Much was already apparent. Assumptions, many of them based on the experience at Campbell, had been wrong. Said Buckelew, “We did two bait applications. Campbell had only one. The risk was higher, but what was the trade-off? What if we fail? The recommendation was, if you have the resources to do two applications, do them. The bait didn’t move as quickly as we calibrated. It didn’t break down. I don’t think we have the same microbes, the same temperature as Campbell.”
There was also a question of timing. Why, for example, was nobody around to witness the first signs of trouble? Why, with more than six weeks of supplies, did the entire expedition need to decamp after eleven days? The anomalously splendid weather that had allowed the baiters their rapid deployment and subsequent exit, had perhaps allowed them to miss the first sick gull. Perhaps with more patience, they might have noticed the first gathering of eagles.
The number of eagles that had found their way to Rat Island had surprised everyone. There had only been four or five pairs known to be nesting there. Somehow, after the poisoning, word had gotten out among the Aleutian eagle network that there were dead or dying gulls and rats for the taking on Rat Island. And in they flocked, to their deaths.
Which, for certain spectators, seemed not so bad a deal after all. Alaska was a state where both the gulls and the bald eagles had become populous to the point of nuisance, their numbers inflated by garbage and offal from the Bering Sea’s two-billion-dollar-a-year fishing industry. The eagles eventually tallied on Rat Island were forty-three of some twenty-five hundred inhabiting the Aleutians.
“To be honest, they’re trash birds,” said pilot Fell. “We’ve been out here a long time, and I can tell you there are more than plenty of eagles in the Aleutians.”
“The nontarget issue is frustrating,” said Art Sowls. “But if you have cancer, you have to decide if you’re going to have chemo. Truth is, if they get all the rats, all the nontargets will be better off in the long run. We knew there was the probability of some loss in the process.”
“The losses are short-lived compared to restoring the ecology of the island,” said Ed Bailey of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “So you lose a few eagles along the way. Here in Homer they’re causing all kinds of grief. They’re killing waterfowl, killing sandhill cranes, people’s pets and poultry. Eagles in Homer have become trash birds.”
“The only reason some people are concerned is because of the eagles,” said the refuge’s Jeff Williams. “Is that any different than songbirds getting killed? It’s a big giant bird, a national symbol, with more meaning and cachet. But everyone knew that. Most people don’t know that bald eagles have a very high mortality rate of their young each year. Whether all of those birds that were poisoned would have survived otherwise, I don’t know. Will it make it more difficult for permitting future projects, I don’t know. But who’s going to be the one to complain? The local inhabitants most intimately linked with wildlife in this region think it’s unfortunate but not that big a deal.”
“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.”
FALLEN BYRD
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
AMID 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 th
is 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.”
THE ENDLESS FLOCK
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.
Epilogue
ISLAND EARTH
LATE IN AUGUST 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 othe
rs, 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.
WORLD WAR
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.
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