Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust ? Official Blog - Mauritius

Telfair?s skinks and Guenther?s geckos released on Ile aux Aigrettes

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:07:00 +0100

By Nik Cole, Durrell Mauritius Programme

March 2010 has been a busy month for the staff of the reptile team in Mauritius, translocating 550 endangered reptiles from Round Island to the nature reserve island Ile aux Aigrettes. This translocation forms part of our ongoing work to rebuild the lost endemic reptile communities of Mauritius with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and the National Parks and Conservation Service.

If you have seen some of the earlier blogs on Mauritius you‘ll know that Ile aux Aigrettes is an important site for the restoration and preservation of one of the last remnants of dry Mauritian coastal forest. Over the past 20 years nearly all invasive plants and numerous exotic animals, such as cats and rats have been removed. The restoration process has led to the re-introduction of endangered plant and animal species. Last year rats were again detected on the island and after a really intensive effort, it seems that we have been able to eradicate them. This opens the way to bring more Telfair’s skinks and Guenther’s geckos back onto the island.

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Durrell and the Museum of Life

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:13:00 +0100

The Natural History Museum has always been one of my favourite places in London. As an institution, it has been intertwined with the development of our understanding of the natural world for the last three hundred years. The very building itself is a monument to the discovery and reverence of nature. Also although it has some great displays, it’s what goes on behind the scenes that is most fascinating and so I was very excited to see a new series begin on BBC2 about the Museum and the people who work there (Museum of Life, BBC 2, Thursday 8pm).

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Giant escape artists finally free to roam Ile aux Aigrettes once again

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:59:00 +0100

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.

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A rat free island, but how do you detect the last rat?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:15:00 +0100

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!

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Removing rats on Ile aux Aigrettes: the final stages

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:09:00 +0100

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.

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Removing rats on Ile aux Aigrettes: walking the lines

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:25:00 +0100

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.

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Removing rats on Ile aux Aigrettes: setting the grid

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:09:00 +0100

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.

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Rats place tortoises behind bars!

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:05:00 +0100

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).

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Success breeding the Lesser night gecko

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:48:00 +0100

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.

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Mauritius Fodies get downlisted: a cause for celebration

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:02:00 +0100

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.

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