JOHANNESBURG: Conservationists said Saturday they plan to bombard a remote South African island with tons of pellets laced with pesticides to kill mice that are eating albatrosses and other seabirds alive.
Hordes of mice are devouring the eggs of some of the world's most important seabirds nesting on Marion Island, about 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles) southeast of Cape Town, and have begun eating live birds, conservationist Mark Anderson said.
Among them is the iconic wandering albatross, a quarter of the world's population of which nest on this island in the Indian Ocean.
“For the first time last year mice were found to be feeding on adult wandering albatrosses,” Anderson told a meeting of BirdLife South Africa, the country's main bird conservation organisation.
The gruesome images presented at the meeting showed bloodied birds, some with the flesh of their heads torn from their teeth.
Of the 29 species of seabirds that breed on the island, 19 are threatened with local extinction, the Mouse-Free Marion Project said.
Mouse attacks have increased in recent years, but birds don't know how to respond because they evolved without ground predators, said Anderson, project leader and chief executive of BirdLife South Africa.
“The mice just climb on them and eat them slowly until they succumb,” he said. AFPIt can take days for a bird to die. “We are losing hundreds of thousands of seabirds every year to mice.”
Extreme conditions
Considered one of the world's largest bird conservation efforts, the Mouse-Free Marion Project has raised about a quarter of the $29 million it needs to send a helicopter crew to drop 600 tons of rodenticide pellets on the rugged island.
He wants to strike in the winter of 2027, when mice are hungriest and summer-breeding birds are largely absent.
Pilots will have to fly in extreme conditions and reach every part of the island, which is about 25 kilometres long and 17 kilometres wide.
“We have to get rid of all the mice,” Anderson said. “If there were one male and one female left, they could reproduce and eventually get back to where we are now.”
Mice are multiplying because warmer temperatures due to climate change mean they are reproducing more frequently over a longer period, Anderson said. After eating plants and invertebrates, the mice have turned to birds.
House mice were brought to the island in the early 19th century. Five cats were brought in around 1948 to control the population, but the number of cats grew to around 2,000 and they were killing around 450,000 birds a year. An eradication project eliminated the last cat in 1991.
