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Literally millions of birds migrate to Haida Gwaii every summer to have their chicks.
The rainforest of the remote islands here harbour over 100 species of breeding birds.
The Ancient Murrelet is a species at risk in Canada
and over 50% of the entire global population nests on Haida Gwaii,
and almost half of those are right here in Gwaii Haanas.
Some people have asked me, "why is the Ancient Murrelet such an important species?"
And I like to think of them as a barometer of the health
of not only the oceans where they feed, but also the remote islands
where they have evolved for thousands of years in complete isolation.
Most visitors to these islands view them as peaceful, quiet retreats,
but at night, these islands really come to life.
[Birds chirping]
Ancient Murrelets evolved to return to their burrows in the dark of the night,
to avoid avian predation from native predators such as Bald Eagles and Peregrine Falcons.
So here are we are at an Ancient Murrelet burrow
and you can see that they’re pretty cryptic and often hard to spot.
Unlike other birds whose chicks remain in their nests for weeks,
Ancient Murrelet chicks tumble from their burrows after only one or two days,
drawn to the sea by the calls and songs of their waiting parents.
Unfortunately this is the time of the night when rats are most active,
and this puts Ancient Murrelets at great risk of local extinction
on islands where rats have been introduced.
[Birds chirping]
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Sadly though, whole colonies of Ancient Murrelets as well as other seabird species
have been lost as introduced rats continue to spread throughout the archipelago.
Parks Canada, the Haida Nation, and several partners
are working together to restore these critical island habitats.
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[Laurie Wein, Parks Canada]
The Night Birds Returning Project is about restoring globally significant seabird populations,
particularly those of Ancient Murrelets.
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Invasive species like rats are the number one threat to the ecological integrity of Gwaii Haanas.
Rats are voracious in terms of their consumption of eggs of seabird chicks
they will even take adult seabirds.
The Ancient Murrelet, or the Night Birds as the Haida call them, are particularly impacted by rats.
We’re concerned about their breeding habitat and their breeding success on these islands.
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There have been over 300 successful rat eradications from islands globally.
And we’ve looked to many of those to learn lessons
that we could apply here in the Haida Gwaii context.
[Chris Gill, Coastal Conservation]
The Night Birds Returning project has been in planning and development,
and in the implementation phase, since 2009.
Because this is Canada’s first aerial eradication of rats,
we wanted to make sure that we had as many experts as possible
to help us with the planning of this project.
[Pete McClelland, Coastal Conservation]
Globally now, we’ve got an eradication community that shares information.
Over time, we’ve gotten to more complex and larger islands,
and what had started in New Zealand now is being done in many countries around the world.
We first started planning the project for a ground-based eradication
on smaller islands of Bischofs and Arichika.
Using what we learned from our pilot projects,
we moved on to tackle much larger islands of Murchison and Faraday.
These were logistically much more complicated to plan an eradication on,
and required new techniques.
The technique that we focused on was an aerial broadcast methodology;
And we chose that technique because it gave us the highest probability of eradication success.
It allows us to tackle islands of much more complicated terrain, and much bigger in size.
[Gregg Howald, Island Conservation]
The implementation of rat eradications are not taken lightly.
These are built on incremental steps
to learn and understand not only number one, can you get rid of the rats
but 2, that the potential impact from the bait that you're using
the mitigation will be appropriate to minimize the risk to the non-target species.
[Pete McClelland]
Every eradication brings with it the risks where
species that you don't want to eat the bait, do
But with planning and good implementation,
those populations soon recover and far outnumber what they were initially.
You’re removing predation, you’re removing competition,
and so the species come back and the ecosystem as a whole is much healthier.
At the end of the day, this project is not about the removal of rats from the islands,
it’s really about the recovery of local seabird populations.
And ultimately about restoring balance to the ecosystem.
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