Rat Island (21 page)

Twenty-one hours later Pepper brought the
to dock in Sweeper Cove, hurriedly unloaded all but the ship's crew, and, with the decks still precariously piled high, headed directly back out for home port in Homer. Soon after he sailed, the sheltered waters of Sweeper Cove were rising on nine-foot swells and one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. Those booked for the biweekly flight out of Adak would be stranded for two more days, until aircraft could once again land the island. The
got as far as the Islands of the Four Mountains before the gales caught up. And for the final seven hundred miles, boat and crew tossed through twenty-foot seas, running for cover in the lee of islands, playing cat and mouse with the storm. Seven days after leaving Rat Island, the
pulled into port in Homer, Pepper and crew chalking up another memorably nasty week on a typically nasty sea. “That was a terrible piece of ocean,” said Pepper, “but the crew was good at lashing. We didn't lose a stick of cargo.”

B
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REPARED TO
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URPRISED

With the
safe return, the real work was done. The team could now only watch and wait, for one of two scenarios: In the first, seven years and more than two million dollars worth of planning and proposing—not to mention the chance to save Kiska—had just slid down a rat hole. In the second, which most on the team believed more likely there would soon be nothing but new birds and greener hillsides to report from Rat Island. “Everything went incredibly smoothly during the operation,” said McClelland. “I would be amazed and hugely disappointed if the eradication hasn't succeeded.”

There was little reason to doubt that by then the rats of Rat Island were already dropping in droves, with any survivors soon to follow. The weather had been as perfect as during any eleven-day stretch in any Aleutian October of collective memory. There was no reason to think that the latest rat eradication had failed.

“Rat Island has put island restoration through invasive-vertebrate control on the global scale,” said Howald. “It's basically ripped that world open now. Be prepared to be surprised by what we find on Rat Island.”

The following April, six months after the poison had been laid, a crew sailed back to Rat Island for the first checkup since its surgery. The searchers walked the perimeter, looking for signs of rats, surveying for birds, hoping to mark the awakenings of life on the ratless shores of Rat Island. Before long somebody did spot a bird. It was the corpse of a glaucous-winged gull, dead by what means, nobody could say. They recorded the gull and walked on. Soon came another dead gull. And another. Somebody came upon a huge dark carcass with the massive talons and saber beak of a bald eagle. And then another. What might otherwise have been more simply blamed on an act of nature—the punishing Aleutian winters were notorious for weeding the young and the weak—now came with added complications. For poison had now entered the picture.

On the beach, more gulls, more bald eagles. The more people walked, the more dead birds for the data sheets. There were forty-one eagles, 173 gulls, and counting. Buckelew began sending the birds' livers to a toxicology lab in the National Wildlife Health Center's laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.

While all waited on the test results, there remained hopes that these kills were somehow within the Aleutians' bell curve of normality. Howald, who knew brodifacoum better than anybody else on the team, resisted the easiest and most damning conclusion: “I don't know that they're nontarget kills yet. We merely noticed a higher number of dead birds on the beaches. We've also been finding pelagic seabirds, where there's zero to no chance of rodenticide in them. I don't know what's going on yet. Certainly the number of eagles presents the biggest concern.”

Howald tried to think it through. He recalled his study on the poisoning of Langara, where there had been many eagles before and roughly the same number afterward. There hadn't even been forty-one eagles living on Rat Island. How could so many have wound up dead?

“Certainly birds have to die somewhere,” he said. “It's not uncommon to find dead birds. We're putting the island under a microscope. People don't typically do that under normal reconnaissance. There have been incidents of numerous carcasses found in the Aleutians for which we don't know the causes, but they're certainly not poisoning. It does happen that starvation is not uncommon for birds of prey. Basically their energy requirements are so high …”

The Rat Island eradicators, at turns proud, at turns defensive, were ultimately a bit confused with their public message. Even as the bodies and suspicions were stacking up, the Nature Conservancy was posting glowing news of the eradication's success, with slide shows on its Web site celebrating a newly hatched oystercatcher in its puff of black down. “Black oystercatcher nests such as this one discovered during the 2009 summer field season are the first ever recorded on the island,” read the caption.

Well, maybe. The fact was, oystercatchers had been known to nest on Rat Island before the rats were removed. The Web site of Island Conservation also shared the good news, albeit with another convenient dash of omission: “No sign of invasive rats was found on the island and several bird species, including Aleutian Cackling Geese, Rock Ptarmigan, Peregrine Falcons, and Black Oystercatchers were found nesting!”

Well, yes, such birds were found nesting, just as they had been found nesting all along on Rat Island, at least since the foxes had been killed off years before. The congratulations came capped with a touching thirty-second video of two downy oystercatchers hatching on the rat-free shores of Rat Island. Through it all, nary a word of dead gulls or eagles.

As every biologist on the project knew, however, it was in fact too early for great expectations in an ecosystem likely to be years on the mend. On June 11 the three partners in the Rat Island eradication released a more forthcoming statement to the press, this time including the discomforting details.

“Biologists,” it stated, “have found 157 juvenile and 29 adult glaucous-winged gull carcasses and a total of 41 bald eagle carcasses that appear to have died in recent months … While some level of winter die-off of these species is not unusual on islands in the Aleutians, and avian die-offs are not uncommon in Alaska, these numbers are cause for concern and further investigation. The Service is very concerned by these levels of mortality and is doing everything possible to expeditiously determine the cause of death.”

All wishful thinking was soon enough dashed when in late June the test results that everybody had feared came back. Every liver sampled—from two bald eagles, two glaucous-winged gulls, one peregrine falcon, and one rock sandpiper—had tested positive for brodifacoum toxicosis. This was no longer a natural weeding from a hard Aleutian winter. This was a rescue that had gone awry.

This was also now a legal issue. Many of the victims, after all, were not just any bird, but the nation's symbol, a protected bird. Searchers were sent back to scour the island for more carcasses. A federal investigator was among them. Howald, Buckelew, and the refuge's eradication specialist Steve Ebbert were questioned about what had happened to those forty-odd eagles on Rat Island and why. The partnership commissioned a panel of three independent reviewers from the Ornithological Council, based in Washington, D.C., to examine the eradicators' protocol and assumptions that might have led to the demise of more than four hundred unintended victims on Rat Island.

Much was already apparent. Assumptions, many of them based on the experience at Campbell, had been wrong. Said Buckelew, “We did two bait applications. Campbell had only one. The risk was higher, but what was the trade-off? What if we fail? The recommendation was, if you have the resources to do two applications, do them. The bait didn't move as quickly as we calibrated. It didn't break down. I don't think we have the same microbes, the same temperature as Campbell.”

There was also a question of timing. Why, for example, was nobody around to witness the first signs of trouble? Why, with more than six weeks of supplies, did the entire expedition need to decamp after eleven days? The anomalously splendid weather that had allowed the baiters their rapid deployment and subsequent exit, had perhaps allowed them to miss the first sick gull. Perhaps with more patience, they might have noticed the first gathering of eagles.

The number of eagles that had found their way to Rat Island had surprised everyone. There had only been four or five pairs known to be nesting there. Somehow, after the poisoning, word had gotten out among the Aleutian eagle network that there were dead or dying gulls and rats for the taking on Rat Island. And in they flocked, to their deaths.

Which, for certain spectators, seemed not so bad a deal after all. Alaska was a state where both the gulls and the bald eagles had become populous to the point of nuisance, their numbers inflated by garbage and offal from the Bering Sea's two-billion-dollar-a-year fishing industry. The eagles eventually tallied on Rat Island were forty-three of some twenty-five hundred inhabiting the Aleutians.

“To be honest, they're trash birds,” said pilot Fell. “We've been out here a long time, and I can tell you there are more than plenty of eagles in the Aleutians.”

“The nontarget issue is frustrating,” said Art Sowls. “But if you have cancer, you have to decide if you're going to have chemo. Truth is, if they get all the rats, all the nontargets will be better off in the long run. We knew there was the probability of some loss in the process.”

“The losses are short-lived compared to restoring the ecology of the island,” said Ed Bailey of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “So you lose a few eagles along the way. Here in Homer they're causing all kinds of grief. They're killing waterfowl, killing sandhill cranes, people's pets and poultry. Eagles in Homer have become trash birds.”

“The only reason some people are concerned is because of the eagles,” said the refuge's Jeff Williams. “Is that any different than songbirds getting killed? It's a big giant bird, a national symbol, with more meaning and cachet. But everyone knew that. Most people don't know that bald eagles have a very high mortality rate of their young each year. Whether all of those birds that were poisoned would have survived otherwise, I don't know. Will it make it more difficult for permitting future projects, I don't know. But who's going to be the one to complain? The local inhabitants most intimately linked with wildlife in this region think it's unfortunate but not that big a deal.”