Rat Island (20 page)

The Conservancy and the Park Service thus found themselves at odds with two invaders, one of them a wilderness icon. And as long as eagles remained, the fox would be in trouble. (Eagle trappers had discovered the remains of thirteen foxes in one nest.) It was entirely possible, and even frightfully likely according to one scientific model, that to remove the pigs without first removing the eagles would have the raptors descending with undivided attentions upon the little foxes, to their catastrophic end.

For the sake of the Santa Cruz island fox, both eagle and pig had to go. In 1999 local raptor specialists began trapping golden eagles and hauling them back to the mainland, to some minor grousing from the critics. In 2005 Prohunt, a squad of professional eradicators from New Zealand, with guns, traps, hunting dogs, helicopter sharpshooters, and hormonally juiced Judas pigs, began systematically routing and gunning every last pig off the island. And the crowds, as they say, went wild.
KILLING SPREE OFF OUR COAST
, blared a headline.
ISLAND PIG ERADICATION SPURS WILD CONTROVERSY
, blared another. Letters to the editor dripped with venom; old arguments and familiar opponents resurfaced on Internet posts: “The pigs have been demonized and accused of imaginary crimes,” opined Rob Puddicombe, the onetime accused saboteur of the Anacapa rat poisoning. “The same arrogant assumption of superior mentality that brought us Three-mile Island, Vietnam, Wounded Knee and Waco is alive and well at Channel Islands National Park.”

Fifteen months later, under budget and more than a year ahead of schedule, Prohunt dispatched the last of 5,036 pigs with a high-powered rifle. The foxes had survived the pigs, the eagles, and the cross fire. The sniping from the mainland quieted. Within three years, Santa Cruz was bounding with more than seven hundred foxes, reproducing more like rabbits.

Saving the Santa Cruz Island fox by lethal means, for all its eventual vindications, came with a caution for the entire budding profession of conservation eradicators. This business of rearranging ecosystems was riddled with hidden strings and trip wires, and saddled with that eternally haunting price for mistakes and miscalculations, a price often measured in lives.

E
XPECT THE
U
NEXPECTED

Thus toughened to the task, the Nature Conservancy signed on as the third axis in the alliance to take the rat out of Rat Island. To lead the operation, Gregg Howald chose his Island Conservation teammate Stacey Buckelew, a student of seabirds from the Antarctic to the Aleutians and a recent veteran of the Anacapa campaign. Buckelew in turn was surrounded with a team of advisers: In addition to Howald she was matched with Steve Ebbert, supervisor of the refuge's fox-eradication program, Steve MacLean, director of the Nature Conservancy's Bering Sea program, and New Zealand's Pete McClelland, reigning world leader of high-latitude eradications.

The protocol by now had become fairly well established, and impressively so of late. McClelland's clearing of Campbell Island topped a growing list of some three hundred island rodent eradications on the books, from the tropics to the high latitudes of both hemispheres. The proven approach for wiping rats from wilderness islands had settled upon a few basic principles: Deliver a lethal dose of poison bait, preferably the anticoagulant brodifacoum, to the nose of every rat on the island in their hungriest of times—or at close as one could safely get. In Rat Island's case, that time would be October, when the brief flush of summer greenery and nesting birdlife gave way to the long, raging siege of the Aleutian winter.

After four years of planning, permit seeking, meetings, and conversations across the continents, the Rat Island operation was cleared to commence. On September 17, 2008, the merchant vessel
Reliance
, a 160-foot converted crabbing boat out of Seattle, loaded with fifty tons of rat bait, five thousand gallons of jet fuel, and another six tons of camp shelters, food, and equipment, shipped out of Homer, Alaska, heading west on a weeklong, thirteen-hundred-mile journey across the Aleutian archipelago to the staging harbor of Adak's Sweeper Cove.

Two days later, two Bell Long Ranger helicopters followed, each carrying two of the best pilots in their respective hemispheres. The Bering Sea, true to her nature, soon met them with a wall of fog and winds blowing sixty knots. Alaskan pilots Mike Fell and Merlin Handley dropped down, looking for a window of visibility. They found themselves a hundred feet above the water, pinched by fog above, high seas below, buffeted in a tunnel of turbulence. The storm fought them across the sea. They island-hopped from one fuel cache to the next, to the villages of King Salmon, Port Moller, Cold Bay, and Dutch Harbor, where they rested for the night. The next day, more of the same, more winds and rain and fog and white knuckles on the flight stick, to the Islands of the Four Mountains, to Atka, and finally putting down with an exhalation, at Adak. “It was not a trip for the faint of heart,” said the Aleutian veteran Fell. “I would not have wanted to be a rookie out there.”

On the third morning Adak treated them to more of the same, Fell anchoring his million-dollar machines to keep them from blowing into the Bering Sea. Into relenting winds, the helicopters finally lifted off, heading another two hundred miles west, where the
Reliance
was now maneuvering into position. One more stop, for a drum of fuel cached on a beach in the Delarofs, and sixty miles later the pilots were at last hovering down over a patch of tundra on Rat Island.

The crews thus assembled on September 26, as bees to a hive. The helicopters went into service ferrying cargo from boat to shore, sling-loading the ninety-one drums of jet fuel, the 220 gallons of gas for generators, the 330 gallons of kerosene for heaters, the weatherport shelters, the generators and kerosene heaters and propane stoves, the inflatable skiffs and outboard motors, the survival suits, the boxes of food, and the boxes of bait and rattraps. From the empty spaces of Rat Island's lonely tundra sprang a tent city.

The baiting was set to commence on September 28, weather permitting. Every step of the invasion came cushioned with layers of contingency plans, nearly all of it based on the promise of delays. But on the morning of September 28, as if the gods had suddenly tired of a prolonged prank, the foul weather on Rat Island broke. Buckelew and the pilots gathered at dawn, as planned, to talk weather, to consult the forecasts and decide whether to risk the flight. There was little to discuss. The radio and the readouts had nothing but clear sailing to report.

Buckelew briefed the field crews, reviewed assignments, and checked the radios. The New Zealand aces Graeme Gale and Peter Garden set their rotors spinning and brought their helicopters to hover over five men in hard hats, who began loading fifty-pound bags of brodifacoum-laced pellets of rat chow into the dispensers.

With seven hundred pounds of poisonous payload slung underneath, a hand signal and a radio call sent them off. Garden and Gale flew their lines, eyes darting between instrument panel, bait bucket, compass, map, and ground, flying their perfect paths, meticulously sowing their swaths of poison. The two had been trained to fly straight lines in hurricane crosswinds, all the while aiming precise doses of pellets from a half-ton bucket. They covered the cliffs with side-glancing sprays, sticking pellets to ledges on vertical rock. They painted by number, as it were, at the rate of nearly a ton of bait per hour, as steadily as only a few humans on Earth could.

They divided the island into thirds, moving from one block to the next, each block ostensibly small enough to cover in one day. They spent extra time saturating the beaches—the rats' prime habitat—double-dosing the island perimeter. It was a move calculated to reach the richest concentration of rats, a move that would later bring trouble.

Once the pilots had brushed with their broad strokes, ground crews applied the finishing touches. Around the lakes they followed with buckets of bait, marching in lines thirty feet apart, sowing in unison by the measured handful. All aimed with nothing less than perfection as their goal, with the understanding that one rat left untended could scuttle the entire mission.

Buckelew's team had planned for the Aleutians' typical schizophrenic weather pattern, a Jekyll and Hyde performance lasting six to ten days and generally split between spells of pleasantly light winds and misty clouds and Siberian fronts of relentless rains and hurricane-force gales. Hopes were to hustle and cover the island during any wind-free windows, hunker down during the ensuing blow, then spring forth with the earliest lull. But by some heavenly intervention, the Aleutians' angelic alter ego held sway.

The pilots took full advantage. They finished their first sweep, covering the island without incident. The weather, confounding all expectations, held calm. The radio reports repeated a monotonous forecast of good weather holding. Finally came news of an ominous system heading their way. It never showed up. The crews waited a day to let the bait do its work. And still the fair weather held. Vernon Byrd, the refuge's chief scientist and thirty-seven-year veteran of the Aleutians, had never seen such a spell on the cusp of the Bering Sea's stormy season. “Somebody was looking out for us,” he said shortly after. It was a blessing that he would later look back on with second thoughts.

With the window of good weather holding, the chiefs met and decided to take the gift and run, moving quickly into the second spraying. Crews were briefed and mobilized. Again the helicopters lifted off, hefting their buckets of rat chow, again showering the island back and forth, mountain first, doubling up on the coastline, ground crews hand-feeding the bait to the lakesides. Three days later, more than a month short of the six-week siege Buckelew had supplied for, Rat Island was apparently finished.

About that time, a printer on board the
, now anchored offshore for support, extruded the latest meteorological report. The chart drew immediate attention. The system heading Rat Island's way was depicted in isobars of atmospheric pressure, one stacked upon another like the topographic contours of a cliff. Over that cliff of pressure the winds were hurtling. Even by Aleutian standards, this was going to be a dandy.

Billy Pepper, captain of the
, radioed the report to shore. The demobilization drill immediately commenced. Weatherports and pup tents were disassembled, garbage was bagged, food boxed, radios packed, fuel drums and bait pods and pallets airlifted to the deck of the
. After their last delivery the helicopters lifted off once more, with all pilots and Buckelew aboard, and fled east to beat the storm to the mainland. The
, loading the rest of the crew and stacking the last of the cargo six feet high on decks fore and aft, pulled anchor and sailed for Adak.