The fox in question was a diminutive island specialty the size of a large kitten with a trusting temperament to match. Numbers of the Santa Cruz island fox in the 1990s had free-fallen from two thousand to less than one hundred, its rescue posing a Solomon-esque dilemma. The fox’s demise followed a roundabout route back to the feral pigs that had assumed command of Santa Cruz—pigs that had come to endanger the fox by way of a more problematic accomplice, the golden eagle. Immigrant eagles, enticed from the mainland by the allure of squealing piglets, had taken to snatching the clueless little foxes like candy.
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.
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
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 m
ove 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.
Twenty-one hours later Pepper brought the to dock in Sweeper Cove, hurriedly unloaded all but the ship’s crew, and, with the decks still precariously piled high, headed directly back out for home port in Homer. Soon after he sailed, the sheltered waters of Sweeper Cove were rising on nine-foot swells and one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. Those booked for the biweekly flight out of Adak would be stranded for two more days, until aircraft could once again land the island. The got as far as the Islands of the Four Mountains before the gales caught up. And for the final seven hundred miles, boat and crew tossed through twenty-foot seas, running for cover in the lee of islands, playing cat and mouse with the storm. Seven days after leaving Rat Island, the pulled into port in Homer, Pepper and crew chalking up another memorably nasty week on a typically nasty sea. “That was a terrible piece of ocean,” said Pepper, “but the crew was good at lashing. We didn’t lose a stick of cargo.”
BE PREPARED TO BE SURPRISED
With the safe return, the real work was done. The team could now only watch and wait, for one of two scenarios: In the first, seven years and more than two million dollars worth of planning and proposing—not to mention the chance to save Kiska—had just slid down a rat hole. In the second, which most on the team believed more likely there would soon be nothing but new birds and greener hillsides to report from Rat Island. “Everything went incredibly smoothly during the operation,” said McClelland. “I would be amazed and hugely disappointed if the eradication hasn’t succeeded.”
There was little reason to doubt that by then the rats of Rat Island were already dropping in droves, with any survivors soon to follow. The weather had been as perfect as during any eleven-day stretch in any Aleutian October of collective memory. There was no reason to think that the latest rat eradication had failed.
“Rat Island has put island restoration through invasive-vertebrate control on the global scale,” said Howald. “It’s basically ripped that world open now. Be prepared to be surprised by what we find on Rat Island.”
The following April, six months after the poison had been laid, a crew sailed back to Rat Island for the first checkup since its surgery. The searchers walked the perimeter, looking for signs of rats, surveying for birds, hoping to mark the awakenings of life on the ratless shores of Rat Island. Before long somebody did spot a bird. It was the corpse of a glaucous-winged gull, dead by what means, nobody could say. They recorded the gull and walked on. Soon came another dead gull. And another. Somebody came upon a huge dark carcass with the massive talons and saber beak of a bald eagle. And then another. What might otherwise have been more simply blamed on an act of nature—the punishing Aleutian winters were notorious for weeding the young and the weak—now came with added complications. For poison had now entered the picture.
On the beach, more gulls, more bald eagles. The more people walked, the more dead birds for the data sheets. There were forty-one eagles, 173 gulls, and counting. Buckelew began sending the birds’ livers to a toxicology lab in the National Wildlife Health Center’s laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.
While all waited on the test results, there remained hopes that these kills were somehow within the Aleutians’ bell curve of normality. Howald, who knew brodifacoum better than anybody else on the team, resisted the easiest and most damning conclusion: “I don’t know that they’re nontarget kills yet. We merely noticed a higher number of dead birds on the beaches. We’ve also been finding pelagic seabirds, where there’s zero to no chance of rodenticide in them. I don’t know what’s going on yet. Certainly the number of eagles presents the biggest concern.”
Howald tried to think it through. He recalled his study on the poisoning of Langara, where there had been many eagles before and roughly the same number afterward. There hadn’t even been forty-one eagles living on Rat Island. How could so many have wound up dead?
“Certainly birds have to die somewhere,” he said. “It’s not uncommon to find dead birds. We’re putting the island under a microscope. People don’t typically do that under normal reconnaissance. There have been incidents of numerous carcasses found in the Aleutians for which we don’t know the causes, but they’re certainly not poisoning. It does happen that starvation is not uncommon for birds of prey. Basically their energy requirements are so high …”
The Rat Island eradicators, at turns proud, at turns defensive, were ultimately a bit confused with their public message. Even as the bodies and suspicions were stacking up, the Nature Conservancy was posting glowing news of the eradication’s success, with slide shows on its Web site celebrating a newly hatched oystercatcher in its puff of black down. “Black oystercatcher nests such as this one discovered during the 2009 summer field season are the first ever recorded on the island,” read the caption.
Well, maybe. The fact was, oystercatchers had been known to nest on Rat Island before the rats were removed. The Web site of Island Conservation also shared the good news, albeit with another convenient dash of omission: “No sign of invasive rats was found on the island and several bird species, including Aleutian Cackling Geese, Rock Ptarmigan, Peregrine Falcons, and Black Oystercatchers
were found nesting!”
Well, yes, such birds were found nesting, just as they had been found nesting all along on Rat Island, at least since the foxes had been killed off years before. The congratulations came capped with a touching thirty-second video of two downy oystercatchers hatching on the rat-free shores of Rat Island. Through it all, nary a word of dead gulls or eagles.
As every biologist on the project knew, however, it was in fact too early for great expectations in an ecosystem likely to be years on the mend. On June 11 the three partners in the Rat Island eradication released a more forthcoming statement to the press, this time including the discomforting details.
“Biologists,” it stated, “have found 157 juvenile and 29 adult glaucous-winged gull carcasses and a total of 41 bald eagle carcasses that appear to have died in recent months … While some level of winter die-off of these species is not unusual on islands in the Aleutians, and avian die-offs are not uncommon in Alaska, these numbers are cause for concern and further investigation. The Service is very concerned by these levels of mortality and is doing everything possible to expeditiously determine the cause of death.”
All wishful thinking was soon enough dashed when in late June the test results that everybody had feared came back. Every liver sampled—from two bald eagles, two glaucous-winged gulls, one peregrine falcon, and one rock sandpiper—had tested positive for brodifacoum toxicosis. This was no longer a natural weeding from a hard Aleutian winter. This was a rescue that had gone awry.
This was also now a legal issue. Many of the victims, after all, were not just any bird, but the nation’s symbol, a protected bird. Searchers were sent back to scour the island for more carcasses. A federal investigator was among them. Howald, Buckelew, and the refuge’s eradication specialist Steve Ebbert were questioned about what had happened to those forty-odd eagles on Rat Island and why. The partnership commissioned a panel of three independent reviewers from the Ornithological Council, based in Washington, D.C., to examine the eradicators’ protocol and assumptions that might have led to the demise of more than four hundred unintended victims on Rat Island.
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