Rat Island

by William Stolzenburg

  The elusive least auklet was nonetheless easy prey in the breeding colonies. Auklets emerging from their crevices or hesitating on a rock before takeoff were regularly swallowed by gulls or picked off by snowy owls. Auklets taking flight suffered the stoops of bald eagles and peregrine falcons from on high. Those swimming offshore were sometimes swallowed by fish or seized by the relentless gulls. Humans too hunted the auklets. Aleut people in the Pribilofs had been known to bag hundreds by the hour, by expertly waving a net as the flocks zipped past.

  In his 1993 monograph Jones did broach the subject of foreign predators. The era of Aleutian fox farming had graphically exacted its toll on the littlest of auks, perhaps eliminating colonies from the islands of Uliaga and Kagamil. The impact of the rats, though, was only lately coming to light.

  Following the near-eradication of Kiska’s foxes in 1986, visiting biologists would note rat tracks and droppings proliferating on Kiska’s beaches. Whether the rats in their freedom were multiplying or simply venturing more boldly with the coast finally clear—perhaps it was simply a lack of somebody there to notice—one could only guess. Whatever the case, there was something new afoot in the foxes’ absence. When the first bundle of birds was found lying so neatly stacked during the Sirius Point auklet expedition of 1988, it was still possible to blame the last renegade fox. With the last fox’s subsequent killing, the list of suspects narrowed considerably. When in 1992 the refuge’s chief biologist, Vernon Byrd, and his fellow seabird specialist Art Sowls came upon the same odd spectacle—this time twenty-eight auklets laid side by side—there was only one viable predator left to blame.

  “Accidental introduction of rats to remote islands (due to shipwrecks or at harbors) may be the single most serious threat to Aleutian and Pribilof breeding populations,” wrote Jones in 1993, conveying Byrd and Sowls’s concerns. Nine years later he would see for himself.

  In the summer of 2001, Jones began what would become a perennial study of the auklets and rats of Sirius Point. He followed the familiar migration route of a small flock of scientists conducting research each summer across the outer Aleutians, flown by a DC 737 from Anchorage twelve hundred miles west into the Bering Sea to the old navy airstrip on Adak Island, there boarding the M/V , the 120-foot workhorse research vessel of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Twenty-four hours west of Adak’s Sweeper Cove, the came to anchor off the famous lava flow marking the northernmost shore of Kiska. Ferried from there in an 18-foot inflatable, threading warily between breakers through a notch of rock, Jones jumped to shore at the base of the Sirius Point auklet colony.

  His home for the next three months would be a campsite shoehorned into the rocks, his communication consisting of two radio conversations each day with refuge personnel on Adak. His accoutrements featured a mountain tent for sleeping and a twelve-by-eighteen-foot nylon shelter for eating, studying, and otherwise hunkering down for however long Kiska’s weather so dictated. The shelter was strutted with steel, bolted to a wooden foundation, and anchored six ways ’til Sunday against the weekly Aleutian apocalypse. It was custom-built to withstand even the one-hundred-mile-per-hour williwaws that would come roaring unannounced from the heights of the Kiska volcano. For protection from the pounding northerly gales, the campsite had been tucked behind a fifty-foot wall of rock fronting the sea, a rock that stopped most of the waves.

  In his first summer Jones began laying the groundwork, hiking about the slippery jumble of boulders (a feat once compared to walking on giant marbles), marking out his study plots, erecting his blinds, catching auklets on a carpet of nooses, cinching colored bands around their legs, and watching.

  Every day, twice a day—when the gales and williwaws permitted—Jones headed out to the blinds. And from nine in the morning to two in the afternoon and from ten at night to half past midnight, Jones sat peering out upon the rocks, charting the comings and goings of the resident parents and watching for the defining finale of lone chicks clumsily departing for the sea. As a gauge of Kiska’s relative normalcy, Jones had students stationed at auklet colonies on two other Aleutian islands, Buldir and Kasatochi, watching likewise. If something bad were going on at Kiska, it would likely show by contrast with the ratless colonies on Kasatochi or Buldir.

  Hardly a week into searching the lava dome of Sirius Point, Jones came upon a cache of thirty-eight least auklets, their bodies apparently moldering from neglect. Eleven days later he found another little massacre of at least four, barely visible from the depths of a crevice. They too were decomposing, left to rot by a rat that had apparently gone on to other things. That year, barely more than one out of ten auklet nests at Sirius Point hatched a chick. By contrast, auklet chicks on Buldir and Kasatochi were flying away at three to five times the frequency. The breeding season of 2001 ended with the worst production of least auklets Jones had ever witnessed anywhere.

  The following year Jones was joined by his grad student Heather Major, and the two repeated the experiment. The summer started off with an unfortunate bang. On May 26, 2002, the two came upon a stash of 122 least auklets, together with the corpses of seven fork-tailed storm petrels, another little burrowing seabird sharing the lava flow. In the burrow lay a female rat with nine pups. Through June the bodies continued to pile up. On the 29th, Major and Jones found a single cache of decomposing bodies numbering 148 least auklets.

  Wandering about on the lava dome, Major and Jones came upon thousands more carcasses and half-eaten eggs and what Jones would describe as “windrows of skulls,” each with a hole through which the brain had been extracted. That year beat the previous year’s record for the worst auklet production in history. “It is an enormous disaster,” Jones reported. “The number of seabirds that are being killed by rats each year are more than what were killed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill.”

  The colony was under siege. And the plague had developed a certain disturbing progression. All the hoarded auklets were identified as adults killed early in the breeding season. As the season matured, the hoarding stopped, the caches giving way to the remains of chicks strewn about the colony. Jones and Major found evidence of auklet parents ambushed at the entrance of their den, their food pouch spilled on the rock, their chick eaten in turn.

  The developing picture was that of a colony of half-starved rats barely hanging on through the cruel Kiska winter, then finding with the auklets’ spring arrival their manna from the heavens. Obeying instincts forged by eons of feast or famine, the rats immediately set upon the windfall of auklets as if it were the last meat they would see for months. Once sated on eyeballs and brains—the richest organs in the package—the rats switched gears from famine mode to reproduction mode. And soon the rocks of Sirius Point were visibly crawling with rat pups.

  Although the surplus slaughters lasted but a short while, their timing and intensity were especially crushing for the auklets. The birds most vulnerable were the first arrivals, the dominant, most experienced breeders, the ones most capable of seeing a chick through to fledging. The starving rats in their desperate hoarding were skimming the reproductive cream of the auklet crop.

  Major did the math and came up with a sobering model of probability. At the going rate the rats could nearly obliterate the incomparable auklet colony of Kiska within thirty years. Major and Jones were later joined by refuge biologists Vernon Byrd and Jeff Williams in an official message to the scientific community, published in the journal Auk. “The presence of introduced rats at Kiska is of great concern,” they wrote, “and we recommend their ultimate eradication.”

  Chapter 11

  RAT ISLAND

  AS THE FEARS for Kiska mounted with the carnage, those tending the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge were already busy considering the deeper ramifications. In their jurisdiction were at least a dozen islands with rats chewing holes in the ecosystems they were charged with defending. The concerns went far beyond seabirds. It was about the missing songbirds and Kamchatka lilies, the shorebirds and the dune grass and the inter
tidal communities languishing in the post-rat age of the Aleutians.

  And now Kiska, among the finest jewels of the chain, was being robbed beneath their noses. Art Sowls, in his years defending the harbors of the great Pribilof rookeries against incoming rats, had come to assume that prevention was the islands’ only salvation. He and his boss, Vernon Byrd, had repeatedly characterized the invasion of a single rat as a fate worse than any oil spill.

  Prevention on Kiska was obviously no longer an option. Neither was neglect. Sowls and Byrd had seen for themselves the corpses. They had heard their worst-case scenarios emphatically confirmed by the experts in Auckland, and now by the world’s leading expert on auklets, staring directly into the rats’ lairs at Sirius Point. The question was no longer whether Kiska needed saving, but how.

  In the forty years since Bob Jones had committed himself to taking back the Aleutians, he and his followers had cleared foreign foxes from forty islands. They’d seen seabirds piling back into the predator-free vacuums; they’d celebrated the Aleutian cackling goose rebounding from assumed extinction to some thirty thousand birds, flying itself off the U.S. register of endangered species. But here was a scarier foe, a more suspicious creature than the curious fox (which had a reputation for helping itself into traps and walking up to men aiming rifles). The rat presented logistical problems far beyond the purview of a few underpaid hunters laying lines of leghold traps by hand.

  Up until 2001 the stewards of the Aleutian refuge had considered the invasion of rats as the sentence of an incurable cancer. That year, even as the auklet bodies were stacking like cordwood, Kiska’s terminal prognosis took a heartening turn.

  MCCLELLAND’S CAMPAIGN

  In July 2001 a team of New Zealanders under the direction of the wildlife officer Pete McClelland reported that they had just poisoned what they hoped was every last rat on an island larger by far than any ever attempted. Campbell Island, a forty-four-square-mile, starkly beautiful, foul-weather paradise in the Southern Ocean of the subantarctic, had become the giant new standard in the campaign for island conservation.

  Unwelcoming by all outward appearances, Campbell had nonetheless come to host a massive gathering of wildlife. Great colonies of penguins, albatross, petrels, shearwaters, prions, and cormorants and immense rookeries of seals and sea lions gathered in Campbell’s paradise of seclusion. And all had eventually come to suffer the familiar plague of discovery. By the late 1700s, Campbell Island’s seals had brought the inevitable shiploads of seal hunters, and with them their rats. The sealers bludgeoned their way through the herds; the brown rats chewed their way through the flocks.

  McClelland, charged with saving the endangered, had two monsters to deal with. One was the rat; the other was Campbell Island. Campbell had long been deemed undoable for good reason. Bounded by thousand-foot cliffs, it sat far alone in the Southern Ocean—just getting there meant crossing 440 miles of heaving seas through the storm-lashed latitudes so reverently named the Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties. McClelland spent the better part of five years planning and organizing for what would closely approximate a military invasion. It would be a blitzkrieg without compromise. If one pregnant rat were left in one little cranny of Campbell’s rugged enormity, future eradications, careers, and two million dollars of taxpayers’ money would be lost. Failure was not to be discussed. Any naysayer among McClelland’s crew was immediately surrounded and shouted down. It was better to lower the head and trudge forward than to look up and contemplate the impossibility of the looming task. Over the final six months of preparation, McClelland took to sleeping with a notebook next to his pillow, jotting down scraps of thought and reminders as they woke him through the night.

  On June 26, 2001, the beginning of the New Zealand winter, five helicopters and two ships loaded with 210 drums of helicopter fuel and 132 tons of rat bait left Invercargill, at the southern terminus of New Zealand, heading for the Southern Ocean. By the second week of July, McClelland and company had dropped their first load of brodifacoum on Campbell. Ten days and two hundred thousand dead and dying rats later, they dropped their last. In the following years the crews returned to find no evidence of survivors.

  Campbell’s eradication raised the bar by frightening degrees. The island exceeded the area of former record-holder, Langara, by eight times. McClelland, who took three years before returning to Campbell, had trouble believing what he’d done. “I looked at those cliffs and the size of that island and I said, ‘No. There’s no way we did that. It was too big, too rugged to get rats off that island.’ ”

  Campbell Island came as both fresh hope and forewarning for those now contemplating Kiska. In many ways Kiska was Campbell’s big brother of the north. Both lay at the high latitudes nearing fifty-two degrees. Both were far adrift in forbidding seas, pummeled daily by winds gusting to fifty miles per hour, and stung by cold, incessant rains. There was good reason that neither was inhabited or blithely happened by. Stormy spells could last weeks, when landing a boat or flying a helicopter would threaten lives. Yet somehow, on Campbell, McClelland and the can-do Kiwis had managed to breach the impenetrable fortress. To the minds of their North American allies, if Campbell, why not Kiska?

  TARGET PRACTICE

  Conversations began. Sowls and Byrd of the Aleutians, to McClelland of the New Zealand territories, to Gregg Howald of Island Conservation—together they started pondering first steps toward tackling Kiska, the very first of which was to go nowhere near it.

  Attacking Kiska outright was a fool’s game. Kiska was twice the size of Campbell, and of any rat island ever attempted. It was one hundred square miles of fog-shrouded rock and tundra, fifteen hundred air miles from Anchorage, plus a twenty-four-hour cruise through cranky seas from the nearest working harbor. To reach Kiska alive was only half the ordeal. Inescapably there was that volcano to deal with, a snow-covered monolith whose upper reaches remained hidden for all but a few days by the Aleutians’ notorious gray curtain of cloud. And at the base of it lay ground zero, Sirius Point, that all-but-impenetrable maze of Volkswagen-size lava boulders, tantamount to the world’s largest bomb shelter for rats. Kiska was the worst of places to pick the first rat fight in the Aleutians.

  The sane approach would start smaller, someplace challenging but manageable, someplace not so little as to be yawned at, not big enough to risk humiliating defeat. As McClelland would warn, “If you don’t succeed, you don’t get the chance to do another.”

  Among the chain of Aleutian candidates, one particular island all but nominated itself by name. It had been infested since 1778, when a Japanese fishing vessel had run aground on its reef and spilled a few rats ashore. The native Aleut people had earlier named the island Hawadax, meaning “entry” or “welcome.” When the Russian explorer Fyodor Petrovich Litke came by in 1827, he renamed it for what had by then apparently become its most striking feature. Litke named it Rat Island.

  Rat Island was but a tenth of Kiska’s size, but at seven thousand acres it would rank as the world’s third largest rat eradication ever attempted. Rat Island was classically Aleutian: windy and cold, thirteen hundred miles west of Anchorage, and a twenty-four-hour boat ride from the closest port, at Adak.

  It was not a venture for the fainthearted, but victory there promised big returns. The Aleut people had left indications of what could be expected. Long ago they’d piled their trash heaps high with the bones of seabirds. Their ancient middens revealed a former avifauna of impressive diversity, including puffins, petrels, murrelets, gulls, and cormorants. All were species that would presumably come spilling back once Rat Island was rescued.

  By all accounts, the island would provide a challenging warmup for the title bout with Kiska. “It was a mama bear, papa bear kind of thing,” said refuge biologist Jeff Williams. “Not too big, not too little. We knew from our earliest stage of thought that if we were going to do an island, it would have to be Rat Island.”

  In the summer of 2001, Williams, his refuge colleague Sowls, and Ho
wald visited Rat Island for an early reconnaissance to see for themselves what they might be getting themselves into. How big and steep and manageable—or not—was the terrain? Where might the ground crews camp? Where on the tundra slopes would the helicopters land and load? How bad, really, were the rats?

  All three were well traveled and intimately familiar with some of the great seabird colonies of the Pacific—with the quintessential cacophony and commotion of birds, the acrid essence of guano. When they landed their Zodiac inflatable on the beach, the overwhelming essence of Rat Island was that of silence and sterility.