Rat Island

by William Stolzenburg

  “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

  THE 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.

  AUCKLAND SUMMIT

  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 Montebe
llo 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.

  SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?

  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.

  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

  IAN JONES 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.”