It has now been over a month since we penned the Aldabra giant tortoises on Ile aux Aigrettes. This prevented them trampling and eating the poison bait that we placed 21 days ago to eradicate an introduced population of rats. With no rat signs for a while now we have removed the poison leaving only peanut oil flavoured chew sticks and baited live traps across the eradication grid, which we check and manage daily.
By Nik Cole, Durrell Mauritius Programme
It is day 16 of the rat eradication on the island nature reserve, Ile aux Aigrettes. We have not found any rat chew marks in the bait, no rat faeces or encounters with live individuals during our daily searches across the entire island for the past six days. We are starting to feel rather positive that our hard work has paid off and to top it all off it has stopped raining!
Day 6
Its been wet, really wet and this has taken its toll on the cardboard box bait stations. Two days ago we realised that we would need to replace all our bait stations that were being destroyed by the rain. The ideal replacement would be a plastic bottle, but we need a lot of them. Thankfully, after contacting one of Mauritius' leading soft drinks company, Quality Beverages Ltd., they gladly donated lots recyclable plastic bottles for us to fashion into new waterproof bait stations.
By Leanna Racine and Tara Imlay, Mauritian Wildlife Foundation
Day 1 – Setting the poison grid
Our alarms go off and we slip out of our bunks. Its 5:30 in the morning and we have 394 bait stations to place. With additional help from other staff from Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and the National Parks and Conservation Service, the reptile team sort everyone into eight groups. Each group is armed with small cardboard boxes, a stapler, permanent marker, notebook and poison. We set off with compass and map in hand to find bait stations. We are quick to discover that finding our stations is A LOT easier said than done even with each point made accessible. Most of the time was spent using a machete to further clear the paths through dense vegetation (usually with lots of thorns) and locate the pegs that indicate corners of the 12.5 x 12.5 m grid covering Ile aux Aigrettes. Poison was placed at every second grid peg, laying down a 25 x 25 m poison grid across the island.
By Rouben Mootoocurpen, Mauritian Wildlife Foundation
Rats have got onto the island of Ile aux Aigrettes, which lies just off the coast of Mauritius. This small island has been restored by MWF as a nature sanctuary and icon of what biodiversity in Mauritius used to be like. But for fragile islands such as this, the introduction of rats can be devastating to native species. In the last post we saw how once the evidence of rats was first seen, the eradication process was started.
Ile aux Aigrettes is a 26ha islet located in the Mahebourg Bay off the south-eastern coast of Mauritius. The island is a Nature Reserve leased for conservation management to the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation. It is one of the last and best remnants of dry Mauritian coastal forest. In an attempt to preserve this dwindling ecosystem, extensive restoration work has been carried out since 1985. Nearly all of the island has been weeded of invasive plants and replanted with native plants. In 1991 numerous exotic animals such as rats and cats were successfully eradicated. The restoration of the island was paralleled with the re-introduction of a host of endemic plants and endemic animal species (pink pigeon, Mauritian fody, Olive white-eye, Telfair’s skink) and also the analogous Aldabra giant tortoise (to replace the now extinct Mauritian giant tortoises).
In mid December 2008, 15 pairs of the Lesser night gecko, Nactus coindemierensis, on loan from the Mauritian Government, arrived at the Durrell Herpetological Dept. These tiny geckos, which grow to only 6cm in length and lay eggs weighing just 0.2g, are part of an ex-situ captive breeding and reintroduction project. This species is now only found on four small islets, where they would once have existed in dense populations throughout the Mascarene islands. Habitat destruction and invasive species are the main factors threatening the survival of this species.
BirdLife International has released its latest assessment of the state of the world’s birds which it contributes to the overall Red List of Threatened Species. Birds are by far the best studied group in the world and provide a fairly good, although not complete, surrogate for the state of biodiversity in general.
The results this year seem to follow the trend established in most species-based assessments, as knowledge increases more species are listed as threatened. It seems that even with increasing conservation efforts around the world, the number of threatened animals seems to constantly increase. This assessment of all bird species found that 12% or 1,227 species were classified as threatened. A total of 77 species changed their conservation status with 9 being uplisted to Critically Endangered and 7 being downlisted from Critically Endangered to lower categories.
