Scientists prepare for mass rat cull on remote UK island

Eradication programme aims to save millions of seabirds from invasive rats on South Georgia

By Lewis Smith, guardian.co.uk
24 February 2011 14.57 GMT Testing for the biggest rat eradication programme in history is beginning on a remote UK island in the south Atlantic. Scientists are preparing to drop poison in a limited area of South Georgia in a bid to save the world’s most southern songbird from extinction and restore tens of millions of seabirds to the island’s breeding grounds. Millions of bird-eating and egg-eating rats are estimated to be living on the island, which Captain James Cook claimed for Britain in 1775. The clearance project is intended to kill all of them within five years. Two helicopters have been transported to South Georgia to take part in the extermination programme and will from Tuesday begin dropping poison pellets on the island. The first drops will take place in a limited area to test whether the techniques used by the extermination team work. They will return in 2013 and if the rats have disappeared from the test area, drops will take place over the rest of the island. Researchers have calculated that they need to clear rats from 800 square kilometres (80,000 hectares) – making the project almost 10 times bigger than the previous biggest rat eradication programme on Australia’s Macquarie Island. Prof Tony Martin, of the University of Dundee and the South Georgia habitat restoration project director, said: “Killing any rat on an island like South Georgia is a hell of a challenge. If you underestimate their ability to survive and stay away from danger you will fail. “The vast majority of birds that should be breeding on South Georgia have been displaced by the presence of rats. Rats have gone virtually everywhere except the very cold southern coast. We are looking to restore millions, possibly tens of millions of sea birds to the island. “The exciting thing for me about this is there are few things you can do to revert the impact of human activity on the planet but what we are going to be doing will reverse two centuries of human impacts on the island.” Brown rats reached the island 200 years ago on sealing and whaling ships and wreaked devastation on the bird population by eating countless eggs and the chicks and fledglings. The ground-nesting birds have little defence against rats seeking to eat the eggs or their young. …