Creature discomforts
B.C. island declares war on rats.
everybody on Haida Gwaii has a rat story. And if it’s not a story about a twitchy-nosed, longtailed, beady-eyed, disgusting little creature raiding the kitchen cupboards of a rustic summer retreat, then it is a story about rats stealing eggs from a chicken coop.
And if it is not a chicken coop, then it is a scene from a seaside campsite, idyllic locales for arm-weary sea kayakers where, come nightfall, the rats of Haida Gwaii — the 18-plus island archipelago off the B.C. coast commonly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands — invariably come out to play.
“I remember camping on Murchison Island and trying to fall asleep in my tent,” said Laurie Wein, a Parks Canada project coordinator and chief Pied Piper in the islands’ continuing war against the rat epidemic.
“I remember lying there, listening to the constant — tica-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-whoosh — as the rats would run up one side of my tent and slide down the other.”
Rats. Running up one side of her tent. Sliding down the other. How gross is that? even more foul, however, than any human-rat encounters has been the impact of the rats — Norway rats and ship rats to be precise, originally stowaways that jumped ship, arriving in the area in the 1700s — on native seabirds.
The rats came. Multiplied. And, for dinner, dined out on eggs and chicks, feasting their way through once-abundant species, such as the ancient murrelet.
“The birds didn’t have biological strategies, like nesting in trees, to deal with the rats,” said Ms. Wein. “Langara Island, for example, had the world’s largest colony of ancient murrelets — about 200,000 breeding pairs.
“Rats arrived on the island around 1940 and by the most recent count there had been a drop to 14,000 breeding pairs. It’s a similar story on the other islands.”
It is a catastrophe for the birds and the health of an ecosystem that, without the birds, hunting and pecking for seafood on the tidal plains, has been thrown into disarray.
But now there is hope. Now there is a helicopter and a comprehensive Parks Canada plan to rain death from above on the dastardly rats. There can be no prisoners. No mercy shown. (Rats are relentless breeders.)
Fear not: This isn’t some
flaky, hatched in an Ottawa back office by a bunch of civil servants drunk on two-hour lunches and solid gold pensions scheme, but a frontline rat eradication technique pioneered in New Zealand’s rat wars more than a decade ago and since adopted worldwide.
Gregg Howald of Island Conservation, an non-governmental organization allied with Parks Canada in its ratfree ambitions, explains.
“Have you seen a helicopter flying with a bucket for fire fighting?” he asked.
“It is similar to that. It’s a metal bucket, an inverted cone, and [the rat poison] flows through a hopper as the helicopter flies and hits a spinning plate and the plate flings [the poison] in a 360-degree pattern.”
The rats eat it, scurry back to their rat holes to get a little shut-eye where it is lights out, for good, for Senor Rat.
“We just had our 10-year anniversary of being rat free on Anacapa Island off California,” Mr. Howald said.
“We have had a population of Scripps’s murrelets, which have the same natural history as the ancient murrelet, and which were having their eggs and chicks eaten by rats.
“The population has quadrupled since the island was declared rat free.”
Haida Gwaii’s aerial assault is scheduled for September. It comes on the heels of a landbased pilot project on two of the archipelago’s smaller islands in November 2011.
Parks Canada workers did the legwork, laying out the rat poison, collecting any dead
rats they discovered along the way. No rats have been detected on either island since the spring of 2012.
Alas, there is a new pest on Haida Gwaii, at least around the Parks Canada offices: the random phone caller, with a rat story.
“Since we started doing this project, we have had all kinds of people come out, asking for help, and asking if we can help get rid of the rats in their chicken coop or the rats in their cabin,” Ms. Wein said, laughing.
“But that’s a pest control issue, where what you need is an exterminator versus what we are doing.”
Which is saving seabirds and, perhaps, offering weary sea kayakers a chance to fall asleep to the sounds of an ocean breeze, instead of 10,000 scurrying feet.