In the end, even adult albatrosses were no longer safe on Gough Island: ” target=”_blank”>Hungry mice ate them alive when the seabirds came to breed on the small British Atlantic island, and millions of chicks fell victim to the rodents, The losses were so dramatic that ecologists urgently recommended eradicating the mice, which was actually tackled in 2021 and at least gave seabirds some breathing space in 2022, the British bird conservation organization RSPB reports in her blog.
The past breeding season was therefore the most successful for various species in at least ten years. Among the endangered MacGillivray’s petrels (Pachyptila macgillivrayi) for example, 82 percent of the chicks fledged, compared to the previous year’s average of 6 percent. In some years not even a single young animal survived the mouse attacks. With the even more endangered Tristan albatrosses (Diomedea dabbenena) the success rate increased from 32 to 76 percent and in the gray petrel (Procellaria cinerea) from 30 to 75 percent. ‘All in all, the seabirds on Gough have had a phenomenal breeding season this year and there has been no sign of mouse feeding,’ writes the RSPB.
However, the joy is not undiminished. By the end of 2021, the monitoring team had discovered a surviving mouse on Gough. At the end of the southern summer of 2022, the on-site ecologists even noticed a rapid increase in the number of mice. So the extermination campaign was not a complete success. After all, the comprehensively reduced mouse population ensured that the rodents that were still present had sufficient alternative food and did not attack any seabirds.