Before the eradication attempt, the number of house mice on Gough Island peaked at over one million each summer.
I was at Oliver Tambo Airport, waiting to fly home. In addition to some useful work in Mozambique, I'd finally tracked down two of the handful of southern African birds that still eluded me. I was looking forward to a couple of weeks with the family over the festive season. Then I got a call from Mark Anderson.
He jumped straight in:I've got devastating news. They've photographed a mouse on Gough.'I felt sick. Few things could have elicited such a visceral response. Maybe the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet or the outbreak of nuclear war. But this was closer to home. I was indeed devastated.
The Gough Island Restoration Programme attempted to eradicate mice from Gough during the winter of 2021. I was part of the team tasked with establishing insurance populations of captive Gough Buntings and Gough Moorhens ahead of the eradication attempt. But my involvement stretched back 20 years to when Richard Cuthbert first discovered the unusually low survival of Tristan Albatross chicks and suspected mice must be the cause.
Esta historia es de la edición May/June 2022 de African Birdlife.
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Esta historia es de la edición May/June 2022 de African Birdlife.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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EXPLORING NEW HORIZONS
Keith Barnes, co-author of the new Field Guide to Birds of Greater Southern Africa, chats about the long-neglected birding regions just north of the Kunene and Zambezi, getting back to watching birds and the vulture that changed his life.
footloose IN FYNBOS
The Walker Bay Diversity Trail is a leisurely hike with a multitude of flowers, feathers and flavours along the way.
Living forwards
How photographing birds helps me face adversity
CAPE crusade
The Cape Bird Club/City of Cape Town Birding Big Year Challenge
water & WINGS
WATER IS LIFE. As wildlife photographer Greg du Toit knows better than most.
winter wanderer
as summer becomes a memory in the south, the skies are a little quieter as the migrants have returned to the warming north. But one bird endemic to the southern African region takes its own little winter journey.
when perfect isn't enough
Egg signatures and forgeries in the cuckoo-drongo arms race
Southern SIGHTINGS
The late summer period naturally started quietening down after the midsummer excitement, but there were still some classy rarities on offer for birders all over the subregion. As always, none of the records included here have been adjudicated by any of the subregion's Rarities Committees.
flood impact on wetland birds
One of the features of a warming planet is increasingly erratic rainfall; years of drought followed by devastating floods. Fortunately, many waterbirds are pre-adapted to cope with such extremes, especially in southern Africa where they have evolved to exploit episodic rainfall events in semi-arid and arid regions. But how do waterbirds respond to floods in areas where rainfall - and access to water - is more predictable? Peter Ryan explores the consequences of recent floods on the birds of the Western Cape's Olifants River valley.
a star is born
It’s every producer’s dream to plan a wildlife television series and pick the right characters before filming.
