The art of the impossible

The extermination of every single one of South Georgia’s rats, for the sake of its birds, was confirmed at a press conference in London last week. A summer of searching with dogs and bait two years after the last poison was deployed turned up no sign of a rodent. This achievement is remarkable, not least because it was deemed impossible right up until it was achieved. It was a barmy idea, way out there, crazy, bound to fail. Like lots of other ideas. Maybe there’s a lesson here.

The island got infested with rats from whaling ships centuries ago, and they soon exterminated endemic pintails and pipits from the main island, driving the remnant populations of prions and petrels into the rat-free mountains. Only the penguins were rat proof. (It is a little known international law, deriving from an Antarctic treaty, that birds’ names down there must begin with ‘p’.)

Then, New Zealanders and Australians worked out how to use new poison baits slung out of helicopters to wipe out rats on two subantarctic islands, Campbell and Macquarie. But South Georgia was a different matter: a precipitous mountain range sticking out of an iceberg-infested sea in the stormiest part of the Furious Fifties latitude with no runway, 800 miles from the nearest land. The island’s ice-free and rat-infested areas were nearly ten times the size of Campbell island.

No way could you ensure that you’d killed every last rat and if you failed, it would not just be a huge waste of money but set back conservation efforts all round the world. Somebody might lose their life in the attempt. ‘Regrettably, this is virtually impossible,’ wrote one expert about the idea of exterminating South Georgia’s rats. But a handful of people in the miniature South Georgia government and the little South Georgia Heritage Memorial Trust nonetheless decided to give it a go.