Lord Howe Island: Strange birds in paradise
You may half expect to see pterodactyls wheeling in the mist – but you can count on a currawong divebombing you.
from the May 21, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Situated 430 miles northeast of Sydney, the island was uninhabited when it was discovered in 1788 by a British ship supplying the newly established penal colony of Sydney Cove. It was visited for the next 45 years by Royal Navy vessels and whaling ships working the South Pacific. It was permanently settled in 1884 by three families who lived by selling vegetables, fish, and meat to passing crews. The pioneers were a motley bunch of British sailors and American whalers and their Maori and Pacific Islander wives. Only 10 percent of the island has been cleared for farming and housing; the rest is swathed in palm forest.
A three-mile-long coral reef encloses an idyllic lagoon inhabited by turtles and tropical fish. Beaches fringed by rocky headlands are overlooked at one end of the island by the twin bulwarks of Mt. Gower and Mt. Lidgbird, with sheer cliffs and jungle-clad summits reminiscent of Tahiti. Their mysterious plateaus evoke a lost world – you half expect to see pterodactyls wheeling over the mist-shrouded forest. If you sat down with a pen and paper to sketch the perfect sub-tropical island escape, this would be it.
But there is a serpent in paradise – or rather a rodent. In 1918 the cargo from a shipwreck was unloaded on a beach, and black rats escaped into the forest. Voracious and agile, they feasted on bird eggs and fledglings. Within a few years, five bird species had become extinct. The rats remain a problem to this day.
Now there is a highly ambitious plan, called the "Noah option," to wipe out the entire population of rats by trapping as many native animals, reptiles, and amphibians as possible and placing them in enclosures – a modern-day Noah's Ark. Most of the island's birds are migratory so the exercise would be carried out when they leave the island. Poison pellets would then be dropped by aircraft over the entire island in order to kill off all the rats.
The operation, expected sometime in the next few years, would probably be carried out by experts from New Zealand's Department of Conservation, who are world leaders in offshore island pest eradication. Wildlife rangers would have to be 100 percent sure that every last rodent had been killed before releasing the captive animals.
"If we were successful, Lord Howe would become the largest inhabited island in the world to get rid of rats," Mr. Hutton told me as we hiked through the palm forest. "We look forward to the day when it happens."
Among the animals that could then be re-introduced to Lord Howe is a giant stick insect that was recently found to have survived on a rat-free rocky outcrop here called Ball's Pyramid. Nicknamed the "walking sausage" or "land lobster," it's one of the biggest (up to six inches long) and rarest bugs in the world.
RSS feed
