Rats Wipe Out Seabirds On Alaska Island
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska — More than 200 years ago, rats jumped ship for Rat Island.
The muscular Norway rat climbed ashore on the rugged, uninhabited island in far southwestern Alaska in 1780 after a rodent-infested Japanese ship ran aground. It was the first time rats had made it to Alaska.
Since then, Rat Island, as the piece of rock was dubbed by a sea captain in the 1800s, has gone eerily silent. The sounds of birds are missing.
That is because the rats feed on eggs, chicks, and adult seabirds, which come to the mostly treeless island to nest on the ground or in crevices in the volcanic rock.
“As far as bird life, it is a dead zone,” said Steve Ebbert, a biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, whose 2,500 mostly uninhabited islands include the Aleutian chain, of which Rat Island is a part.
State and federal wildlife biologists are gearing up for an assault on the rats of still-uninhabited Rat Island, hoping to exterminate them with rat poison dropped from helicopters. If they succeed, the birds will sing again on Rat Island. And it will be the third-largest island in the world to be made rat-free.
A visitor to the island 1,700 miles from Anchorage doesn’t have to look far to find evidence of vermin. The landscape is riddled with rat burrows, rat trails, rat droppings, and chewed vegetation.
