Rat Island (23 page)

Epilogue

ISLAND EARTH

L
ATE IN
A
UGUST
of 2010, nearly two years after the poison had been laid, the last crew of the season came off Rat Island after the final and deciding survey, with a glorious lot of nothing to report. No baits chewed, no snap traps sprung, no rat prints or scats in the sand. “Rat Island is officially declared rat-free!” exclaimed a press release from Island Conservation.

That summer oystercatchers had raised chicks on the rocky shores of their ratless new island, song sparrows had sung from the same spaces found empty not long ago. The gulls had gathered by the score about the wrack lines, and eagles had returned to nest as if nothing had happened.

There was no word in the announcement about dead birds, but much about living ones, about the sparrows and oystercatchers and gulls, the pigeon guillemots, rock sandpipers, common eiders, red-faced cormorants, and gray-crowned rosy finches, all confirmed to be nesting on the island. “Restoring habitat on Rat Island for native seabirds is the most ambitious island habitat restoration project ever undertaken in the Northern Hemisphere and the first in Alaska,” continued the release. “Thanks to everyone who supported this incredible conservation achievement.”

The apparent stirrings of resurrection—still too early for science to confirm, though not beyond the devoted to proclaim—suggested images of a Rat Island already on the mend. Hype and hopes notwithstanding, chances were good now, and certainly better than they had been in two hundred years, that there would soon be a new commotion of life to Rat Island, like the sounds of a city street awakening with the first glow of dawn.

There will likely come a day, perhaps in a few years yet (perhaps it has already happened), when the odd prospecting puffin or storm petrel will take a chance and land on the suspiciously uncrowded shores of Rat Island, to find its fears unfounded. And in time the pioneer's boldness will embolden others, and the clan will grow ever bigger and noisier and more irresistible to passersby. The flocks will multiply, and the headlands will again be busy avenues of birds commuting from the sea. The guano will rain, the hillsides will bloom, the dead will be forgotten.

W
ORLD
W
AR

Even as the crews were coming off Rat Island, others were already heading out on new record-breaking missions. Peter Garden, ace eradication pilot of Rat and Campbell islands, was on his way to the South Atlantic, to destroy the infamous albatross-eating mice of Gough Island. Garden was also slated for duty in the subantarctic seas for what promises to be the next granddaddy of all rat eradications. South Georgia Island is seventy-five miles long, half covered in snow and glacier, and spectacularly brimming with penguins and albatross and a host of other seabirds being catastrophically trimmed by millions of rats—every last one of which Garden and an army of colleagues have designs on killing.

South Georgia's anticipated restoration would add to a world tally of island eradications that has already topped eight hundred. With the many victories, however, have also come a few black eyes. In the fall of 2010, even as the engineers of the Rat Island overkill were anxiously awaiting their review, more bad news was coming from another world-class bastion of wildlife, from the South Sea island of Macquarie. Fifteen years before, Tasmanian wildlife officials had begun systematically killing cats on Macquarie, bagging the last one in the year 2000. Seabirds began recovering, only to suffer from ecological whiplash. The missing cats were replaced by a plague of some 130,000 rabbits and a corresponding flush of rats and mice, eating the island tussocks to nubs, invading the bird colonies, inviting new disaster. In 2006, the rabbit-scoured hillsides gave way under heavy spring rains, emtombing untold numbers of nesting penguins below and triggering an international landslide of finger-pointing press, the bulk of it deriding the debacle as an example of man's ham-handed tampering with nature.

In 2010 Macquarie's managers went back to finish the job, bombing the rabbits and rodents with brodifacoum. Horrible weather intervened, the eradication failed, and more than four hundred birds were found inadvertently poisoned—the latter embarrassment again making the headlines.

Undeterred, the eradicators march on. Island Conservation's Karl Campbell—of Galápagos goat-killing fame—and his partner-in-mischief Josh Donlan have been flirting with heretofore unthinkable leaps to those islands once called continents. Campbell and Donlan—who four years ago directed a battle discharging half a million rounds of ammo and killing 160,000 goats on a Galápagos island the size of San Francisco—have recently been visiting with the governments of Chile and Argentina, with talk of saving fifty-four thousand square miles of forest in Tierra del Fuego, now flooded and endangered by dam-building beavers from North America. “You can see their lakes from an airliner,” said Donlan. “It wouldn't be cheap, but the alternative is beavers making their way to Patagonia.”

Campbell and Donlan's exploratory forays, onto an archipelago better approximating the mainland, give hint of the island campaign's inevitable destination. It should go without saying that the plague of biological invasions did not begin or end on the shores of oceanic islands. “We must make no mistake; we are seeing one of the great historical convulsions in the world's fauna and flora,” wrote Charles Elton in his 1957 book,
The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
. Elton was a founding and visionary ecologist from England who drew the first and most lasting portrait of a world eating itself alive. “We are living in a period of the world's history when the mingling of thousands of kinds of organisms from different parts of the world is setting up terrific dislocations in nature. We are seeing huge changes in the natural population balance of the world.”

Elton wrote of African mosquitoes inadvertently shipped to Brazil, igniting “one of the worst epidemics Brazil has ever known.” During the disaster, also, “hundreds of thousands of people were ill, some twenty thousands are believed to have died, and the life of the countryside was partially paralysed.” Elton charted the wreckage of the chestnut blight, a fungus from Asia that spread like fire to the ecological ruin of the dominant tree of the eastern U.S. forest. He foresaw the dangers of the sea lamprey sneaking through the gates of the Erie Canal, on its way to extinguishing three native species of Great Lakes fish; he presaged the ecological catastrophe of the European zebra mussel, ferried to U.S. waters in the ballast tanks of transatlantic cargo ships and now clogging pipes and smothering life, threatening dozens of native mussels, and costing billions of dollars to fight it.

The world has not gotten any safer since Elton first sounded the alarm. The new global village trades not only in electronics and soybeans but also in weeds, disease, insect pests, and more of the familiar cast of misplaced mammals—an epidemic of epidemics. In the United States alone, some fifty thousand alien invaders have been helped ashore and across the borders. The invaders include more than a billion rats and one hundred million house cats, the latter of which have been implicated in the demise of perhaps a billion small mammals and lizards and birds every year. U.S. forests are serving as barnyards and feedlots for four million feral pigs. One economic accounting of the invaders' damages comes to $120 billion per year, with a discomforting caveat: “If we had been able to assess monetary values to species extinctions and losses in biodiversity, ecosystem services, and aesthetics,” wrote David Pimentel and his research colleagues, “the costs of destructive alien invasive species would undoubtedly be several times higher.”

Americans have been slow to concern themselves with these figures, certainly if stray cats are any measure. In 2008, in Galveston, Texas, a man who shot one feral cat as it was chasing a rare shorebird was arrested and faced up to two years in jail and a sixty-thousand-dollar fine before the charges were overturned. There are now organizations throughout the country actually promoting and feeding feral cat colonies. They are operating very successfully in Hawaii, the U.S. capital of extinction and endangerment, where some of the rarest birds on the planet are still being taken by the subsidized cats.

New Zealanders, on the other hand, have taken the practice of killing for conservation to the level of civic duty. In the same way that a coterie of Audubon Society members might gather with their binoculars for a Saturday-morning bird walk through Central Park, citizen groups in New Zealand are now marching into their local woods armed with snap traps. Such is the state of conservation in an island nation whose vanishing native fauna has already been picked half clean.

“Places when I was a kid wandering around the bush, I used to see and hear kokako,” said Bruce Thomas, the former battler for Breaksea. “I used to sit out on the ridges and hear kiwi. They don't exist anymore. They're all gone. One day you wake up and say, ‘Oh, I haven't heard a gray warbler for a long time.' The bush is going silent.”

Thomas is now a freelance conservationist, bent on supplying New Zealand's rat-killing community with the proper tool for the job. In his toolshed he has developed a rattrap that is lighter (a trapper can carry 150 in a backpack), more foolproof (featuring a trigger that prevents even the most thumb-struck handyperson from smashing his own fingers), and ultimately more deadly. “I'm not out to make my first million dollars,” said Thomas. “I'm out to take my first million rats.”

Thomas's trap kills quickly. Ninety-nine of every one hundred rats tripping one die of a crushed head or broken neck. “They're all head shots,” said Thomas. “Death should be instant.”

More are agreeing on that. The New Zealand Department of Conservation has over the past decade been replacing its venerable snap traps with new precision designs that kill far more quickly. And three young entrepreneurs from Wellington, calling their little company Goodnature, have built what they believe is an even better rattrap, featuring a plastic tube and a CO
2
cartridge that propels a plastic plunger with head-pulverizing force. The device—named the Henry—not only renders rat or stoat or possum instantly dead, but also automatically resets itself to await the next victim. “Killing is part of our culture,” said Stu Barr, cofounder of Goodnature. “But it's not the animal's fault they're here. It's our fault really. We've got to treat them humanely, until we kill them.”

In the Kiwis' invaded kingdom, the kill trap has become an icon of conservation; the fence is another. One of particularly epic proportions has recently gone up in the center of the country's North Island. The fence—the last link of it erected in 2006—stands eight feet high and thirty miles around, enclosing in steel mesh a twelve-square-mile mountain island of forest, what its builders hope will someday become a sanctuary of primeval New Zealand. The Maungatautari Ecological Island is financed and run by a citizens' trust, whose written aim is no less than “to restore the dawn chorus, to fill the forest to capacity with native birds, insects, reptiles, frogs and other wildlife, and to share it with all New Zealanders.”

As prerequisite, managers of Maungatautari have emptied their fenced forest of all mammalian invaders. Their next step is to reassemble the forest's conspicuously missing pieces, its kiwi and kokako, its giant weta and tuatara. And the ultimate prize now being quietly considered for transfer to the confines of Maungatautari is the reigning icon of New Zealand's fight for life, a bird once believed to be extinct.

L
ONG
W
ALK
H
OME

At the turn of the second millennium, in the years following the kakapo's terminal diagnosis and subsequent admission to intensive care, the patient miraculously rallied. Following that bumper crop of rimu nuts on Codfish Island in the summer of 2001, the kakapo responded with a crescendo of booming and mating, and the next spring with a bumper crop of chicks. Twenty out of twenty-one female kakapos on Codfish mated. And each, of course, had a midwife at her side. As the nesting season hit high gear, Don Merton and crew matched pace through the nights, candling eggs, nursing chicks, removing infertile eggs with hopes of new layings. By the time the rush of 2002 was through, an army of exhausted nest-minders had welcomed another twenty-four kakapos into the fold, jumping the world population to the dizzying sum of eighty-six birds.

The years following were spent waiting for another like 2002. So much depended on the fickle fruiting schedule of the rimu trees, and all was precariously limited to the one island of Codfish—the only place on Earth where the kakapo still boomed and bred. The rimus' next substantial fruiting came in 2008; the kakapos responded with six chicks. More rimus fruited the following year, and this time the roof blew off. The year 2009 went down as the greatest in kakapo conservation history. Birds mated multiple times; some laid a second clutch. Those needing assistance were artificially inseminated. By the time the books were closed on the kakapo's record-breaking breeding season, the population had vaulted to 124 birds.

But there had developed a dark side to the kakapo's booming fortunes. One of the diseases most feared for the little cooped-up population on Codfish had already begun to show symptoms. Sperm of male kakapos were sprouting extra heads and tails. Eggs were lying infertile. The little band of inbred kakapos was coming apart at the genes.

To no great surprise. All but one kakapo had originated from a tiny remnant of survivors on Stewart Island. The one exception was the lovable old bird from Fiordland named Richard Henry. The kakapo that Merton had pulled from the brink in the Esperance Valley in 1975, the sole carrier of Fiordland blood, had in his thirty years of island life sired all of three offspring, none of which had yet entered the mating game. In the intervening years Richard Henry had shown only sporadic interest in competing with younger males. He was blind in one eye, likely an old battle wound. It was quite possible that the kakapo's knight in moss green armor was more than a century old. Seasons would go by when Richard Henry's hormones no longer responded to the ripening of the rimu. Merton would coddle and coax his beloved kakapo, following him around with treats of apple, enticing him at every turn with offerings of more food, hoping to fatten the grand old parrot for one more go on the courting grounds.