Eradication effort to protect the island’s wildlife from millions of invasive rats, which will feed on the brains of live seabird chicks, starts in 2015
Tuesday 2 December 2014 15.33 GMT
Conservationists are undertaking a final push to wipe out millions of rats from South Georgia once and for all, in a bid to protect the island’s wildlife.
Described as the world’s largest rodent eradication project, the UK-led effort will see three helicopters dropping 95 tonnes of the poison Brodifacoum on the British overseas territory next year.
South Georgia is a crucial breeding ground for over 100 million seabirds including penguins, albatrosses and pintails, which feed on the food-rich waters of the Southern Ocean.
But rats introduced two centuries ago by sailors and whalers have devastated the island’s seabirds, causing their populations to drop by more than 90%. The brown rats have been filmed eating seabird chicks alive, and feeding on their brains to disable them, which is an “appalling thing to see” according to the team behind the eradication project.
The South Georgia Heritage Trust, a Scottish charity, will begin the £2.5m bait-dropping effort in February next year and is aiming to have covered a 364 sq km (140 sq mile) area by the end of March. It follows two earlier phases of rat poisoning in 2011 and 2013, which the trust hailed as successful, though it could not say precisely how many rats had been killed due to the difficulty and cost of measuring it.
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