the fox camps just loved shooting things.”

Callousness notwithstanding, the deaths by bullet were often merciful in their relative quickness. Those by leghold trap were often not. It was a dirty little secret among the fox-killing crews that the ethical standard of checking traps early and often did not apply in the Aleutian frontier. The Aleutian fox campaign was a bare-bones business of lowly paid trappers living in tents on lonely wind-battered islands on the edge of nowhere. The idea of checking every trap every day was understandably scoffed at by those facing daily marathons of boulder beaches and mountains of waist-high tundra. Bailey commonly came upon foxes dead in the traps, with untold hours and days of suffering exposed to the Aleutian elements. Foxes that didn't starve or succumb to exposure were sometimes cannibalized by their neighbors. Litters of pups whose nursing mothers didn't return home died a slow death in the den. “Leghold traps are cruel,” said Bailey, “no question about it. They can say they're checking their traps ten times a day, but there's still a lot of pain involved.”

Bailey in his tenure would come to whiff the scent of indifference from both sides of the ethical divide. In the 1990s the Aleutian fox project had a run-in with animal rights advocates from the Sea Shepherd Society. The Shepherds, better known for more high-profile escapades ramming whaling vessels and confronting clubbers of baby seals, had caught wind of the feds' fox trapping. The killing was cruel, they charged. The solution they demanded was to live-trap all the foxes and move them. Bailey, pondering the practical absurdity of their demands, called their bluff. When he offered to take the protesters out to experience firsthand the breadth and brutality of the Aleutian environs, the Shepherds turned tail and abandoned the foxes to their fates.

Bailey's only sure sanctuary of conscience was to remind himself repeatedly of the bottom line. “It was a dirty job that had to be done,” he said. “But I had to look at the bigger part of the mission, of how many seabirds were alive because of what we were doing.”

As for the vanquishers of Anacapa's rats, Howald and company would be saddled with the same imperfect solution to an inescapable dilemma. “Death is never easy,” said Howald. “But we don't take it lightly. Unfortunately, this is the tool of choice we have.”

R
ESTORING
B
ALANCE

One month after the quarreling parties of Anacapa came to legal blows, the federal judge handed down the court's opinion: The eradicators had followed the rules; they were free to proceed.

But by now the scuffle had gathered onlookers. Newspapers from Los Angeles to San Francisco picked up on the row between the murrelets' and the rats' defenders. Rhetoric-laden editorials and caustic letters to the editor frayed nerves. Anacapa rangers took to arming themselves with flak vests, handguns, and batons. Howald found himself looking under his car at the end of the day.

On December 5, 2001, the eradicators' helicopter lifted off with an industrial grain hopper and began methodically spraying East Anacapa with brodifacoum-laced pellets. Within hours the deed was done. After a few days of mop-up the island conservationists gathered in their rustic field quarters and popped the champagne. Said Tershy, raising a glass, “I think we made conservation history today.”

Over the following year the checkup crews would find no signs of rats remaining on East Anacapa. But neither would they find any signs of the Anacapa deer mice that had been left outside. About a hundred birds were found dead too, ten of them raptors.

But from the death eventually came rebirth. In the spring following the poisoning, the captive deer mice were released, to soon replenish their island to capacity. Anacapa's cohort of young side-blotched lizards and slender salamanders had prospered particularly well during their first winter without rats. And that summer, in a cave where no Xantus's murrelet had fledged for the last three years running, surveyors found a nest bearing a healthy egg—the surprisingly rapid onset of a long comeback.

The following year's clearing of Anacapa's middle and west islets amounted to anticlimax. Again the helicopter sprayed; again the editorialists and letter writers blared foul. Deer mice, raptors, songbirds, and rats all suffered, but only the rats to the very last. And soon enough Anacapa had begun to resemble a more pristine past. By 2003 the number of murrelets nesting there had nearly doubled.

“That's why we're here,” said Howald. “That's really why we're here. We're not here to kill rats. We want to see the seabird numbers take off. We're here for the lizards. We're here for the mice. We're restoring balance.”

Chapter 9

ESCALATION

T
HE ERADICATION
OF
black rats on East Anacapa in December 2001 had capped a pivotal year for those who would save the world, one island at a time. It was a year rocked by wild swings between fortune and despair, beginning with fresh hopes for the poster victim of the global invasion.

The kakapo had weathered a tumultuous decade in the 1990s, replete with surprise stoat intrusions and rat-plundered nests and interisland shuttling of emergency patients, ever fleeing the reaper. And yet the turn of the twenty-first century revealed kakapo numbers in a tenuous upswing, having somehow risen from a moribund population of fifty-one to a veritable crowd of sixty-two. The upward inching of the kakapo population was a small but vital vindication for what had become a Herculean feat of human intervention.

In 1995, six years after Don Merton's last Fiordland expedition had come back having found no sign of any living kakapo, six years after Merton had begun lobbying for a heavier hand in righting the kakapo's fall, a decree came down from Wellington in the form of a new national recovery plan. In a case of better late than never, the hands-off philosophy was officially tabled in favor of immediate emergency aid. The direness of the situation was no longer to be ignored or understated. The kakapo was a species numbering in the dozens, with a glacial rate of reproduction and a world of enemies in firm command of its homeland. It had become a fugitive from its own country, and even the artificial shelter of island life had grown inherently dangerous. The refugees from Stewart Island, their numbers now squeezing into the bottleneck, were beginning to exhibit the classic death-spiral symptoms of inbreeding and failing fertilities. And any hopes of infusing fresh blood from Fiordland were hanging on one last old lovable bird who, for all anyone knew, might no longer be up to the task. For all anyone knew, Richard Henry, the kakapo's knight of knights, was a hundred years old. Such was the state of the kakapo's future when its rescue turned serious.

Under the new plan, every egg, chick, and kakapo mother was to come under intensive care. Tethered to every kakapo nest was a tent fifty meters away, hiding two stewards and a TV monitor tuned 24-7 to the kakapo channel. By day the stewards would review time-lapse tapes of the mother with her young, noting every turn of the egg, every feeding of a chick. Every coming and going of kakapo tripped an infrared sensor and the ringing of a doorbell in the watchers' tent. By night, as mother kakapo foraged, the stewards stood guard. Any rat attempting a burglary would first traverse a minefield of snap traps surrounding the nest. Any such rat lucky enough to survive that gauntlet would ultimately be met by the spying eye of the security camera and sent scurrying with a remote-controlled explosive charge. Or should, say, the cool of the night threaten to chill an untended egg, the stewards would intervene with a heating pad. If the kakapos' wild foods ran short, the birds found handouts conveniently appearing in their path. Every kakapo that had managed to survive to the mid-1990s was to find life a precarious but pampered affair indeed.

Punctuating the marathon vigils were moments to recharge the conservationists' flagging spirits, none more electrifying than the announcement commencing the 1998 breeding season, that Richard Henry, the most valuable kakapo on the planet, had finally mated. He, the last of the kakapo's Fiordland bloodline, and Flossie, a refugee from Stewart Island, had found each other in their temporary sanctuary on Maud Island. By early February, Flossie was on nest, incubating the first three eggs from which, everyone hoped, would hatch the heirs to Richard Henry's Fiordland.

Video surveillance and rat alarms, extra food and heating cushions, and all the sundry services routinely afforded every kakapo nest only began to describe the attention heaped on this critical little clutch. Flossie had chosen to nest on what to Merton and crew seemed a perilously steep and precarious slope. Over the next few mornings she would return from foraging to find her nest insulated with a fresh new bed of wood chips and bolstered by a plywood retaining wall with a viewing portal. At times she would return early and supervise the construction. Merton and his midnight remodelers dug drainage ditches, installed a new doorway, and built a deck. When the due date arrived, the remodelers turned midwives, whisking two of the pipping chicks into incubators to assist their labors. The team's exhaustive doting paid off. By the second week of March television crews were sharing images with the world of three homely, naked little hopes for the future of the kakapo.

And so, in harrowing fits and starts, evolved the seat-of-the-pants science of kakapo husbandry. As for securing the kakapo a safer interim home, the strategy had come to narrow on one island called Codfish. Situated off the west coast of Stewart Island, a 3,400-acre, jungle-green throwback to primeval New Zealand, Codfish had been gradually groomed as the principal sanctuary in the kakapo's island shell game. In 1998 the final stage of Codfish's restoration commenced when the young wildlife officer Pete McClelland led a crew to kill Codfish's rats.

McClelland's feat on Codfish would presage the Americans' juggling act on Anacapa, and then some. Before a pellet of bait hit the ground, his crews rounded up and moved every last Codfish kakapo, more than four hundred rare bats, and twenty-one individuals of Codfish's unique brand of fernbird. Lacking anywhere suitable to store the fernbirds, McClelland cleared rats from two other nearby islands—in the same day.

Codfish's renovation was soon to be put to test. Early in 2001 the blossoming of the rimu trees on Codfish was hinting of a bumper crop of kakapo food, and therefore of kakapo chicks to come. Risking all kakapo eggs in one basket, their keepers hurriedly shipped all but a few infertile individuals to Codfish, in anticipation of what was hoped to be the biggest breeding season in the bird's new era of intensive care.

A
UCKLAND
S
UMMIT

That February, at the far end of the country in Auckland, the disciples of island conservation came together for the first major reunion since the Wellington rat conference of 1976. In as much as Wellington had been likened to the Last Supper for its somber undercurrents of impending loss, the spirit of Auckland would more aptly recall the Resurrection. This was no longer a surrender to fate, nor so simply circumscribed by one country's desperate affairs. In Auckland, the International Conference on Eradication of Island Invasives had gathered the big guns from what had become a global offensive.

There among them were Don Merton and Brian Bell, thirty-five years after bearing witness to Big South Cape's unraveling by rats. Both had since come to find their services in rising international demand, each now reporting on his most recent work clearing islands of interlopers in the Indian Ocean. Merton for his part, while not nursing kakapos back from the dead, had led a last-minute rescue of the Seychelles magpie robin, directing offensives against its attackers while carrying the last survivors of the species to safety.

There again were Bruce Thomas and Rowley Taylor, the now-renowned battlers for Breaksea, reviewing forty years of island rat eradications. The young industry's growth curve described a rocket's ascent, from the three-acre nubbin of New Zealand's Maria Island in 1961 to the eight-thousand-acre monolith of Canada's Langara thirty-four years later, with far more ambitious missions already counting down.

Pete McClelland was there to report that he and his Kiwi crew were just months away from a campaign to dwarf any in eradication history, preparing to remove every rat on the forty-four square miles of Campbell Island. Campbell, a world-class sanctuary of albatross and penguins 450 sea miles south of New Zealand, measured eight times larger and untold degrees more forbidding than Langara.

From across the continents came reports of innovative weaponry, mounting boldness, and once-invincible invaders being put on the run. Among the leaders of the Australian contingent, David Algar brought news of breakthrough in the Montebello Islands, having dropped eleven hundred sausages of kangaroo meat laced with Compound 1080 in an aerial eradication of feral cats. The Aussies had moreover been busy amassing an empire of recaptured lands, clearing foxes, rats, mice, rabbits, and goats from forty-five islands off their western shore since the 1960s.

There was Bernie Tershy speaking for his Baja band of island conservationistas, closing in on their twenty-fourth eradication in northern Mexico, their tally of rescued species surpassing fifty. And there too, ascending to the podium, was the feral figure of Tershy's unlikely ambassador, Bill Wood.

The man who had feared nothing more than to see his trapper's secrets unveiled before a packed auditorium—except, perhaps, the prospect of speaking in public—was now, at Tershy's prodding, doing both. And apparently loving it. The soft-spoken Wood, with his homespun lore and humble mastery of his craft, picked up where he had left off in the fishing villages of Mexico, now charming this international gathering of Ph.D.s and professional wildlife managers. Wood was once again the unassuming sage of laconic wit, the Yoda of the cat wars. In the Q&A that followed, when asked where to best set a cat trap, Wood brought the house down with the wisest three words a master trapper ever divulged: “Beneath its foot.” Afterward he found himself in the familiar situation, the magnetic center to a gathering circle of curious strangers and instant friends, fielding offers of home-cooked meals and places to stay.

It was a conference for both the graybeards and the young guns of island conservation, some coming face-to-face for the first time, some leaving the meeting with audacious new plans. Josh Donlan, the ponytailed, Birkenstocked, self-described hippy sort from Tershy's Santa Cruz team, and Karl Campbell, a hard-charging, crew-cut grad from Queensland rapidly gaining a reputation as the goat-killer of the Galápagos, had from their e-mail correspondence each imagined the other as a grizzled, battle-scarred veteran of the island wars. In Auckland they met to their surprise as fellow twentysomethings, and as kindred souls the two immediately began plotting world conquests.

Campbell had been developing a diabolical means of matching wits with one of the toughest and craftiest of the island invaders, even then eating its way through the hallowed kingdom of the Galápagos. There had been many attempts around the world to eradicate island goats, many of them failing for one particular reason. The hunters, with their guns and dogs, in their opening salvos would invariably mow through the unwitting herds. But those few that would typically escape would seem to sprout the capes of supergoats. Time and again the hunters would be left chasing wary phantoms vanishing into the island's most rugged enclaves. And all it took was one gravid nanny to outlast the hunters' money or patience, and the island's goat invasion would mushroom all over again.

Campbell capitalized on one of the tenets of goat warfare, which stated that the surest way to lure a goat from hiding was with another goat. Judas goats, they'd come to be called. Collared with radio transmitters, Judas goats were sent out to seek and lure herdmates while silently signaling their whereabouts to the hunters. The Judas goat had revolutionized the hunt for those last island holdouts and renegades; Campbell took the weapon of seduction one step further. He began implanting nannies with extra doses of estrus hormones, creating in essence a supersexed she-goat that had her suitors running from cover. Campbell's hoofed femme fatale drew irresistible parallels to a famous World War I spy, a female exotic dancer doubling as an agent for Germany and eventually executed by firing squad. Mata Hari, they named Campbell's monster.

Within four years of meeting, Campbell the hit man and Donlan the strategist would lead two hundred ground hunters, forty trained dogs, six hundred Judas goats, and an ace squad of helicopter pilots in a campaign covering a combined landmass the size of Rhode Island. With guns ablaze, firing over half a million rounds of ammunition and killing 150 invaders per hour, the team and their Ecuadoran counterparts would remove every last one of 160,000 goats from the Galápagos islands of Santiago and Isabela, the two biggest goat eradications in history.

S
HOULD
W
E
B
E
W
ORRIED
?

Away from all the plenary speeches and major announcements of record-setting restorations, in a quieter corner of the convention hall, stood a large man beside a poster summarizing his research. Art Sowls was a seabird biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, his territory covering the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. Nine months earlier Sowls and a fellow seabird biologist, Mark Rauzon, had journeyed to the outer reaches of the Aleutian chain, to the legendary black tongue of lava at Kiska's Sirius Point and the greatest single colony of auklets on the planet. What they had found there amply confirmed fears that by then had been building for twelve years. Sowls's poster was titled “Can Kiska's Auklets Survive the Rat Menace?”

The first hints of trouble at Kiska had surfaced in 1988, with what had begun as a routine survey of the auklets of Sirius Point. One of a trio of biologists, Hector Douglas, was off hiking when he came upon the track of what could only be an arctic fox. It was a fox that should not have been. Hired hunters had supposedly finished clearing the last of them from Kiska two years before.

Douglas returned to the auklet colony to mention his discovery to workmate Dave Backstrom, who by then was puzzling over a strange sighting of his own. Backstrom had been watching as a pocket of melting snow in his study plot began to unveil something odd. He brushed aside the snow to find a bundle of molding auklets, each hardly ruffled but for a hole in the head where the brain had been. Backstrom and Douglas's disparate findings suddenly clicked. The two radioed notice of the renegade fox to the refuge managers, who dispatched a trapper, who dispatched the fox. And that appeared to settle things: The cache of auklets had been the work of Kiska's fugitive fox, thought the experts. The fox was now gone; crisis averted. And for a while, nobody thought anything more about it.