The text message turned heads in the office of the tribal government on St. Paul Island, Alaska, when it arrived in June. A resident had reported a rat sighting.
“I got PTSD immediately,” Lauren Divine, the director of the island’s Ecosystem Conservation Office, told The Washington Post.
Rats are a nuisance in the alleyways and dumpsters of large cities like New York or Washington. But on St. Paul, a volcanic island in the Bering Sea about 200 miles off the Alaskan coast, they threaten entire species. A motley and colourful cast of seabirds, including puffins and parakeet auklets, call the island home. And a single wayward rodent hiding in the tundra could spread disease and feast on eggs and chicks, to devastating effect.
Enter the rat strike team.
With an array of traps, field cameras and peanut butter – irresistible bait to the rodents – St. Paul officials and experts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have spent the last few months combing neighbourhoods, trails and the island’s sweeping coast in a months-long hunt. Catching just a single rodent in St. Paul, they’ve discovered, is a daunting task. In 2018, when a sighting was last reported on the island, it took almost a year to find and poison a single rat in a warehouse in St. Paul’s harbour. This year’s search is just beginning.
“We’re the last line of defence,” Divine said. “For keeping the island ecosystem intact and healthy.”
The birds’ seclusion makes them vulnerable. Seabirds nest on the ground or in burrows and lack the instincts to escape interloping predators like rats, which aren’t native to the island but sometimes arrive as stowaways on ships. The situation south of St. Paul, on another island chain, shows the worst case scenario. Rodents were accidentally introduced to some of the Aleutian Islands, which stretch from southern Alaska between the Bering Sea and Pacific Ocean, by military ships during the Second World War. The invasive rat populations that have taken root since have devastated seabird populations.
“Rats and birds and islands together are not a good combination,” said Stacey Buckelew, an expert in the Alaska regional office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The people of St. Paul, a tight-knit community of fishers that routinely welcomes tourists to their birdwatcher’s paradise, know the stakes. Rat prevention is part of the school curriculum, Buckelew said, and residents are told to report sightings as soon as possible.
That preparation led to quick action when the alert came in June: Two residents sitting outside their apartment saw what they believed to be a rat scurry out from underneath the stairs. It immediately prompted a response from Divine’s office, which works together with Buckelew and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
How do you ferret out a single rat hiding on an island 43 square miles across? It’s less exciting than Buckelew’s job title – island invasive species strike team biologist – might suggest.
“If it’s a single rat on a big island, it’s a little bit like finding a needle in a haystack,” Buckelew said.
The team starts by spreading a slew of traps, cameras and other indicators to locate the rat, Buckelew said. Many of the traps are commonplace: snap traps baited with peanut butter, Snickers bars or marshmallow fluff. His team also searches for rat urine, which glows under ultraviolet light, and sets up motion-activated trail cameras. Only once they’ve located a rat will the strike team deploy rodenticides, which can also harm other animals on the island.
But rats are shy and wary of unfamiliar environments, Buckelew said, and sightings are rare. So far, St. Paul’s most recent rodent visitor has stayed out of sight. It’s a nerve-racking wait – rats can reproduce very quickly, and Buckelew said she dreads the possibility of a pregnant female rat evading detection for this long.
“We’re all kind of sitting on pins and needles right now,” Buckelew said. “Just wondering if this rat is out there [and] if it’s out there, what it’s doing.”
The hunt has animated the St. Paul community, which has heeded calls from Divine’s office on posters, social media and over the radio to stay vigilant. Families have offered to help monitor mousetraps, and fishers have asked Divine’s team to place cameras near fisheries in hopes of baiting the rat out with odours from their trawls, she said.
“Everyone is working together,” Divine said.
It may just be a waiting game. Buckelew said the previous rat to haunt St. Paul in 2018 evaded hunters for several months before cooling temperatures in the fall and winter forced it indoors to search for food, where the strike team found and eventually poisoned it. She hopes the same will happen with this rat.
The hunt may also spur a temporary change in legislation so that the rat strike team can bring in canine reinforcements: federal law forbids dogs from being brought onto St. Paul to protect fur seals, another vulnerable species on the island. Buckelew has pushed for an emergency exemption to allow tracking dogs to be used in the rat hunt, she said.
Until then, the rat strike team will continue its diligent watch over the traps and cameras now scattered across St. Paul in hopes of catching the flash of a tail or a paw that will end the search and allow the island’s birds – and biologists – to rest easy.
“To have a dead rat in the hand will feel good,” Buckelew said. “And I think we can all sleep a little easier.”