Environmentalists said Saturday they plan to bombard a remote South African island with tons of pesticide-laced pellets to kill mice that eat albatrosses and other seabirds alive.
Hordes of mice are eating the eggs of some of the world’s most important seabirds nesting on Marion Island, about 2,000 kilometres southeast of Cape Town, and have begun eating live birds, said leading conservationist Mark Anderson.
This includes the famous wandering albatross, a quarter of the world’s population of which nests on this island in the Indian Ocean.
“The mice have now been observed feeding on adult wandering albatrosses for the first time in the last year,” Anderson said at a meeting of BirdLife South Africa, the country’s leading bird conservation organization.
At the meeting, gruesome images were shown showing bloody birds, some with the flesh bitten off their heads.
Of the 29 seabird species that breed on the island, 19 are threatened with extinction, the Mouse-Free Marion Project said.
Mouse attacks have increased in recent years, but the birds do not know how to respond because they have evolved without terrestrial predators, said Anderson, one of the project leaders and CEO of BirdLife South Africa.
“Mice just climb on them and eat them slowly until they succumb,” he told AFP. It can take days for a bird to die. “We lose hundreds of thousands of seabirds every year to the mice.”
– Extreme conditions –
Considered one of the world’s most significant bird conservation initiatives, the Mouse-Free Marion Project has already raised about a quarter of the $29 million needed to send a squadron of helicopters to drop 600 tons of rodenticide-laced pellets onto the rugged island.
It is expected to strike in the winter of 2027, when mice are hungriest and summer-breeding birds are largely absent.
The pilots have to fly under extreme conditions and reach every part of the island, which is about 25 kilometers long and 17 kilometers wide.
“We need to get rid of every single mouse,” Anderson said. “If one male and one female were left, they could reproduce and eventually return to where we are now.”
The mice are proliferating because they are breeding more frequently over a longer period of time due to warmer temperatures caused by climate change, Anderson said. After eating plants and invertebrates, the mice turned to birds.
House mice were introduced to the island in the early 19th century. To control their numbers, five cats were introduced in about 1948. However, the number of cats grew to about 2,000 and they killed about 450,000 birds annually. The last cat was removed in 1991 as part of an eradication project.
