Rat Island (22 page)

“They fluffed some feathers, but the bottom line is, they got the rats,” said the
Pepper. “If eagles are there in the year 2020, and seabirds are there in 2020, then the end justified the means. The bottom line was, that eagle was going to die anyway. Just like all of us. Whether it was twenty-two or eighteen grams of poison per acre, forty-three eagles, however many gulls, they're all just numbers. I'm a layman. To me, the bottom line is, are there any more rats? If the answer is no, they'll all be back there—all the eagles, gulls, seabirds.”

“We're moving forward,” said Howald. “Everybody acknowledges this was an unfortunate incident. What can we learn from it? How can we maintain the ability to do rat eradications in the Aleutians and further minimize the risk for nontargets? From my perspective, I'm surprised by the number of birds, but not necessarily the risk for individual species identified.”

F
ALLEN
B
YRD

Amid the explanations and excuses, shrugs and regrets, one person among the many responsible all but demanded the blame. “You've found the guy whose fault it is,” said Vernon Byrd.

Nobody understood the stakes of Rat Island's eradication better than Byrd, and nobody seemed to take the losses harder than he. Byrd had committed his life to protecting the Aleutians. He'd first come to the islands some forty years before, as a navy junior officer stationed at Adak. Adak—Aleut for “birthplace of the winds”—was a place from which those of unraveling minds were regularly shipped stateside for evaluation. At the end of his tour, when most of his comrades were clawing to escape their sentence in this frozen hell, Byrd hurriedly signed on for another go—earning himself a visit from the navy psychiatrist. “That was very unusual for a single person to offer to extend his tour at Adak,” said Byrd.

When Byrd finally quit the navy in 1971, he took up the next day as biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska. He followed in the fashion of his dory-sailing mentor Sea Otter Jones, gravitating to the majestic harshness of the Aleutian wilderness, banding eagles, counting waterfowl and seabirds, and coming to recognize the consequences of the Aleutians' invasion. Byrd could judge from the look and smell of an island whether foxes and rats held sway there. He would see the foxes disappear down the line under the determined chases of Jones and Ed Bailey, and witness the flocks coming back. And when the early rumors started to swirl of something wrong on Kiska, he himself went and witnessed one of the first caches of auklets on the rocks at Sirius Point. He had been as eager as anyone to see Rat Island free of rats and full again of seabirds, and as eager for its success to begin paving the way toward Kiska. And he, along with everyone else who had signed on to take Rat Island back, had badly miscalculated the ultimate cost. But it was Byrd who took his own sword to chest.

“I'm the guy who's supposed to know the most about birds in the Aleutians, and I clearly thought the eagles were not going to be a problem, and I was dead wrong,” he said. “You don't have to look any further. I know who should have known best about that.”

In June 2010 the crews returned to Rat Island to set up their summer camp, to check again with their hopes of rats missing and birds returning. The carcasses had stopped coming, the poison long gone, all bodies by now dust and feather. The review panel was still reviewing. For now, it was a time of watching and waiting on Rat Island, for the tiniest hint of what was sure to be a long recovery. After a week on the island, however, project leader Buckelew returned to the
all but bubbling. “The first beach I walked on, the first bird I saw was a song sparrow. I've been on the island four seasons and never seen a song sparrow.”

Even Byrd allowed himself a proud moment. “It's looking likely all the rats were eradicated,” he said. “Ultimately Rat Island is going to be great. The eagles will come back. The gulls haven't even been affected at the population level. In fact there's going to be a lot more gulls in the long term after the seabirds build back up and gulls have more prey. The ecosystem will be restored. The long term is very positive.”

Chapter 12

WHITHER KISKA

A
MID ALL THE
cautious celebrations of Rat Island's costly eradication, there remained the question of Kiska. Once a beacon of distress looming large on the horizon, Kiska suddenly seemed fainter and farther adrift. The urgency in those giant piles of tiny dead auklets that had triggered the Aleutian rat campaign had given way to an Aleutian case of cold feet.

“We continue our commitment to protecting important seabird habitat in the Aleutians,” said the Nature Conservancy's Steve MacLean, “but extraordinarily high costs and problematic fundraising have precluded another eradication on a larger island. We are hopeful that we will be able to continue this program, but are concentrating now on learning as much as we can from the Rat Island project.”

“Kiska is going to force a fundamental shift in the way we think of doing these types of projects,” said Gregg Howald. “Is there stomach for the nontarget loss on the scale of Rat Island? I don't know.”

“At this point I don't think anybody would want to take Kiska on,” said Vernon Byrd. “The size itself is enough to be completely daunting. The cost will be astronomical. There are still caves on Kiska dug by the Japanese in World War II—scary places, some of them booby-trapped. There may be rats living down there that never see the light of day. I don't want to say Kiska is not ever doable. Ultimately I would love to see Kiska rat free. But I would want at least one more island under our belt before attempting it.”

There was every good practical reason for backpedaling on Kiska, not to mention the psychological weight of Rat Island's forty-three dead eagles still heavy on the conscience. By the crudest of calculations, Kiska would require ten times the effort of Rat Island—twenty helicopters, five hundred tons of rat bait, ten ships, and so forth—in an economic climate whose bubble had lately burst. Kiska had streams running with salmon, with scores of bald eagles regularly converging on them, and the potential for collateral casualties to easily eclipse the body count on Rat Island. And how, after all, was one to deal with Sirius Point, to deliver a lethal package to every rat's address in the unreachable bowels of their underground Gotham City?

There remained yet a more baffling reason that the burning concerns for Kiska had cooled. In the years following the least auklets' electrifying collapse of 2001 and 2002, Ian Jones and his students had come back from their summers at Sirius Point with their surveys suggesting something oddly leaning toward … normalcy. Young auklets were fledging, in some years, at healthy rates. The rats' grisly caches had grown sporadic. It seemed that the worst of the siege had abated, that the rats had somehow been knocked back.

“When I first went to Kiska there was rat shit everywhere,” said Jones after coming off the island in 2010. “Now it's like they're not even there. We would find these carcasses of auklets with holes in their head where the brains were cleaned out. We'd find rats in their burrows with
their
brains eaten out. They were eating each other. Now,
poof!
We don't know what's happened with the rats on Kiska.”

Not that the auklets had quite escaped the crosshairs. Those harbored at Kiska accounted for one of only nine tenuous colonies in the Aleutians (a number that had recently been reduced by one when, on August 7, 2008, a surprise volcanic eruption on the island of Kasatochi had entombed some forty thousand chicks under a hundred feet of ash and boulder, leaving their parents and another quarter million breeding auklets looking for new homes). The colony at Kiska was the biggest of an exclusive few, and that standing carried special degrees of promise and peril.

One hazard came self-inflicted. A bird of habit, the least auklet faithfully staked out its breeding lots on slopes of bare boulders, seeking clear views of airborne predators and proper stages for its courting dances. It shunned encroaching plants and obscuring greenery, ironically of the very sort that its own guano tended to fertilize. There would naturally come a time when, with boulder fields fading beneath the foliage, the birds would abandon and the colony fall silent.

Kiska was different. Kiska's working volcano was in the habit of occasionally throwing up new habitat, the signature boulder field at Sirius Point most recently enlarged by an eruption in the 1960s. While other colonies withered with age, Kiska's periodically freshened itself with volcanic face-lifts. Sirius Point offered the auklet's most enduringly alluring real estate in the Aleutians.

Yet even that distinction brought mixed blessings. Jones suspected that auklets and other Aleutian seabirds out prospecting for new homes were not uncommonly enticed by the avian commotion at Sirius Point to stop by and inquire about vacancies. But to what end, with rats still at large, Jones could only darkly guess. “Maybe it's like a hotel where murderers are killing all the people checking in.”

Even for Kiska's auklets in residence, the latest stay of execution was by definition only temporary. “It's certainly possible that rats will boom again. We could have a run of go-go years for rats that could kill the auklets,” said Jones. “It's a war of attrition. The end point is unknown. But as long as there are rats on this island, that colony is in danger.”

T
HE
E
NDLESS
F
LOCK

All that anybody could say for sure, as of June 2010, when the
made one of its seasonal sweeps past Sirius Point, was that the auklets of Kiska were still performing a show for the ages. The
had arrived at the dusky hour of half past ten, and as was customary whenever the vessel happened upon this special place and time in the world, the engines had come to an idle and the boat to a slow drift. The birds were returning from the sea, skeins of auklets skimming over the water, clouds of auklets billowing over the far horizons. And on they came with an ever-frenzying pace and the musical roar of their multitudes, ascending the snowy heights of the Kiska volcano.

It was impossible to say whether the torrents of life raining upon the headlands of Sirius Point represented more the indomitable force or the fading remnant of a far richer storm of birds. Nor could anyone say what the rats' next move would be. Maybe they had met their match in the culling winters of Kiska. Or perhaps this was the season that would find them again tearing through the auklets. Given its global record of conquest, there was no betting against the rat in the long run.

But for the moment, one could only stand dumbstruck before the mind-bending enormity of the auklets' masses, as one pondering the brink of the Grand Canyon. The deeper the gaze, the dizzier the reckoning of scale. For every flock of birds there was another behind it, and another behind that, repeating to the end of sight. Witnesses had sometimes compared the phenomenon of Sirius Point to the northern forests' legendary flocks of passenger pigeons, obscuring skies for hours in passing. It was perhaps of no trivial portent that the passenger pigeon—slaughtered en masse for fertilizer and hog feed—fell from its untouchable flocks of billions in the mid-1800s to exactly zero in 1914.

An hour into the show, Kiska's auklets were still sweeping endlessly from the sea, swarming and swirling over the point. The diesels of the
rumbled to life, the ship moved on, and Sirius Point melted into the horizon, beneath glowing heavens still streaked with fleeting wisps of living smoke.