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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

 

JULY-AUGUST 2003

Eradicating feral foxes from Aleutian island leaves auklets to the rats

ANCHORAGE--Perhaps the most catastrophic consequence for conservation yet of the U.S. federal effort to eradicate "invasive species" from sensitive wildlife habitat is evident on Kiska Island in the Aleutians, touted earlier as scene of a major victory.

 

"In 1986, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service eradicated foxes from Kiska as part of a campaign to save Aleutian Canada geese from extinction," Doug O'Harra of the Anchorage Daily News recounted on July 14. "About 49,000 beef tallow baits laced with Compound 1080 poison were dropped on the island, killing an estimated 700 foxes" who were introduced decades earlier by fur farmers.

 

"Biologists visiting the island in spring 1987 found that Norway rats had exploded in number with the foxes gone, the Associated Press reported that spring. A federal report noted the apparent surge in rats as evidence that the foxes had been eliminated," wrote O'Harra.

 

Now, seabird ecologist Ian Jones told O'Harra, "The rats go from one nest to the next," killing and eating least and crested auklets and their eggs. When no longer hungry, the rats cache more auklets for later, after the birds leave the island. Jones said he had found as many as 148 decomposing auklets stuffed into just one rat warren.

 

From three to six million seabirds lay their eggs on Kiska Island. About 80% are least auklets. In 2002 fledglings survived from only 10% of the least auklet eggs laid, Jones said. At that rate the species could soon be at local risk.

 

Now Jones, Alaska Mari-time National Wildlife Refuge supervising biologist Vernon Byrd, and alien species extermination specialist Peter Dunlevy would like to try poisoning the rats, at estimated cost of as much as $3 million.

 

Seventy-six islands worldwide have eradicated rats, Channel Islands National Park chief of resource management Kate Faulkner recently told Los Angeles

Geese and swans affected by the campaigns.

  

Times staff writer Jenifer Ragland. Faulker claimed Norway rats are responsible for up to 60% of all bird and reptile extinctions worldwide, and credited the poisoning of all rats on Anacapa Island, a part of the park, with resurgences of unique native deer mice, lizards, and salamanders. Seventeen Xantes murrelets nested on the island in spring 2003, after a 74-year absence.

 

The Anacapa rats were poisoned despite a lawsuit brought against the project by the Fund for Animals and an alleged attempt by Channel Islands Protection Association founder Rob Puddicombe, 52, to distribute Vitamin K to the rats as an antidote. Puddicombe on July 10 was acquitted of related charges by U.S. Magistrate Willard McEwen Jr. Alleged accomplice Robert Crawford, 40, earlier pleaded guilty.

 

Anacapa is tiny compared to Kiska Island. Kiska is more than twice the size of Campbell Island, south of New Zealand, which is to date the largest island from which rats have been eradicated.

 

Byrd and Dunlevy denied to O'Harra that the Kiska foxes directly controlled the rats, though rats are a staple of fox diets wherever both­­of any species--are found.

Geese & swans

Saving Aleutian Canada geese or any Canada geese is no longer a prominent Fish & Wildlife Service concern. Banning live decoys in 1936 to protect the then-steeply declining migratory Canada goose population, the Fish & Wildlife Service seized giant non-migratory "Canadas" bred for decoys by hybridizing wild-caught Canada geese with domestic geese, propagated them, and for more than 50 years worked with state agencies to stock them wherever the habitat seemed favorable, in hopes of rebuilding huntable numbers. But suburban sprawl overtook most of the stocked sites. Some states are still moving program descendants to new habitat, but most long since classed non-migratory "Canadas" as an invasive nuisance. The Fish & Wildlife Service removed them from the protection of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1994.

 

USDA Wildlife Services now culls geese in cities throughout the stocked range. Activist groups defending the geese have emerged in the Washington D.C. area, the Hudson River Valley, Massachu-setts, Wisconsin, around Dallas/ Fort Worth, and in Seattle.

 

The goose issue overlaps controversy over a Fish & Wildlife Service plan published in the July 2 edition of the Federal Register to kill 11,000 of the estimated 14,000 mute swans inhabiting the 17-state Atlantic Flyway, and 4,500 of the 7,100 believed to inhabit the rest of the country. The Fish & Wildlife Service contends that mute swans were introduced to the U.S. from Europe as an ornamental species, and blames them for allegedly depleting sea grass in Chesapeake Bay, for which nutria, a large South American rodent introduced by the fur trade, are also targeted.

 

Contending that fossil evidence shows that mute swans are a native species, and should therefore be protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and alleging that the Fish and Wildlife Service has improperly granted swan culling permits, Kathleen Burton of Save Our Swans USA filed suit on May 22 against culls proposed in nine states. Maryland on May 16 surrendered a federal permit to cull swans in settlement of a suit brought by the Fund for Animals.

 

Friends of Animals meanwhile renewed a longstanding offer of $1,000 to anyone who videotapes a wildlife agent in the act of killing a mute swan.