18 years after rats were eradicated, Tromelin Island off the coast of Madagascar is a thriving colony of seabirds once again.
The same story happened over and over during the age of exploration: Europeans brought rats or rabbits on board their ships and dumped them on delicate, pristine island ecosystems.
Hundreds of islands became desolate wastelands this way, damage that has for the most part been reversed, as GNN has reported, in one of the greatest conservation stories ever told.
Now, this small teardrop of sand, rock, and palm trees in the southern Indian Ocean, is the most recent example of conservationists being able to completely rewild a landscape back to a period before European contact.
Spanning just 1 square kilometer, Tromelin Island is now home to thousands of breeding pairs of 7 seabird species like the masked and red-footed boobies.
By 2013, these two species had doubled in number from the precarious, rat oppressed lows of just a handful in 2004. In the subsequent 9 years, white terns, brown noddies, sooty terns, wedge-tailed shearwaters, and lesser noddies all came back on their own initiative.
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Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island, told Hakkai Magazine how, in some cases, restoring seabird populations can be a tricky thing based on the particular species’ nesting habits.
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On other islands where Le Corre has worked, they’ve had to install robotic bird calls and life-size replicas to convince the birds the island is a safe place to nest again. But Tromelin Island needed no such help, since these terns, noddies, and boobies are much more dispersed in their nesting patterns.
“In terms of conservation, it’s a wonderful success,” Le Corre says.
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