Rat Island

by William Stolzenburg

  THE KISKA BLITZ

  At four A.M. on June 3, 1942, two Japanese aircraft carriers steamed into position one hundred miles south of Dutch Harbor on the Aleutian island of Unalaska and launched an attack on American forces. A dozen fighter planes and twenty-two bombers shook the town awake, causing minor damages to a radio station and some oil tanks and otherwise triggering the Aleutian campaign of World War II.

  Within the next four days, Japanese troops had captured the islands of Attu and Kiska, establishing an embarrassing beachhead on American soil. And over the following fifteen months the two countries would struggle for strategic control of the North Pacific theater, before the Allied forces would finally take back both Attu and Kiska, to close the curtain on the Aleutian campaign.

  Between the opening and closing salvos, the Aleutian campaign came to be known as the war fought not against enemy bombers and battleships but against the weather. Pilots flew blind through endless fog into lurking volcanoes. Williwaws thundered from the peaks and slammed planes into the ground. Foot soldiers suffered far fewer casualties from enemy fire than from trench foot and frostbite, insanity and suicides. Those who served for too long developed the glazed gaze of a pithed frog, a signature malady immediately diagnosed as the Aleutian stare and routinely treated with sedation, straitjacket, and a trip stateside.

  The Aleutian campaign most infamously came to be known for the battle of Kiska. The Japanese Imperial North Force, which had taken Kiska in the first week of the war, had for months been hunkered down in its tunnels, stubbornly holding out under a daily deluge of bombs and the starving squeeze of an Allied blockade. On August 15, 1943, American and Canadian troops gathered for the massive offensive to finally take Kiska back.

  On Kiska’s D-day, 34,426 Allied troops, 95 ships, and 168 aircraft descended on the forbidding island, prepared for battle. They stormed the shores to eerie quiet. The first soldiers to inspect the enemy’s underground city found it deserted, the only hostility a few parting shots of insult hand-scrawled in bad English on the walls. Trigger-itching Canadians and Americans advancing through the foggy hills mistook each other for the enemy and opened fire. A destroyer hit a mine, killing seventy-one.

  The Japanese had orchestrated the greatest of escapes. Two weeks earlier five submarines from the Imperial navy had tiptoed into Kiska Harbor under cover of darkness and, in less than an hour, crammed all 5,183 comrades aboard and slipped homeward undetected.

  Dozens had died in the Kiska Blitz, every one of them belonging to the Allied forces, each falling to friendly fire or to the mines and booby traps of an enemy gone home. Kiska’s weather itself accounted for the most casualties. More than one hundred soldiers, trudging wet and cold through the tundra, were to be treated for trench foot.

  With the embarrassing blitz of the Kiska ghost town, the Aleutian campaign came to its end, the war shifting to new and more celebrated battlegrounds farther south before the atomic obliterations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 brought the final surrender. Kiska thereafter became a graveyard of war, pocked with bomb craters, littered with military rubble and wreckage, abandoned again to the birds and the foxes, but also now to a new castaway. The rat, stealing ashore while the warring troops were otherwise busy bombing hell out of Kiska, had quietly established its own beachhead.

  SEA OTTER JONES

  Among the troops who had fought in the Aleutian campaign was a young radar officer named Robert Jones Jr. Jones had been one of the first ashore on Adak Island, establishing the base from which the final assault on Kiska would be deployed. What his comrades saw as life on Alcatraz, Jones saw as plum duty in the most beautiful place on Earth. Jones was a rough-and-ready seaman, a salty throwback to the frontier mountain man, invigorated by the cold and lonesome spaces of this Bering Sea wilderness. When his postwar comrades went racing stateside to restore their sanity, Jones found a way to extend his Aleutian tour of duty, as manager of the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

  Jones took up where Olaus Murie had left off. His vessel was a twenty-foot wooden dory. It was a sturdy, rough-water craft bred in the stormy New England seas, storied home of the tempestuous nor’easter. The boat was propelled by a thirty-five-horsepower Mercury engine, backed by a spare motor in the hold. Jones filtered gas through a chamois to keep the pervasive Aleutian dampness from the fuel lines. A tarp stretched across the gunwales kept Jones’s supplies somewhat dry through the squalls.

  Jones in his dory became a master of the Bering Sea, less so by battling it, more so by artfully dodging its blows. The sea dealt harshly with renegades and cowboys, its depths littered with the wrecks of boats far larger than Jones’s dory. When the whitecaps were angry, when the scudding clouds suggested storms, Jones took heed. There were days of fifty-knot winds and driving rains, days when the manager of the refuge found himself hunkering in a tent. For the rougher crossings and landings, Jones had himself fitted for a neoprene wet suit, a prototype for the modern survival suit. He would thread his dory through the rocks and breakers, toward the least formidable stretch of shore, and jump to land.

  From one island to the next, Jones leapfrogged across his wildlife refuge, taking stock as Murie had, with a growing admiration and gnawing apprehension for the endangered Eden of the Aleutians. He could tell by the look and feel of an island—by the relative stillness where commotion should have reigned—of an island eviscerated by fox. To Jones’s mind no island could be whole again until he’d driven the invaders out.

  To the embattled islands Jones began bringing assistants and lethal arms. They spread baits laced with strychnine and the virulent Compound 1080. They placed exploding capsules of cyanide smeared with scent lures, serving the curious fox a lethal mouthful of poison. They set leghold traps and fired .223-caliber rifles.

  With the first eradication of foxes in 1960, on Amchitka, the largest Aleutian Island west of the Alaska Peninsula, Jones’s Aleutian campaign was launched.

  For at least one among those in harm’s way, it was feared the rescue had come too late. When Jones began his tour of duty, the Aleutian cackling goose hadn’t been seen in seven years. He would thereafter confirm the goose missing from every island harboring alien foxes. But what about those few islands without?

  On June 25, 1962, Jones beached his dory on the island of Buldir. Buldir was a seven-square-mile cone of rock and tundra in the western Aleutians, farthest adrift of any island in the chain. No would-be fox farmer had mustered the nerve to brave the sixty-mile commute between Buldir and anywhere, or the island’s infamously treacherous landing upon arrival. Such inhospitable bearing and an absence of foxes had left Buldir mad with birds. Twenty-one species of seabirds bred there by summer in stunning densities—the most diverse seabird colony in the northern hemisphere. In starkest contrast to the Aleutians’ fox islands, Buldir was the picture of ecological purity.

  Jones’s field notes for his July 25 inventory of Buldir recorded with cool scientific detachment a scene to set the heart skipping. Before dryly mentioning three sea otters with pups, a colony of sea lions that “could well exceed 10,000,” a pair of bald eagles, and “very large colonies of pelagic birds, especially tufted puffins and horned puffins, murres, kitty wakes, [and] glaucous-winged gulls,” he began by noting a flock of 56 Aleutian cackling geese, of the species otherwise presumed extinct. “They were flying off the high steep sea cliffs. They were apparently evenly distributed around the island.”

  The haven embodied by Buldir provided Jones many thousands of reasons why his refuge with foreign foxes was no refuge after all. He stepped up his Aleutian campaign. The following year he began poisoning foxes on the islands of Kasatochi and Agattu. And in the spring of 1964, helicopters dropped fifty thousand baits laced with Compound 1080 across the rugged breadth of Kiska Island.

  Jones was off and running on his mission to liberate the Aleutian refuge. Foxes started dying, islands birds started living again. But what Jones didn’t realize was that the fox was only the first and not the wor
st of his concerns. To this day nobody knows precisely when the rats finally made their way from the World War II battlefield of Kiska Harbor to the great metropolis of auklets at Sirius Point twelve miles north. Whatever the reason, it was later to be confirmed that even as Jones was ridding what he considered the singlemost threat to the birdlife of Kiska, a greater danger was even then advancing upon one of the largest flocks of seabirds on the planet.

  The average rat could go where the cleverest fox could not, to the tightest nooks and crannies of the auklets’ underground refuge in the boulders of Sirus Point. What a brown rat could do to a defenseless bird a quarter of its size required little imagination. What a horde of brown rats could do to Kiska’s uncountable colony of such birds was anybody’s guess. But as of the beginning of 1964, with Jones and the Refuge so keenly focused on fox, it was nobody’s immediate concern.

  By the end of 1964 there would be reason to reconsider. By then a new and sobering demonstration of the rat’s ecological power was under way and on public display six thousand miles due south, back on that archetypal island of endangered innocence, New Zealand.

  Chapter 4

  CAPE CATASTROPHE

  IN MARCH OF 1964, the offices of New Zealand’s Wildlife Service received a report from a little island off the country’s southernmost coast, of an outbreak of rats. The news would hardly have rated a mention had the island been any other than Big South Cape Island, perhaps the most precious little refuge for wildlife in New Zealand.

  Big South Cape was a wild enclave of rocky shores and untrammeled forests spanning scarcely four square miles. Within those tiny confines, however, the island still harbored—at the impossibly late date of 1964—a near-pristine assemblage of the vanishing New Zealand avifauna. Its forests sang with a signature assortment of fernbirds, bellbirds, and fantails, kakas, parakeets, and kererus. Its headlands were swarmed every summer with seabirds. And crowning Big South Cape’s hallowed gatherings was a cluster of the world’s rarest species of animals.

  The Stewart Island snipe was a long-billed member of the sandpiper family, unusually large by mainland standards. The Stead’s bush wren was a mousy sprite recalling the flightless wren of Stephens Island, the one so infamously snuffed a century before by Tibbles the cat and company. Big South Cape was the last refuge of a gaudy songbird named the South Island saddleback, and the greater short-tailed bat, one of only three mammals ever to have reached the country under their own power.

  All of these—plus an assortment of native insects, among them a grasshopper approaching the size of a rat—had once ranged widely over the island nation of New Zealand in its pre-predator history. All had since been driven to the edge of their existence, which was now circumscribed by the few isolated acres of Big South Cape Island.

  For all its enduring sense of purity, the island had not gone entirely unexploited. Every spring Big South Cape would swarm with sooty shearwaters, saber-winged seabirds arriving to raise their single chicks in earthen burrows pocking the coastal headlands. And every summer boatloads of Māori would land to harvest them. The Māori muttonbirders, as the hunters had come to be called, would gather the fat, flightless chicks from their burrows by the thousands for their feathers, flesh, and oil. Over the centuries the muttonbirders had managed a precarious balance, a sustained harvest of Big South Cape’s shearwater crop, retaining as clear a snapshot of primeval New Zealand as could be found in the twentieth century. But now, so very suddenly, the picture included rats.

  Sometime in the early 1960s a ship rat or two, stowed away on a muttonbirder’s boat, jumped from ship to shore. The rat then applied its signature skill of rapidly transforming all things edible into rat biomass. In 1964 the muttonbirders returned to find their summer camps ransacked, their foodstuffs pillaged, and their cabins fouled. Big South Cape had irrupted with rats.

  The news reached the authorities to mixed reactions. For certain academics and administrators, the prospect of rats invading Big South Cape was a minor annoyance for the back burner. But for those earning their keep in the field, the idea rang of a five-alarm inferno.

  MERTON

  Among those hearing sirens was a quiet, twenty-five-year-old wildlife officer named Don Merton. In his young but far-flung career with the Wildlife Service, Merton had witnessed firsthand the aftermath of rats invading ecosystems unschooled in defense. He’d been to both ends of the country and beyond, touring the outer islands, seeing the carnage, hearing the silence. Merton had also been to Big South Cape in its heyday. Three years before the outbreak he’d spent a month there, peering through its magic portal into New Zealand’s wilder past. It was the enchanting sort of place whose peril the field man could most appreciate.

  Merton had found his life’s passion early on, in the birds of New Zealand. From the time he could read, he read about birds. He went to bed with the books in hand. Wherever he wandered, be it forest or farmland, shoreline or swamp, he wandered in search of birds. Growing up, Merton kept a birdcage beside the house and practiced avian husbandry. He brought home orphaned goldfinch chicks and put them under his pet canary to raise. He found a wild raptor’s egg and duped one of his laying hens into hatching it. His schoolmates nicknamed him Bird Brain. Merton could hardly argue. He was, by his own admission, “absolutely besotted by birds.”

  To learn anything about New Zealand’s birds was to eventually learn a history of loss. It was to know the sad tale of the moas, those wondrously flightless New Zealand giants that had so recently been reduced to piles of butchered bones. It was also to know the less famous but equally poignant story of the huia, an odd, scythe-beaked songbird with elegant black plumes and endearing displays of affection, whose last official sighting had come just a few short decades before Merton’s birth.

  Young Don Merton had a hard time fathoming such mindless annihilation. And he would be reminded often that the killing wasn’t nearly finished. On the Mertons’ little family farm there walked a chickenlike bird with a stiletto beak, a tame but mischievous creature, poking about here and there among the ducks and chickens for an unguarded egg. The bird was a North Island weka, one of the few flightless survivors of the great Pacific massacre. It was a recurring specter of a violent past, and of a mass extermination still under way. Merton said to himself, we must not let them go extinct. More to the point, he thought, I must not let them go extinct.

  In February 1957, three days after his eighteenth birthday, Merton began his internship as a Wildlife Service trainee. After a stint of surveys, touring the outer islands, he found himself temporarily stationed on the southern mainland, on a wild coastal stretch of the Otago Peninsula, as sole caretaker of the Taiaroa Head royal albatross colony. It was famed as the world’s only mainland colony of albatross. And it remained so only through the round-the-clock vigilance of bodyguards like Merton. Here Merton learned one of the essential skills of the New Zealand wildlife officer. He learned to kill.

  Ferrets, weasels, cats, and rats came to menace the colony. Merton dutifully trapped them all in turn. While not shooing curious visitors to a respectable distance, he acquainted himself with the leghold trap. He learned how to anticipate his quarry’s approach, how to lead it with aromatic baits, how to hide the trap’s spring-loaded jaws precisely where the interloper’s foot was most likely to step.

  But there were many predators, and only one Merton. Shortly after his assignment ended, a feral cat slunk into the unguarded colony. Of the five albatross chicks that had hatched under Merton’s watch, three were attacked, two of them killed.

  It was a lesson for Merton in the realities of wildlife conservation in New Zealand, a lesson harking back to Richard Henry’s crushing defeat at Resolution Island. There was no standing back and letting nature take its course, if the nature of New Zealand was to be saved.

  MARIA ISLAND

  Little more than a year later, in 1960, Merton was called to investigate a killing on Maria Island. Maria was a three-acre speck of land fifteen miles off the coast of Auckland i
n the Hauraki Gulf. A schoolteacher and bird enthusiast named Alistair McDonald had visited the island the year before to find it littered with the freshly mangled bodies of some nine hundred white-faced storm petrels. The elegant little seabirds had apparently been killed by ship rats, which had lately run amok on Maria Island.

  The rats were newcomers, thought to have arrived in the 1920s, upon rafts of flotsam and floating garbage from Auckland, or perhaps as late as the 1950s, in boats hauling cargo to build a lighthouse. The petrels, for their part, had colonized under their own power millennia before, instinctively seeking a predator-free place to dig their burrows and raise their young. The eventual meeting between rat and petrel came with predictable results, now evidenced by the many lifeless little forms at McDonald’s feet.

  By the time Merton arrived to investigate, McDonald had already taken up his own vigilante crusade. He had set his fox terrier loose on the rats, then returned with fellow birders to spread poison. Merton for his part took no chances. Over the next two nesting seasons, he and a volunteer crew of petrel defenders armed with a hundred shillings’ worth of the rat poison warfarin, went after whatever rats might remain on Maria Island. Merton then moved on to other patients in New Zealand’s emergency room of endangered fauna, unaware until years later the historical import of what he had just done.

  Merton, in his trials by fire, found himself resuscitating populations of birds breathing their last. It was timely training for the call that eventually came, of the catastrophe unfolding on Big South Cape.