Male magnificent frigratebirds have a bright red gular sac
Removing goats and rats from a remote Caribbean island involved abseiling, catapults and nappies, as Jenny Daltry reveals.
What do Dirk Bogarde, Diana Dors and Ian McEwan have in common? How about Barry Humphries, Libby Purves and Sting? They are all dukes and duchesses of the fantasy realm of Redonda, a small but surprisingly tall island jutting out of the Caribbean Sea. Due to a quirk of history, for more than 150 years it has been the notional seat of a string of charismatic ‘kings’ who have awarded ‘peerages’ to friends in the arts.
In the real world, Redonda is uninhabited and belongs to Antigua and Barbuda, 50km away. Over the past two years, it has become the focus of an exciting conservation project that aims to save its wildlife – including several endangered reptiles and major seabird colonies – and to restore the island to its former verdant glory.
Redonda’s ecosystem is unique, with many species having evolved in isolation. Among the most specialised is the Redonda darkling beetle, found exclusively in the nests of brown boobies, relatives of the gannet. My personal favourite is the Redonda ground dragon – up to a foot long and jet black with flecks of sky blue. These lizards swagger around the island, getting into fights, stealing fish from the seabirds and basking spread-eagled on black rocks so hot you could fry an egg.
A harder resident to love is the jumping cactus, which flings out painfully thorny segments if you get too close. At least I think that’s what it does. It is difficult to catch these cacti in motion, but they strike with enough force to drive barbed spines 2cm into your skin.
Seabirds are still present too, albeit in lesser numbers than in the past.
Most obviousobvious are the famously ly tame boobies. Smartly dressed brown boobies, the goose-sized ed masked boobies and, in the crowns of ancient fig trees, the flamboyantly painted red-footed boobies, all with white powderpuff chicks. Among them are red-billed d tropicbirds with white streamer tails, and the agile frigatebirds, atebirds, which are aerial pirates. But, by 2016, the seabirds’ irds’ precious nesting trees were dying out. What had gone wrong?
SEABIRD CITY Y
Christopher Columbus mbus called the island “Santa María la Redonda”, or Saint nt Mary the Round, a name ill-suited to its jagged points and nd sharp edges. When the Spanish fleet first arrived in 1493, 493, however, Redonda was softened with a cloak of trees and nd shrubs, and encircled by a no noisy cloud of thousands of seabirds. eabirds.
It was the birds that attracted tracted more Europeans to the island. In his 1859 paper A AN Night with the Boobies, TE Southee described how one could hardly take a step on the island without kicking a seabird. The American Phosphate Company eagerly leased Redonda from Britain to quarry the island’s ample supply of seabird droppings. In its heyday, this was the largest guano mining operation in the Caribbean, with up to 120 miners collecting up to 17,000 tonnes of phosphate-rich bird poop every year. Most of it was rep reportedly sold to Germany for use in explosives. The trade ended abruptly wit with the outbreak of World War I, but relics of the island island’s industrial history can still be seen. The abandoned ruins of old buildings and rusting machinery are now pri prized perches for boobies and lizards. However, the phospha phosphate miners also left a more dangerous legacy that would co completely transform Redonda and place its unique wildlife in peril: feral goats and rats.
Of the many animals to have gone extinct sin since 1500, a staggering proportion were in the We West Indies: ten per cent of the birds, 34 per cen cent of mammals and a whopping 70 per cent of reptiles. Over two-thirds of these extinctio extinctions have been attributed at least in part to the in invasive alien mammals that humans introduced to the islands. Redonda lives up to these woeful statistics. Gone is its endemic skink, its dark grey iguana and the unique burrowing owl that used to live here, all driven to extinction by the goats and rats.
The black, or ship, rats that took over Redonda grew unusually large. Our analysis of their diet revealed them eating everything the island had to offer: chicks, eggs, reptiles, insects, seeds and cacti; even goat droppings when times were tough. Around the clock, the rodents could be seen pouncing on helpless seabirds, deftly killing them with a bite to the back of the head, and they overpowered the native lizards with ease.
Eradication expert Elizabeth ‘Biz’ Bell estimated there were 5,000–7,500 rats on Redonda. A well-
plac aced snap trap could typically catch one within 10 minutesm even during the day; sometimes two simul ultaneously. Meanwhile, long-horned goats nimbly ly scaled Redonda’s cliffs and helped the rats strip th he island bare. Fruits and seeds were eaten by the rodentsro before they hit the ground, whilew the goats picked off any se eedlings.
RESTORINGING REDONDA
The mamm mals’ efficiency in deforesting theth island came back to bite them, how owever. Malnourished and stunted, every y year many of the goats wasted away, lit ittering the island with their bones. You u know an ecosystem is in serious trouble whenw even feral goats are starving to death.
Out of sight and d out of mind, the ecological calam mity unfolding on Redond nda was known to only a few people.p Among the first to rais ise the alarm was Junior Prosper, head of the national archivesrchives on Antigua, a keen birdebirder and member of the Env iron m en talvir on mental Aware n es Awareness Group (EAG). The EAG and myy organ is a organisation i–Fauna& Flora International – have a long shared history of working together to remove invasive pests, revealing nature’s phenomenal power of recovery.
Yet it was clear that while Redonda still had wildlife worth saving, this was an altogether much greater challenge. Large parts of the island comprise scree slopes and crumbling cliffs: difficult for even a goat to navigate, and suicidal for a human. There was no water and almost no relief from the burning tropical sun on the hot black surface. How could we conserve wildlife in such a place?
The only truly effective way to remove rats from an island is with rodenticide. For Redonda we chose the bait Klerat, which has saved dozens of Caribbean islands to date. As the bait is waxy, bitter and dyed blue, the only island animals willing to eat it are the alien rats and a small number of invertebrates, which are unaffected.
To reach every rat on Redonda, this bait had to be distributed at intervals of not less than 40m, even on the steep and crumbling cliffs. We engaged the help of tthe British Mountaineering Council to figure out where acaccess ropes could be safely anchored. For zones too danangerous even for professional abseilers to reach, bait wasas thrown by hand or with catapults.
TeTen volunteers, ably led by New Zealander Biz Bell and Britonon Jack Ibbotson, lived on Redonda for two months to distribbute the bait, monitor its uptake and clear away the carcassses. The rats piled into the blue cubes of bait as if it wewere chocolate, the junior rats barely able to wait their turn until their seniors had finished gorging themselves.
The feral goats – an old Spanish breed with magnificently spiralled horns – provided their own challenge. The Government of Antigua asked that enough goats be removed alive so that the breed could be
IT WAS CLEAR THAT WHILE REDONDA STILL HAD WILDLIFE WORTH SAVING, THIS WAS AN ALTOGETHER MUCH GREATER CHALLENGE.
preserved on Antigua. After a series of comically failed attempts to catch them with a self-muster corral (the goats refused to be bribed with food or water), snares (the billies rooted them out with their horns) and even a gas-propelled Spiderman net ( foiled by high winds), the herd was eventually cornered against fence lines and caught by hand.
Our next mission as non-lethal ‘goatbusters’ was to carry the goats to Antigua. The only safe way was by helicopter, blindfolded and held firmly by team members. “We are carrying five passengers, three of them are goats,” the Caribbean Helicopters pilot solemnly announced over the radio on approach to Antigua, to laughter from Air Traffic Control. Mindful of what a nervous caprid might do to the upholstery, the goats were taped in giant plastic nappies for the 20-minute flight. The interior had to look and smell immaculate before the pilot went back to his normal duties of transporting dignitaries and Hollywood stars.
GOOD RIDDANCE
The last rats were seen on Redonda in March 2017 and the last goats left in April 2017 – the result of an incredible national and international effort sponsored by the British government’s Darwin Initiative, Global Wildlife Conservation, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and Betty Liebert Trust.
Together with local scientists, we are monitoring Redonda closely. The island is changing fast, free from alien mammals at last. Birds from neighbouring islands are flowing in, from kestrels to hummingbirds, and
Redonda is alive with butterflies and other insects. In the first year alone, the ground dragons have doubled in number and the tree lizards have tripled. A team of scientists from Harvard and Paris are studying how the lizards change, even evolve, in the absence of rats.
The most conspicuous transformation is in the vegetation, with a swathe of knee-high grasses and herbaceous plants springing up from the seedbank across the island. For the first time in over a century, hundreds of new fig trees are emerging, giving promise to the red-footed boobies and Redonda tree lizards. Yet again, the seabirds are playing an important part in Redonda’s history as their guano creates a fertile soil for new plants to flourish.
For a nature lover, there can be no greater pleasure than returning to a place that will get better with every passing year. Conservation is not just about hanging onto pristine wildernesses, but increasingly it is about restoration, and allowing native wildlife and natural processes to reclaim their kingdoms. Dirk Bogarde would be proud.