For some reason, this is among the purest and most satisfying types of conservation and ecological restoration projects. I love it.. it usually involves remote places, peaceful and exotic.. places where birds congregate their chattiness juxtaposing the serenity off the surroundings, where the sea meets the land and the outside world doesn't seem to exist. This story takes place in the lands that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel DeFoe, and the movie maker and King Kong creator Marian Cooper. It also is finite, accomplish-able, and the results can be incredible, and uncompromised. What I am talking about is Island Restoration.
Now let me explain.. most islands are not disappearing, they don't need to be pushed back up.. well, the people of Vanuatu and Tuvalu, might disagree these days, but this term means something specific, it generally means the removal of invasive species from ecosystems that have evolved in relative isolation. These invasive creatures seem to have most often come from the Whaling Industry of yesteryear, although natives and 20 and 21st century man also contribute endlessly to this problem, but it's a case of a distinct act, usually of culling or relocating invasive mammals, having a measurable result that improves the survivability of the worlds biodiversity, and somehow restores of rescues nature's, or even perhaps some divine power's, intent for the complexity of the world, if only in these remote corners.
As Whalers spread around the world in the 1800's, first entering the Pacific on the recent coattails of Cook and the British Navy, who despite Magellan being the first, were the most thorough in their reconnoitering of the world. And not to leave the Atlantic out, Islands like Saint Helena and the now Famous Falklands and South Georgia, where they also explored, Europeans flush with navigation technology and their new gunpowder weapons and big wooden boats, and heck, the Indian Ocean as well, going further and further afield in search of, you named it, Oil, in this case Whale Oil... Initially the Europeans went in search of Treasure and Spices, but that led to other civilizations, not as frequently but occasionally the uninhabited knobs of the world.
What the whalers would do is stockpile food and supplies on these islands.. release a few pigs and let them roam, so they could breed and eventually they would come back and shoot a few, and of course eventually a Norway Rat or two would scramble down an anchor rope and onto shore, goats would be added to the pigs, and perhaps a pair of fecund cats would be the company of some lonely attendant there to farm supplies for passing ships, he might grow a few trees for shade that might also be used for Ship repair if given time to mature... while a natural outgrowth of commerce, it all had a devastating effect on these isolated island ecosystems, these places usually only touched by what could fly, or swim, or float there with the currents, where evolution occurred in isolation and species adapted to their immediate surroundings since change came rarely enough..
Now perhaps the strong should be allowed to dominate the whole earth..man and a few tigers and rats and bears should roam everywhere, but that kind of takes the fun out of it, the kind of distinct ecological cultures that give the world some richness...so people started to take notice of these impacted ecosystems.. I am not sure who and where first, but somehow the Kiwi's, the kings of practical intervention, decided to take this on in their own country, starting both at home and on some of their remote island territories. the New Zealand Department of Conservation, or DoC (pron: Doc) as it is known in N Zed, are kind of the SAS of Conservation. They are small, nimble, capable and relentless, while still being user friendly. They serve the role of like 20 different agencies in the US, BLM, NPS, USFWS to name a few, all under one roof, and they decided to take on some projects around their sumptuous little island country. These problems I am describing are most romantic on deserted uninhabited islands, and New Zealand has a few, but the whole country was kind of a lightly inhabited, if not deserted, then isolated Island (not to piss off any Maori, the aggression gene and all that.. they were the most advanced Stone Age Culture in the world by some measures, pretty cool to boot, but can be credited with the extinction of a flightless bird called the Moa which was the top predator on the North and South Islands after 50 million years of blissful isolation until Polynesians showed up 1300 years ago, and they did have trade with other groups on the nearby island chains it is proven, as they were seafarers as well as warriors).
The Work credited with beginning this kind of Environmental restoration, necessary on likely hundreds of islands around the world, if not thousands, began on a small Island, Cuvier, barely a mile long, off the Corimandel Penninsula aside the Bay of Plenty, on the north Coast of the north Island of N Zed.. it has a lighthouse on it, and not much else, and it must have been crawling with invasives, as it's remarkably beautiful looking, (I have been 20 miles south of it but never to it, it was beautiful where I was as well), but otherwise unremarkable, because I had never heard of it until now. Most Kiwis are originally Scottish, and they like things tidy, DoC employees no exception eh, and somehow this offended them, so work began in 1962 to clean up this mess. You need to understand that given the ecological history of New Zealand, Rats and even lots of species of Mice are invasive.. it's a tall order to make things they way they should be, or were, to be scientific and not moral. At around the same time there was an effort to eradicate a rat species from Bermuda, and a few other things, but I am not sure how many projects functioned on this principal of full restoration if possible.
Cuvier Island near the NE of the North Island of NZ
An island set I had heard of, and the first to intrigue me before I learned of these efforts worldwide, including significant efforts on the Aleutians and Channel Islands of my own country of the United States for two, and loads of other places big and small, is a classic case that struck me as I read it not for being the first, but for being such a colossal effort for a result that many would consider inconsequential, which taught me how far DoC would go to restore nature and right wrongs, since these islands are so far from anyone that justifying this work in most democracies would be ludicrous. I am speaking of DoC's work on the Campbell Islands.. never heard of them? You are not alone... they are a little group of islands 600 km south of Stewart Island and NZ proper, and further from the closest major population areas of Dunedin or Christchurch, down close to Antarctica, and the roaming areas of the Southern Right Whale. What had happened, as I alluded to at first, is that Whalers had dropped off domestic animals here, cows, chickens, and even a caretaker to raise them and provide when people showed up looking for supplies. Rats took hold as well, chasing off tons of bird species, many endemic, including what has been described as the worlds rarest Duck Species, The Cambell Island Teal. On the nearby Auckland Islands, it was pigs, mice and even one of the sub islands was crawlin' with rabbits, but never rats. There had even been a town there, or a settlement, Port Ross, for a few years, as well as a Maori population fleeing the colonizers, so the lack of rats was a surprise to many.
On Campbell, DoC, starting in the 70's, had culled cows by 1984, sheep by 1992, and then the amazing feat of rats by 2003, and the results already show for Snipe and Teal and other shore and seabirds returns have been impressive. It's like restoring a museum that no one will ever see, just because it should be done, polishing a fabrage egg and locking it in a closet in Northern Alberta. However there is a constituency that does appreciate it, even if they don't vote: the ecosystems have rebounded and many of the species numbers are way up, mostly birds, and with them an increase in the healthiness of the whole ecosystem one might imagine. I remember watching footage of the helicopter hunts for the last feral pigs on Auckland, and it reminded me of something from Mutual of Omahas Wild Kingdom, man in remote lands, hunting to save, helicopters that looked out of an 80s thriller, steely eyed serious men intent of preserving instead of destroying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmnc9INxceM
http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/land-and-freshwater/offshore-islands/new-zealands-subantarctic-islands/auckland-islands/restoring-the-auckland-islands/
These places are UNESCO World Heritage Sites now:
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/877
A study on the success of 5 of the 90(!) islands they have restored, many quite small, but still worth it
http://www.doc.govt.nz/documents/conservation/land-and-freshwater/offshore-islands/island-conservation-effectiveness.pdf
They said that New Zealand has some 165 islands, but that the rest were not in need of intervention.
You can see here the projects that DoC has moved onto:
http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/restoration-projects/
And while I gush over All Black conservation ethics, it seems that even their private sector has gotten into the game, with an interesting approach to this invasives issue. To back up, as I explained, the impact of these invasives is that they either eat what native species like to eat, therefore making their survival harder, or they sometimes eat the native animal species. Maybe both....Double Whammy. But there is another impact they have, which is that animals like rats will eat seeds off the ground or young shoots that might have either been ignored by the native animals of NZ, or not eaten up quite as efficiently, hence they can change the makeup of entire forests. If there is some plant that would normally be abundant, but can never make it past germination, whole generations and regeneration can be stunted, and if you imagine the competition for nutrients and light, the species that the invasives, like rats or mice, don't eat tend to thrive, shifting the balance of the forest strongly.. in the American west it creates a shift towards shrubby thorny type things that cows ignore... for some Kiwi species, like, for example, the Kiwi it's self, this creates a lot of pressure as they kind of grew up in a safe neighborhood for the millions of years they evolved, and then in the last 200 to 150 things changed dramatically ( I believe Captain Cook was the first European to visit New Zealand, although now that I think of it, it was a Dutch guy, Abel Tasman in 1642, hence the name, after the southwest Dutch Province of Zeeland..) since the growth of European settlement, although the first of what could be called invasives came with the first Polynesian settlers in I believe 1300 AC.they arrived with Pigs and chickens and who knows what else after long sea voyages...
So this brings me to a more mainland and private attempt, as if to prove that the whole country of New Zealand supports efforts like this. I was once driving on the south Island, the largest of the Islands, about 600 miles long, so hardly a place where you can just eliminate invasives in the controlled confines of these larger islands. I was driving in a very pretty area north of the college town of Dunedin, and I came across an odd fence with a fence that had only the smallest of openings.. big enough for flies and that's about it... it seemed to encircle a few hundred acres even though ti was still being built, and I asked a local what it was for. He told me it was to protect some little lizard, with a funny combination of shagrin and respect... I was pretty impressed.. it seemed like a lot of work for a little lizard..
The Lizard he was talking about was the Otago Skink..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otago_skink
they have been so busy they haven't even gotten to reintroducing it yet.. October of 2013 is the plan, but they have been busy indeed:
http://www.orokonui.org.nz/content/theorokonuistory.php
http://www.orokonui.org.nz/content/howitworks.php Think of Stalag 17.. or M. Night Shamalan's The Village for native Species... This whole thing was the pipe dream of a Kiwi Cartoonist and his buddies in the 80's, named Burton Silver:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burton_Silver
http://visualhumor.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/burton-silver/
the idea had many forms and even died before coming back to life sometime in the 90's, and sometime in 2005 or 2006 it appears real construction began.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orokonui_Ecosanctuary
http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/225287/dunedin-ecologist-joins-heady-group-loder-cup-winners
Accusations of Environmental Absolutism aside.. it's hard to not be impressed by this... and it wasn't exclusively a DoC or even government funded program, although they no doubt helped..
So it might be a bit Demoralizing that Ne Zealand has set the bar so high for the rest of us.. but remember, this blog is about hope, all good news is good news.
In the Age of Globalization, shipping containers, and flights from everywhere to anywhere, invasive are now a worldwide challenge.. the problems introduced by Whalers looking for a little reliable non seafood grub seem pretty small by comparison these days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species
The Un has gotten in on the act:
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=585&ArticleID=6180&l=en
http://www.cbd.int/
yup.. there is an agency:
http://www.cbd.int/secretariat/
and meetings:
http://www.cbd.int/invasive/
and there are these Biodiversity Targets come up with in a convention in Japan:
http://www.cbd.int/sp/targets/
http://www.gov-online.go.jp/pdf/hlj/20101201/18-19.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_Indicators_Partnership
http://www.unep-wcmc.org/meeting-aichi-target-11_928.html
All kind of mind Numbing but necessary, but it does make you curious what goes on where the rubber hits the road, and since all politics is local, it's gunna cause millions of little independent fights and efforts even though it's nice to see some top down planning going on..
That said, I got a bit off topic from these exotic islands, these paradises lost and returned. Since I am an American, and like I wrote once in a piece about the Jordanian De Sal Canal, it's easy to write about the US, since there is always so much coverage in English, I am going to write about these efforts there, most notably on the Islands of the Pacific, The Aleutians, Hawaiian Islands, and the Channel Islands of California, where this is happening, and there is even an organization that takes this on worldwide and has made inroads on Mexico's pacific coast and Sea of Cortez islands that tend to be desert and therefore somewhat user friendly in the eradication category.
The Hawaiian Islands have a mixed bag of Success.. the ball hasn't completely started rolling yet because of, you guessed it, people.. the worlds most persistent invasive:
Tell em Keanu!
In addition to many invasive plants (there is a wild Asian ginger that was introduced by a Resident Ranger in his garden that is now the bane of Volcano National Park) there is the Drama of the Pigs.. wild pigs that were mostly or entirely introduced by Europeans despite rumors that they are descended from Polynesian Voyagers, but now there are efforts by hungers to protect them even thought hey tear up the Jungle there pretty severely.
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The good news comes from the Aleutians and the Channel Islands.. again on the Mammal scale, with even an effort to eradicate Rat's from Rat Island!
There are many invasives throughout the Aleutians, from Caribou and Elk to Rats and who knows what else,
http://alaskamaritime.fws.gov/whatwedo/bioprojects/restorebiodiversity/background.htm
but the emblematic species is the Arctic Fox. As many of you might know. Russia colonized Alaska after Vitus Bearing 'discovered' it on a Russian Imperial Expedition in about 1740, before the US bought it in 1867 to bail out a broke Tsar who had fears of the English seizing it for free. While converting the natives to Russian Orthodoxy, which still holds in many places, they got busy killing every Sea Otter they could as far south as California for the outlandish prices in the Chinese Market, while placing on every Island they could Arctic Fox, which didn't roam natively south of likely the Yukon, but had a valuable white fur during winter. 455 Islands were populated in all from 1750 until the time the practice was stopped in the 1930's, with it actually peaking in the territorial days at the turn of the last century even though the Russians did start the practice. Most of the ones dropped off in South East Alaska where taken care of by nature the way the Mafia takes care of squealers. However on the more treeless islands, the Aleutians and other islands of Western Alaska, they thrived. These guys were not friendly to the bird population as you might imagine, which had other consequences:
http://currents.ucsc.edu/04-05/03-28/foxes.asp
http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF17/1750.html
Starting in 1949 eradiction efforts began.. with 21 islands intentionally cleaned off by the 1993, with them remaining on 46 as of that year.. does this mean the US was ahead of DoC? Things happen Quietly in Alaska, so I guess so... although they were using poisons like strichnyne until 1972 when such practices were banned, and now are stuck using regular old traps... DoC stil gets in trouble for poison, so it might be the way to go, but you gotto follow the rules.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA322590
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxsub-4N-vY
It might have been an autonomous effort in Alaska from '49, common sense ahead of legislation, but eventually the effort had something to do with the Endangered Species Act, passed under the Great Society push and the Silent Spring movement of 1966. One of the first animals listed was this guy:
http://www.fws.gov/refuge/Humboldt_Bay/wildlife_and_habitat/AleutianCacklingGeese.html
As you can see.. it is never popular to kill cute critters like a Fox, but it had it's pluses.. these Aleutian Geese rebounded from 700 individuals to 120,000 in some 45 years! Farmers where they winter went from never seeing them to considering them pests in that short amount of time!
As the above extensive report and history from 1993 demonstrates, they have had success on many of the islands, but I was once rumbling around Atka, like many of the Aleutians, it's name starts with an A, and I was exploring big tidewater rock on the bearing side where I was camping that should have been teeming with sea life, but it was kind listless, and I came around a corner and was confronted from just about 10 feet by a mangy looking black pelted arctic fox who looked me straight in the eye and didn't really back off.. it was kind of a tight spot we were in between two high spaces.. and we kind of stared at each other for a bit.. and I remember thinking that his pelt almost looked like he was molting... and I remember thinking he thinks I'm as out of place here as I think he is... he shrugged me off and walked right past me...
I recently Spoke to the Invasives Manager of the Preserve by email, and he said since 1993 there have been 26 more projects on individual islands, or closely grouped islands, and I am waiting to hear back from him on how many islands still have the fox that maybe shouldn't.
In a funny way, we can shrug off these distant Islands, they mean nothing to us in the immediate sense, they aren't down the street, and they might not harm the air quality much, but when it comes to complete stewardship, a full and almost ideal approach to our shared environment, these are the Ethics you want..
Efforts continue in the Aleutians, where they have taken a breather, no projects are planned now, but that is likely more a sign of the current economic woes than intent by the USFWS guys in Homer who look after this and quite a few other reserves..
And in the Channel Islands the effort goes on.. funny that the most graphic but thorough recounting I can quickly find comes from animal rights activists:
http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/05/4/tsg.channelIslands4.05.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Islands_(California)
Rats were removed from Anacapa just 10 years ago, usually the last thing to go before you take on invasive plants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacapa_Island
On Santa Rosa, the Elk, the last and most symbolic of the invasive mammals, and source of the longest most dramatic three way fight between the NRA and hunters who wanted to Hunt it in perpetuity, the Animal rights activists who wanted it either left alone or live captured, and the park that just wanted it gone somehow, was finally extirpated just two years ago:
http://www.independent.com/news/2011/aug/17/santa-rosa-islands-final-hunts/
And this brings us back to the kiwi's for an encore:
They have become the world experts, and now have companies that not only consult on these efforts but get the job done world wide, Kiwi Style:
http://nativerange.com/
http://nativerangecaptureservices.com/
And as California is becoming a new home for this in the US, this whole effort has it's own non profit now:
http://www.islandconservation.org/index.php
I checked out their website a few years ago, and they were just focused on the West coast of the US and The Sea of Crortez and Islands off of Baja.. I can see now that their scope has widened substantially.. and why not, Island restoration is kind of an Obsessive Dream..
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