Matthew Groom, Minister for Environment, Parks and Heritage
Macquarie Island pest-free
The Macquarie Island Pest Eradication project has been declared a success.
The project to eradicate rabbits and rodents from Macquarie Island is a conservation achievement of worldwide significance.
The Minister for Environment, Parks and Heritage, Matthew Groom said a rigorous monitoring program, which followed baiting, had not detected a rabbit, rat or mouse in more than two years.
"The program is the world's largest island eradication for these three pest species and it has been an unqualified success," Mr Groom said.
"In 2007, the Australian and Tasmanian Governments announced they would jointly fund the $25 million project to eradicate rabbits, rats and mice from the World Heritage listed island.
"Australia can rightly be very proud of this outstanding result. It is exciting to see an ecosystem which suffered significant degradation due to pest species for more than 100 years, firmly on the road to recovery.
"Pest eradication is costly, as it requires the removal of every last individual of a species, but in the long run is far cheaper than ongoing pest control."
Mr Groom said the island's considerable size of 12,785 hectares, and its location 1500 kilometres southeast of Tasmania in the sub-Antarctic, presented incredible logistical challenges.
"Meticulous planning was required to meet these challenges and to minimise the impact on non-target species," Mr Groom said.
"The project's success has been an incredible feat of persistence and dedication by the hunters and dog handlers from the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service."
"They have scoured the island intensively, walking 90,000 km, more than two times the earth's circumference, in their efforts to locate any surviving individual pests."
"While it may take a decade or more for the island's ecosystem to achieve equilibrium following the removal of the pest species, there are already significant signs of recovery in terms of vegetation and bird species.
"It was expected that up to 24 bird species will benefit from the eradication project, and signs of increased breeding success of some species are encouraging."
Mr Groom said biosecurity measures for all shipping to the island have been improved in a joint program between the Australian Antarctic Division and the Parks and Wildlife Service.
Yes, it can be done! Now for the mainland!
Great news indeed. Yes Woko, the mainland. Maybe we'lll get there in the end, with the help of scientists and an educated and un-apathetic population.
That is interesting but what about the native rodents on the island. I assume they were also eradicated by dogs and poison baits. Using dogs for sniffing only maybe?
I have been doing a lot of research on Macquarie Island over the last few days. It seems that it was formed from rocks from the mantle and has never been joined to any other land mass, so perhaps there was never any native animals on it. From what i have been reading the only things that live there are birds and seals.
Prior to the cats being eradicated in 2000, they were responsable for the extinction of the Macquarie Rail and Maquarie island Parakeet. But the problem with the cats being gone the rabbits and rodents had no predator so there population exploded.
Rats were eating chicks to survive so had a huge impact on the birdlife.
Rabbits from there eating habits cause erosion and further more landslides, these landslides killed many nesting birds. But since there eradication the plant life is recovering and will reduce this problem.
We did have one bad impact with the baiting, birds that ate the posioned rodents did die, but since the baiting has stopped the bird numbers have again increased.
As for the dogs they say they were trained for this, so i would imagine the impact on the wildlife would have been minimal at worst but i would be surprised if the the dogs would have killed anything but what they were trained to kill of sniff out.
My opinion is that they did the right thing by eradicating all ferals at once and not just one at a time and with the (as far as i can find) minimal impact we had on the natives far outweighs the massive impact the ferals were having.
Shorty......Canon gear
Canberra
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That's very interesting, thank you for posting that information shorty.
I've seen at least two documentaries on Macquarie Island but I don't recall native rodents being mentioned.