Conservationists said Saturday they plan to bomb a remote island in South Africa with insecticide-laced bullets to kill rats that are eating albatrosses and other seabirds alive.
Leading conservationist Mark Anderson said swarms of rats are devouring the eggs of some of the world’s most important seabirds that nest on Marion Island, about 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles) southeast of Cape Town, and have now begun eating live birds as well.
This includes the iconic Wandering Albatross, with a quarter of the world’s population living on this Indian Ocean island.
“Last year was the first time that rats were detected feeding on adult wandering albatrosses,” Andersen told a meeting of BirdLife South Africa, the country’s leading bird conservation organisation.
Gruesome photographs presented at the meeting showed bloodied birds, some with their heads chewed off.
According to the Mouse-Free Marion project, 19 of the 29 species of seabirds breeding on the island are locally threatened with extinction.
Project leader and BirdLife South Africa CEO Anderson said rat attacks had increased in recent years, but the birds did not know how to respond because they had evolved without terrestrial predators.
“The rats climb onto them and slowly eat them until they die,” he told AFP. It can take several days for a bird to die. “We are losing hundreds of thousands of seabirds every year because of the rats.”
extreme conditions
Billed as one of the world’s most important bird conservation efforts, the Mouse-Free Marion project has raised nearly a quarter of the $29 million needed to send a fleet of helicopters to drop 600 tons of rodenticide-laced pellets on the rugged island.
He plans to strike in winter 2027, when the rats are hungriest and the summer breeding birds are largely absent.
The pilots will have to fly in extremely difficult conditions and reach every part of the island, which is approximately 25 kilometers long and 17 kilometers wide.
“We have to get rid of every last rat,” Anderson said. “If there are any males and females left, they could breed and eventually come back to where we are now.”
Anderson said rats are breeding in greater numbers due to rising temperatures caused by climate change. After eating plants and invertebrates, rats have turned to birds.
Domestic rats were introduced to the island in the early 1800s. Five cats were introduced around 1948 to control their numbers. But the number of cats increased to around 2,000 and they were killing about 450,000 birds every year. The last cat was removed in 1991 as part of an eradication project.
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