S.Africa plans to ‘bomb’ rats that eat albatross alive

Conservationists said Saturday they plan to blast a remote South African island with tons of pesticide pellets to kill the rodents that eat albatross and other seabirds. they are alive.

Swarms of rats are eating the eggs of some of the world’s most important seabirds on Marion Island, about 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) southeast of Cape Town, and have begun eating live birds. , said conservationist Mark Anderson.

This includes the unique Wandering Albatross, which has a quarter of the world’s population living on an island in the Indian Ocean.

“Now, mice, for the first time last year, have been found feeding on adult Wandering Albatrosses,” Anderson told a conference of BirdLife South Africa, the country’s leading bird conservation organization.

Horrific images presented at the conference showed birds bleeding, some with their heads chewed off.

Of the 29 species of seabirds that breed on the island, 19 are endangered, said the Mouse-Free Marion Project.

Rodent attacks have increased in recent years but the birds do not know how to respond because they have existed without terrestrial predators, said Anderson, project leader and CEO of BirdLife South Africa.

“The mice climb on them and slowly eat them until they give up,” he told AFP. It can take days for the bird to die. “We lose hundreds of thousands of seabirds every year to rodents.”

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 billion it needs to send a fleet of helicopters to drop tons. 600 pellets containing rodenticides on a rugged island.

It wants to hit 2027 in winter, when mice are very hungry and birds that breed in summer are very absent.

Pilots will have to fly in extreme conditions and reach every part of the island, which is about 25 kilometers long and 17 kilometers wide.

“We have to get rid of every last mouse,” Anderson said. “If there was a male and a female left, they could reproduce and eventually return to where we are now.”

Rats are becoming more common because warmer temperatures due to climate change mean they are breeding more frequently over longer periods of time, Anderson said. After eating plants and invertebrates, rodents switched to birds.

House mice were introduced to the island in the early 1800s. Five cats were brought in around 1948 to control their population. But the number of cats increased to about 2,000 and they were killing about 450,000 birds a year. A cat eradication campaign removed the last cat in 1991.

© 2024 AFP