The Hindu : Front Page : Scientists want rats out and birds in

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Thursday, Nov 29, 2007
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Scientists want rats out and birds in

Anchorage: More than 200 years ago the rats jumped ship for Rat Island. The muscular Norway rat climbed ashore on the rugged, uninhabited island in far southwestern Alaska in 1780 after a rodent- infested Japanese ship ran aground. It was the first time rats had made it to Alaska.

Since then, Rat Island, as the piece of rock was dubbed by a sea captain in the 1800s, has gone eerily silent. The sounds of birds are missing. That is because the rats feed on eggs, chicks and adult seabirds, which come to the mostly treeless island to nest on the ground or in crevices in the volcanic rock.

“As far as bird life, it is a dead zone,” said Steve Ebbert, a biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, whose 2,500 mostly uninhabited islands include the Aleutian chain, of which Rat Island is a part.

Wildlife biologists are now gearing up for an assault on the rats of still-uninhabited Rat Island, hoping to exterminate them with rat poison dropped from helicopters. If they succeed, the birds will sing once again on Rat Island. And it will be the third-largest island in the world to be made rat-free. A visitor to the island 2,735 km from Anchorage does not have to look far to find evidence of vermin. The landscape is riddled with rat burrows, rat trails, rat droppings and chewed-up vegetation. Certain plants are all but gone.

“You go to Rat Island and there are hardly any chocolate lilies,” said Jeff Williams, another refuge biologist. The same for songbirds and seabirds.

Rats have all but wiped out the seabirds on about a dozen large islands and many smaller islands in the refuge, which is home to an estimated 40 million nesting seabirds. Puffins, auklets and storm petrels are most at risk because they leave their eggs and young for extended periods while foraging. — AP

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