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Rat patrol

Park rangers send the rats packing from one of Canada's most beautiful parks.

The second storm breaks on us in the night. In the lagoon's protective hug the float camp moves rhythmically, like a baby in a womb. By morning rain is torrential, the wind a howling fury, and waves tower over trees along the island's forested rim. These forces combine with a rapidly ebbing tide to spin our concrete barge, which strains mightily against the ropes anchoring it to both seafloor and shore, like it's resisting the flush of a giant cosmic toilet.

After breakfast, James Hilgemann, Clint Johnson Kendrick, and Peter Dyment head out in their launch, Yo-Dang, to check on some traps. In the strange half-light entering the kitchen command centre, cook Kris Leach clears dishes while next to her, stationed at computers, Lexi Forbes enters data and Roger Packham reviews photos. Yo-Dang returns within the hour, thwarted by the weather.

"Nasty out there," says Hilgemann, shaking his head. "Couldn't get anywhere near shore."

"It's blowing 50-plus knots — spray, waterspouts, everything," adds a wide-eyed and usually laconic Dyment. The largest swells this day will reach 19 metres, the strongest wind gust 170 kph.

Kendrick settles into a chair and picks up a logbook. There's not much to do save what every other living creature out here is doing: hunker down.

Later, there's a satellite conference call to headquarters on the mainland to discuss battle strategy. On speakers in the cramped cooking/dining/mission control, the conversation — like the entire operation — is so facilitative and professional that it's like some hologram projecting an optimal model of people working together, so contra everyday life — let alone government — as to be surreal. What's more surreal is that the reason 11 of us are bobbing in the angry North Pacific — surrounded by strategic maps, wall charts, radio and battery chargers, computers displaying images from dozens of remote cameras, bottomless coffee, and a plate of enormous cinnamon buns — has nothing to do with peaceable solutions: this is war.

Three days before, I'd arrived in Queen Charlotte City on Haida Gwaii. With its fishing-fleeted docks, grimy Department of Fisheries and Oceans trucks, and glut of funky guest houses garlanded in maritime kitsch, it could have been just another B.C. fishing town if not for the mop-haired kid clutching a ceremonial eagle feather in the Sea Raven restaurant. It was a reminder that the first fishermen here were, in fact, the Haida people, and that their current influence over forestry, mining, fishing, cultural, and land issues was greater than at any time since Europeans began systematic exploitation of these lush, biodiverse "Islands at the Edge of the World." But there was one thing the Haida hadn't gained control over, a once-troubling trickle now turned threatening flood that raised grave uncertainties about the future.

The first hint of trouble in paradise comes at the Skidegate ferry dock linking QCC on Graham Island with the Sandspit airport on Gwaii Haanas (formerly Moresby Island), in the form of a billboard entitled "Haida Gwaii Invaders." Visitors could be forgiven for expecting ruminations on historic raiding parties of First Nations rivals, or a litany of logging company misdeeds. Instead, bountiful text profiles three invasive insects and three invasive plants that the B.C. government and the Council of the Haida Nation are actively trying to prevent the introduction of.

Even potential interlopers merit XXL warnings here because the list of alien animals and plants already adversely affecting native species and indigenous people on Haida Gwaii is so populous it couldn't fit readably on any billboard. Were it so rendered, however, and you squinted down through the columns, you'd find one animal that might surprise you: rats.

When I'd signed in at Premier Creek Lodge with its sweeping view over Skidegate Channel, I'd explained to the proprietor, Leanore, that I was waiting for a plane to the Bischof Islands. "Oh, you must be with the Rat people!" she'd exclaimed, as if it were a third Haida clan next to the traditional pairing of Eagle and Raven.

"Not with them so much as interested in what they're doing," I'd offered.

Them is Parks Canada, and what they were doing — killing rats — is hardly unique in the annals of human history, certainly not enough for someone to travel 1,000 kilometres from Whistler to see how the whacking was going. Rather, the extermination reflected a new wave of conservation that spoke to our very concept of national parks, holding meaning not only for the sea kayakers who ply this remote archipelago, but also for outdoor recreationists coast to coast. In 2009, Parks Canada had kicked off Action on the Ground, earmarking $90 million for ecological restoration projects within Canada's national parks — controlled burns to reinvigorate native grasslands, salmon stream rehabilitation, and invasive species management. On Haida Gwaii, the invaders being managed were of the rodent variety.

Rats — whether Polynesian, Norwegian, or Black — are notorious hitchhikers, a trait that has seen them become ubiquitous features of any place human watercraft have ever nosed in. But it has taken several millennia of seafaring and coincident rodent delivery for mankind to finally declare war on these destructive pests in the places it matters most: islands. William Stolzenburg's 2011 book, Rat Island, tracks this global battle, its title referencing a boil of tundra-covered rock jutting from the icy waters of the Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia, where shipwrecked rats had once wrought the same havoc as they have in Haida Gwaii.

Debarking first from 18th-century whaling ships, Norway rats had multiplied and spread across the archipelago, decimating seabird populations on 18 small islands in the weightily titled Gwaii Haanas National Park Marine Conservation Reserve and Haida Heritage Site. Surveys in the 1970s on tiny Arichika Island and the equally minuscule Bischof group had turned up 1,600 breeding pairs of Ancient Murrelet (often referred to as Canada's penguin) and 700 pairs of Cassin's Auklet. Today, neither bird can be found there, the pigeon-sized Murrelet teetering on Canada's endangered species list. Parks Canada and the Haida, joint administrators of the park, hoped that a new program — labelled the tongue-twisting SGin Xaana Sdiihltl'Ixa (Night Birds Returning) for the birds' habit of holing up at night in shoreline burrows — could turn things around.

Partnering with California-based Island Conservation, an adept remover of invasive species with high-profile successes in places like the Galapagos, Parks first spent a year studying the rats' habits on the islands via sensor-equipped cameras. Then, beginning August 1, 2011, it placed poison bait into some 400 previously deployed stations on Arichika and the Bischofs. The design and placement of the hexagonal, black-plastic boxes made it almost impossible for non-target species to reach the bait; rats, however, could enter at will, ferret delicious bits laced with the anticoagulant brodifacoum back to their burrows, share it with family and friends, then quietly bleed to death. Project staff would replace bait and remove any visible rat carcasses for eight weeks, after which, were no more found, success would be declared.

My arrival coincided with the project's wind-down phase, so I'd hoped to join in the victory dance, which I'd imagined might be something akin to Ranger Rick meets the Pied Piper. But that meant hopping a float-plane south, and that hadn't looked promising.

I'd gone to sleep that first night in QCC amidst widespread weather warnings. At breakfast a crusty old dude who'd been on Haida Gwaii since the last Ice Age had brandished a wooden barometer with an ashen look on his face.

"It's the lowest I've ever seen," he'd whispered, pointing to a needle buried well off the scale. Outside, rain lashed and trees — big trees! — bent double. We weren't going anywhere, pointing to the difficulty of even attempting such a project in this storm-wracked area.

Being grounded, however, offered time to visit Parks' resident Haida cultural liaison, Barb Wilson. Though the Haida's abundant art — totem and mortuary poles, long-house entrances, canoes, argillite — leans heavily on animal iconography, nowhere will you find a kuggin (rat). Ergo, the Haida were firm partners in Parks' campaign.

"We're all interested in reestablishing an intact ecosystem," Wilson explained. "Ancient Murrelets and their eggs were food when I was a little girl, and though no one eats them now, Night Birds Returning is important for cultural reasons."

Wilson recited a litany of damage by alien species on Haida Gwaii to medicinal plants, berry gathering, regeneration of cedar, and various indigenous birds, mammals and sea life. "The impact of invasive species is cumulative, and if we don't do something soon we'll be living way out in the Pacific on rocky outcrops with no plants — I don't want to leave that for my grandkids."

The challenge was clear next day when I finally flew to the Bischofs during a weather window with Laurie Wein, Project Manager and de facto head of Parks' Kuggin Patrol. A low tide allowed for an aerial appreciation of how the intertidal zone effectively doubled the area of some of the smaller islands. "Rats thrive here because each time the tide goes out it's like someone dumping bags of food on the beach," Wilson had told me. "A buffet restocked every twelve hours."

We'd circled the float camp, landing on the island's leeward side. Taxiing on the water, a smallish bear scuttled off a cobbled beach into the bush. Offloading supplies onto the Yo-Dang, we heard how the bear had shown up a couple days before — on an island where bears had never been recorded — trashed a few bait stations and consumed their contents. Not enough to do it any harm, but as a precaution the bear had been left a deer haunch containing Vitamin K — the antidote to brodifacoum — which it also happily scarfed. The plan now was to snare, tranquilize and move the interloping bruin to a plush, far-off salmon stream. But all this was a sidenote to a more gratifying bigger picture: victory in the War of the Rats now seemed all but certain; bait uptake had ceased on both Arichika and the Bischofs and no carcasses could be found (indeed only seven turned up the entire time — proof of the plan's efficacy in keeping poisoned rodents from being consumed by unintended targets like eagles, as had happened in the Alaska case). All that remained was to secure whatever bait would be left out over winter for rat stragglers that escaped the original dragnet.

After a quick lunch the group had split. Haida Gwaii's lone conservation officer, Hilgemann, who'd been summoned to tackle the bear, remained at camp with Parks' Kendrick and Dyment. Packham, Forbes, and Ainsley Brow of B.C.-based, Coastal Conservation, another partner, joined myself and a Parks crew of Wein, Tysen Husband, and Debby Gardiner — an affable supervisor who piloted another launch, the Adelita, a half-hour south through swelling seas to Arichika while reciting rat-killing poetry she'd concocted.

On Arichika, bait stations had been laid out in lines corresponding to 50 x 50-metre grids (an adult male rat's territory is about 10,000m2 and contains several females, so there was some built-in overlap — or overkill, as it were). Wein, Forbes and I headed up one line, Packham and Brow each took another. Hiking over slick intertidal rock and scrambling up vertical embankments aided by fixed ropes, it was clear that the work's difficulty and physical demand matched the project's lengthy research, design, and deployment components. And that wasn't the only labour-intensive part: I watched Forbes unlock each bait box, make notes, enter data on a portable device to be computer-uploaded later, bag brodifacoum in a small ziploc, pin it inside the box, then shut and lock it again. With some 100 stations to service in dense bush and rugged terrain, Arichika suddenly hadn't seemed quite so small. Indeed by this point Packham and his troops had walked some 1,500 kilometres over 822 person-hours checking bait, cameras and carcasses, an impressive and thorough campaign.

The storm day that began this narrative is indeed a washout. When it clears the next day I accompany Packham to repair stations trashed by the bear so they're ready for re-baiting. It's tough going, the tangle and moisture equivalent to any jungle. It's also treacherous. As on Arichika, we ascend steep, mossy embankments, clambering over and under massive logs and other obstacles. Packham anchors boxes with rebar and zip-ties to the piercing cries of gulls, which wheel in clouds over sea-lions and whales feeding on herring and needlefish offshore — the great natural cycle that night birds were once a part of here.

Behind camp, Packham and I traipse across a cabin site since reclaimed by the forest. It belonged to a draft-dodging hippie named Butterfly who'd died in a woodstove fire in the 1970s, his charred body reputedly found on the beach clutching a guitar as if he'd been struggling toward the water. There's a story about how Gardiner and another Parks female had been spooked here while surveying a couple years back. Retreating to Parks' permanent encampment on nearby Huxley Island, the other girl had gone directly to her room and shut the door. Gardiner, also quiet, sat down beside Kendrick.

"What's wrong with you two?" Kendrick asked.

"Well..." Gardiner hesitated, "we heard someone crying for help."

"Then what are you doing here?" cried Kendrick, leaping up in alarm. "Let's go!"

"Um... You don't understand. There was nobody there..."

Indeed the idyll of these far-flung islets is often usurped by the unexplained. On their first outing of the day, Hilgemann, Kendricks and Dyment discover that the bear has somehow cleaned out the pot snares they'd hoped to corral it with, so they dismantle them and return in defeat. But surrender doesn't sit easy. The animal might just move off the island on its own when the berries are gone, but Wein and Packham aren't happy about gambling on that. Kendrick loads a photo card on the computer and the group gathers to watch the bear's actions of the past few days. Photos reveal that it always returns to places it has been rewarded — like the pot snares, or deer haunches. Though it hasn't touched any rat-bait stations in days, it would bring peace of mind to get it off. James decides on one last attempt before our outgoing plane arrives at 5 p.m. Accompanying him, Kendrick, Dyment and I help lug the pot-snares to an area above the beach where I'd first seen the bear. To get it to reach up and into a pot — where it's paw would be held in a soft snare until it was tranquilized — Hilgemann attaches them to trees at thigh height. Then in goes high-graded bait: chicken, crabmeat, gravy from last night's prime rib, cinnamon buns, frozen blueberries, sausages fried lovingly for the occasion, and dollops of molasses. Hell, if it weren't for the can of cat food Hilgemann adds I'd eat it.

An hour before the plane arrives the problem takes care of itself in a way that's as inexplicable as its origin. Overexcited, the bear manages to squeeze its head through a snare meant only for a paw and, panicking when the mechanism trips, hangs itself over a log. James has never seen anything like it.

Exterminations of any kind aren't fun, rats included, but it's beyond sad to lose even a single member of an abundant species — especially to random accident — when superhuman provisions are made to protect the animals your conservation efforts are meant to help. Before rat-baiting began, some fifty deer carcasses had been laid out on points and islands surrounding the Bischofs as mitigation for resident ravens and eagles; each morning the islands' birds happily flew off to feed on free deer meat while the crew fanned out to look for anything that might harm them or other indigenous species. The bear's appearance was unaccountable, as was its death, but the unfortunate mishap took a distant backseat to an incredible act of hands-on conservation: by the time Hilgemann, Wein and I departed, rats, it appeared, were gone from the Bischofs and Arichika.

Later checks in November and the spring of 2012 also revealed no sign of rats. This is indeed good news. If Parks can now, as intended, eliminate rats from nearby Farady and Murchison islands, it will create a significant buffer for Hotspring, House and Ramsay Islands on which, to anyone's knowledge, rats have never been seen. By this point a damaged archipelagic ecology might be on its way to recovery, a small but important victory along a much larger battlefront.

It also looks like Action on the Ground might achieve its goal of connecting Canadians to their parks by helping them understand the value of ecological restoration. But they'll also have to understand the unpredictability of nature, the difficulty and occasional collateral costs of nudging ecosystems toward the way they were before we messed them up. Nevertheless, if night birds indeed return to the Bishofs and Arichika, reestablishing the nesting grounds of one of the country's rarest birds, not only will it be worth the time and effort, but also prove an important, perhaps motivating, point: not all of our environmental mistakes are irreversible.



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