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The Great Puffin Revival Of 2002
Huw Williams reports. |
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Puffins have bred successfully on Ailsa Craig off the Ayrshire coast for the first time in 50 years.
Scientists say this justifies their decision to eradicate the brown rats, which had wiped out the puffins that used to nest there.
Ailsa Craig, or Paddy's Milestone, is a massive lump of rock you can see from most of the coast of Ayrshire. It provides granite for curling stones. And it ought to be a haven for puffins.
It used to be, until the brown rats arrived. It's thought they may have taken refuge after ships were wrecked on the island's rocks. Or maybe they hitched a ride on boats supplying coal to the lighthouse built there in the 1880s.
However they got there, the rats had a devastating impact on Ailsa Craig's puffins. One ornithologist put the population at at least a quarter of a million pairs in the 1860s. There were so many, he said, that when he disturbed them, they caused "a bewildering darkness" in the sky.
But a century later and there were hardly any birds nesting on the island ... and none managing to breed successfully. The rats ate eggs and chicks, and effectively wiped out the puffins.
So the decision was taken to eradicate all the brown rats. If it had been any other species, that might have been controversial. When Today reported in July on similar plans to cull all the hedgehogs on the Uists in the outer Hebrides, it provoked an outcry from listeners who said it was cruel and the animals should be transported to the mainland. But - strangely - not so many people made a fuss about wiping out Rattus norvegicus.
So in the early 1990s scientists went ahead with the cull. They covered the island in poisoned wheat, left so that only the rats would take and eat it.
And now Dr Bernie Zonfrillo, from the University of Glasgow says, there are no rats on the island at all. He's proved this fact after years of monitoring; special chew sticks impregnated with fat that rats find irresistible; and from the state of food sources which used to be taken within days, but are now left untouched.
And now, ten years later, the best proof of all. Twenty puffins nested on Ailsa Craig this summer. And two pairs - just two pairs - were seen carrying fish back to their burrows. That must mean they'd produced chicks.
It may be a small start. But it is a start. Dr Zonfrillo says he was about to give up hope that the birds would ever come back. But now he's hopeful there'll be more breeding pairs next year.
And, he says, it's not just the puffins that are benefiting since the rats were exterminated. Other sea-birds on Ailsa Craig are successfully producing more chicks, plus rare plants, other mammal species and even the island's reptiles are flourishing again, now the rats have gone.
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The island of Ailsa Craig
©Maybole Community Council
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A returning puffin
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