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South African environmentalists are now raising money to “bomb” a remote island. The bombs are actually poison balls, but the goal is to eliminate the island’s rats.
The island is called Marion Island and is about 2,000 km southeast of Cape Town. There are many rats there, which eat bird eggs, etc., but there are also many important bird species living on the island. Even rats eat live birds.
Mark Anderson, the man behind the Rat-Free Marion Project, discussed the issue on Saturday at a conference organised by BirdLife South Africa, an organisation dedicated to protecting birds.
He said rats first began eating adult wandering albatrosses alive last year, but about a quarter of the world’s population lives on islands. He showed pictures of bloody birds, some with their heads eaten away by rats. “The rats just crawl on the birds and slowly eat them until they die,” Anderson said.
Rats first arrived on the island with humans about 200 years ago, and they have been causing a lot of damage ever since.
There are 29 species of seabirds breeding on the island, 19 of which are endangered.
In order to be able to drop the bomb on the island, $29 million had to be raised. A quarter of that had already been raised.
The plan is to send helicopters to the island to drop 600 tons of poison bombs on it. Our goal is to do this in the winter of 2027, but by then the nesting season will be over and the rats will be very hungry. Our goal is to kill every rat on the island, because if by chance one rat of each sex survives, then after a certain number the situation will be the same again.
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