Rat Island (17 page)

In the years thereafter, biologists periodically visiting Kiska would continue to find fresh stashes of dead auklets, but no more signs of foxes. Sowls and Rauzon were to follow in 2000, now with curiosities backed by mounting concerns. They repeated the steps of their predecessors, slipping ashore between the poundings of treacherous breakers, climbing onto the devil's playground of volcanic boulders, wandering for a week about the rooftop of the ultimate auklet metropolis. There they came upon the same macabre scenes, of auklet corpses stacked like cordwood, their brains and eyeballs eaten out. They found too the remains of eaten eggs, chicks, and what had been parents tending their nests. The biologists set out quail eggs and returned the next morning to find a third of them destroyed by rats.

Sowls and his fellow caretakers of the Aleutians had wanted to believe that the auklets in their multitudes would simply swamp whatever carnage the rats of Kiska could muster. But the fresh bodies at Sirius Point now had them wondering. Was the epic flock too massive for even the indomitable rat to chew through? Or were these the mass graves of a great spectacle on its slide into oblivion? Presenting these scenarios to the international gathering of island experts in Auckland, Sowls in 2001 stood before his fellow conferees and asked, “Should we be worried?”

If Sowls had come looking for reassurances, he had come to the worst possible place. He was surrounded by Kiwis who had spent careers rebuilding their island nation from the rubble of the rat bomb. The bird of Sowl's concern was, after all, a chunky, defenseless morsel whose inherent preference for nesting in crevice-riddled rock could not better suit a rat. “Mate, you are out of your mind not to worry,” Sowls heard time and again. “It might not happen overnight, it might take fifty years or more, but you'd better believe that as long as rats live on Kiska, your auklets are in danger.”

Four months later, scientists embarked on the research vessel
M/V
of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, heading west across the Aleutians to begin a thorough reconnaissance, deciphering who between the auklets and the rats was winning the mortal contest on Kiska. And wondering what, if anything, might be done about it.

Chapter 10

SIRIUS POINT

I
AN
J
ONES
WAS
a forty-one-year-old professor of biology from Memorial University, in Newfoundland, Canada; an eighteen-year veteran of seabird study in the Bering Sea; and considered by most to be the world's leading authority on the least auklet. His foremost subject was an incredibly common bird remaining largely unknown, for good reason.

As an individual, the least auklet was easy to overlook. At a mere three ounces it was among the tiniest of seabirds, and the reigning runt of a family of web-footed, flipper-winged, tuxedo-plumaged parallels to the penguin. On its nesting grounds, however, the least auklet grew overwhelmingly conspicuous. “They swarm in millions about the rocky beaches of the Pribilof Islands, outnumbering any other species in the Bering Sea,” wrote the early-twentieth-century ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent. “It is difficult for one who has not seen them to appreciate their abundance and one is not likely to overestimate their numbers.” When it came to conducting one of the most basic field measurements of the wildlife biologist, the best one could hope for with regards to the least auklet was to sample small patches, extrapolate wildly, and throw up one's hands.

So it went for much of the least auklet's life history. The auklet held the maddening distinction of being the most numerous seabird in the northern hemisphere and perhaps the least understood. In summer it appeared in its staggering flocks upon the breeding rocks of several dozen islands. For the rest of the year the auklets in their uncountable millions all but disappeared.

They spent the long gray months somewhere in the vastness of the North Pacific, diving, hunting, sleeping, and enduring storm and swell. With the final days of April the auklets would amass from their secret corners of the sea and flock shoreward to breed in their legendary congregations. The birds would alight on the rocks of talus fields and lava flows to bob and weave, strut and court, their excited, buzzing chatter coalescing to a roar audible more than half a mile away. And just as suddenly they would vanish, ducking below to nests where human hands and eyes could seldom reach or see, to lay a single egg that they would take turns incubating for a month to see it hatch. A person standing atop a city of millions in the middle of the day might come away believing the place deserted. With morning the birds would fly out to feed, disappearing again underwater, again to where few scientists would ever have the good fortune of observing them in a most fundamental act of feeding. Dissected auklet stomachs and purged throat pouches revealed that the little birds chased swarms of tiny antennaed creatures called copepods, and at a frantic pace, consuming upward of 90 percent of their body weight each day. Come August, with chicks fledged and gone to sea (a harrowing affair, involving a shaky first dash for the water, followed by an independent life on the waters of one of the harshest seas in the world), the great colony would break up and head back out to god-knew-where. Jones, who went on to write the definitive monograph on the least auklet's life history, could muster only three sentences on the bird's winter range and migration, summing up the state of the science as “poorly documented” and “little known.”

The elusive least auklet was nonetheless easy prey in the breeding colonies. Auklets emerging from their crevices or hesitating on a rock before takeoff were regularly swallowed by gulls or picked off by snowy owls. Auklets taking flight suffered the stoops of bald eagles and peregrine falcons from on high. Those swimming offshore were sometimes swallowed by fish or seized by the relentless gulls. Humans too hunted the auklets. Aleut people in the Pribilofs had been known to bag hundreds by the hour, by expertly waving a net as the flocks zipped past.

In his 1993 monograph Jones did broach the subject of foreign predators. The era of Aleutian fox farming had graphically exacted its toll on the littlest of auks, perhaps eliminating colonies from the islands of Uliaga and Kagamil. The impact of the rats, though, was only lately coming to light.

Following the near-eradication of Kiska's foxes in 1986, visiting biologists would note rat tracks and droppings proliferating on Kiska's beaches. Whether the rats in their freedom were multiplying or simply venturing more boldly with the coast finally clear—perhaps it was simply a lack of somebody there to notice—one could only guess. Whatever the case, there was something new afoot in the foxes' absence. When the first bundle of birds was found lying so neatly stacked during the Sirius Point auklet expedition of 1988, it was still possible to blame the last renegade fox. With the last fox's subsequent killing, the list of suspects narrowed considerably. When in 1992 the refuge's chief biologist, Vernon Byrd, and his fellow seabird specialist Art Sowls came upon the same odd spectacle—this time twenty-eight auklets laid side by side—there was only one viable predator left to blame.

“Accidental introduction of rats to remote islands (due to shipwrecks or at harbors) may be the single most serious threat to Aleutian and Pribilof breeding populations,” wrote Jones in 1993, conveying Byrd and Sowls's concerns. Nine years later he would see for himself.

In the summer of 2001, Jones began what would become a perennial study of the auklets and rats of Sirius Point. He followed the familiar migration route of a small flock of scientists conducting research each summer across the outer Aleutians, flown by a DC 737 from Anchorage twelve hundred miles west into the Bering Sea to the old navy airstrip on Adak Island, there boarding the
M/V
, the 120-foot workhorse research vessel of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Twenty-four hours west of Adak's Sweeper Cove, the
came to anchor off the famous lava flow marking the northernmost shore of Kiska. Ferried from there in an 18-foot inflatable, threading warily between breakers through a notch of rock, Jones jumped to shore at the base of the Sirius Point auklet colony.

His home for the next three months would be a campsite shoehorned into the rocks, his communication consisting of two radio conversations each day with refuge personnel on Adak. His accoutrements featured a mountain tent for sleeping and a twelve-by-eighteen-foot nylon shelter for eating, studying, and otherwise hunkering down for however long Kiska's weather so dictated. The shelter was strutted with steel, bolted to a wooden foundation, and anchored six ways 'til Sunday against the weekly Aleutian apocalypse. It was custom-built to withstand even the one-hundred-mile-per-hour williwaws that would come roaring unannounced from the heights of the Kiska volcano. For protection from the pounding northerly gales, the campsite had been tucked behind a fifty-foot wall of rock fronting the sea, a rock that stopped most of the waves.

In his first summer Jones began laying the groundwork, hiking about the slippery jumble of boulders (a feat once compared to walking on giant marbles), marking out his study plots, erecting his blinds, catching auklets on a carpet of nooses, cinching colored bands around their legs, and watching.

Every day, twice a day—when the gales and williwaws permitted—Jones headed out to the blinds. And from nine in the morning to two in the afternoon and from ten at night to half past midnight, Jones sat peering out upon the rocks, charting the comings and goings of the resident parents and watching for the defining finale of lone chicks clumsily departing for the sea. As a gauge of Kiska's relative normalcy, Jones had students stationed at auklet colonies on two other Aleutian islands, Buldir and Kasatochi, watching likewise. If something bad were going on at Kiska, it would likely show by contrast with the ratless colonies on Kasatochi or Buldir.

Hardly a week into searching the lava dome of Sirius Point, Jones came upon a cache of thirty-eight least auklets, their bodies apparently moldering from neglect. Eleven days later he found another little massacre of at least four, barely visible from the depths of a crevice. They too were decomposing, left to rot by a rat that had apparently gone on to other things. That year, barely more than one out of ten auklet nests at Sirius Point hatched a chick. By contrast, auklet chicks on Buldir and Kasatochi were flying away at three to five times the frequency. The breeding season of 2001 ended with the worst production of least auklets Jones had ever witnessed anywhere.

The following year Jones was joined by his grad student Heather Major, and the two repeated the experiment. The summer started off with an unfortunate bang. On May 26, 2002, the two came upon a stash of 122 least auklets, together with the corpses of seven fork-tailed storm petrels, another little burrowing seabird sharing the lava flow. In the burrow lay a female rat with nine pups. Through June the bodies continued to pile up. On the 29th, Major and Jones found a single cache of decomposing bodies numbering 148 least auklets.

Wandering about on the lava dome, Major and Jones came upon thousands more carcasses and half-eaten eggs and what Jones would describe as “windrows of skulls,” each with a hole through which the brain had been extracted. That year beat the previous year's record for the worst auklet production in history. “It is an enormous disaster,” Jones reported. “The number of seabirds that are being killed by rats each year are more than what were killed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill.”

The colony was under siege. And the plague had developed a certain disturbing progression. All the hoarded auklets were identified as adults killed early in the breeding season. As the season matured, the hoarding stopped, the caches giving way to the remains of chicks strewn about the colony. Jones and Major found evidence of auklet parents ambushed at the entrance of their den, their food pouch spilled on the rock, their chick eaten in turn.

The developing picture was that of a colony of half-starved rats barely hanging on through the cruel Kiska winter, then finding with the auklets' spring arrival their manna from the heavens. Obeying instincts forged by eons of feast or famine, the rats immediately set upon the windfall of auklets as if it were the last meat they would see for months. Once sated on eyeballs and brains—the richest organs in the package—the rats switched gears from famine mode to reproduction mode. And soon the rocks of Sirius Point were visibly crawling with rat pups.

Although the surplus slaughters lasted but a short while, their timing and intensity were especially crushing for the auklets. The birds most vulnerable were the first arrivals, the dominant, most experienced breeders, the ones most capable of seeing a chick through to fledging. The starving rats in their desperate hoarding were skimming the reproductive cream of the auklet crop.

Major did the math and came up with a sobering model of probability. At the going rate the rats could nearly obliterate the incomparable auklet colony of Kiska within thirty years. Major and Jones were later joined by refuge biologists Vernon Byrd and Jeff Williams in an official message to the scientific community, published in the journal
Auk
. “The presence of introduced rats at Kiska is of great concern,” they wrote, “and we recommend their ultimate eradication.”