Back to nature: Macquarie Island’s remarkable resurgence
Once overrun by rabbits and rats, Macquarie Island was declared pest-free only five years ago. Would this wild treasure ever recover?
By rights, I shouldn’t be laughing. Like a clumsy toddler, I’ve taken another comic tumble over giant tussock grass, landing flat on my back. Gazing up at a bright blue sub-Antarctic sky I try not to think of the predatory skuas — large brown gull-like birds with an air of evil — that are liable to take out an eye if you land face-up after a fall. When not tripping over plants that tower over me, triffid-like, I’m slipping on the dark green leaves and hairy stalks of the Macquarie Island cabbage. Or engaged in the futility of extracting large spiky seeds from my clothes and gloves. The reason for my mirth, despite these hazards and embarrassments, is that I’ve come to a wonderful epiphany: this is exactly how Macquarie Island should be.
It’s eight years since I was first on the nation’s wildest and most remote outpost, this incongruous mountain range that rises abruptly, inexplicably, from the vastness of the Southern Ocean, halfway from Tasmania to Antarctica. Back then, the terrain had been all too easy to navigate — thousands of rampaging rabbits had grazed the vegetation so severely it had in places almost disappeared. The ground was hard and any surviving plants were easily trampled underfoot. Something had to be done if the treeless island — granted World Heritage status in 1997 primarily for its unique geology but also its “outstanding natural beauty” — was to regain a semblance of its former glory.
Now I am seeing this improbable land at something very close to its natural state. One not seen since the 1800s. Not even Antarctic hero Douglas Mawson, who made the island a radio base for his pioneering 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, describing it as “one of the wonder spots of the world”, saw it looking this good. The island, a 34km-long and up to 5.5km-wide sliver of uplifted seafloor 1500km south-east of Hobart, was declared free of rabbits and rodents in 2014 following the largest successful island pest eradication program of its kind ever attempted. But the question remained: how would the island respond to its liberation from pestilence?
“You’re relying on seeds within the soil and also wind dispersal of seeds,” Noel Carmichael, the island’s Hobart-based executive officer and a former ranger, explains. “Some areas had been quite heavily grazed for a number of years, so we weren’t quite sure whether there’d still be viable seed in the ground.” Like an anxious farmer watching his crops, Carmichael has returned to the island regularly from Hobart to monitor progress, mostly recently last month. After one extensive field trip, no amount of chilling mist and gale-driven hail on the island they call “Macca” can erase his smile: “It’s fantastic to see; it’s been faster than we thought it was going to be. The vegetation has changed dramatically.”
The tall tussock, as I’ve discovered on a hike at North Head, in the island’s far north, is leading the charge. In fact, a new measure of gale has been adopted among expeditioners at the island’s research station: the tussockometer. Hillsides once animated only by swarming rabbits now hypnotise with the movement of tussock in the wind. Not far behind is the Macquarie Island cabbage (Stilbocarpa polaris), the stems and leaves of which taste more like celery and were consumed by sealers to stave off scurvy. “The cabbage is turning up in places where it hasn’t been recorded previously, which is quite amazing,” Carmichael reports. “The same can be said of the third major species, Pleurophyllum hookeri, the [silver-leaf] daisy. It’s really recovered extremely well.
“There are plants such as Huperzia, like a small clubmoss, which before eradication was found only in about a dozen locations in very low numbers, sometimes only individual plants. Now we’re up to hundreds of plants in about 200 locations,” he says. The native grass species are much denser, with huge numbers of seeds on the flowering heads. Previously, these would have been eaten by rodents or rabbits. “You now see webs from spiders everywhere, and lots of little fungi and mushrooms that all would have been eaten by the mice. So it’s an amazing success story and it really heartens me to come back and see that.”
Not so long ago, the island — known as the “Galapagos of the south” for its almost one million penguins and 15,300 elephant seal cows in season — was occupied by multiple hostile armies. Some probably arrived by accident: cats, rats and mice escaping from visiting ships. Others were deliberately foisted here after its “discovery” by sealers in 1810. Most damaging to the island’s unique vegetation was the rabbit, introduced in the 1870s. At roughly the same time, donkeys, goats and pigs were sent ashore for their various uses, while the weka, a flightless Kiwi wood-hen, was left behind a decade earlier.
Rather than foster a benign Noah’s Ark, the introductions forced the extinction of the island’s endemic parakeet and rail (small ground-living bird) species. Burrowing petrels, which excavate tunnels for their nests, were sitting ducks for the rodents, which devoured their chicks and eggs, largely driving some species from the island. Four species of graceful, stately albatross also suffered. The rabbits’ destruction of vegetation left their nests exposed to the cold and gales of the furious fifties — the winds that circle these latitudes unchecked by any significant landmass — and their young to easier predation. Even the island’s four species of penguin, for decades until 1919 slaughtered for their oil, were not immune from the alien invasion. Erosion linked to rabbit overgrazing led to frequent landslides that would bury hundreds of penguins at a time.
The harsh climate exterminated the larger invaders, while wekas were eradicated by shooting in the 1980s and cats by trapping and hunting in 2002, leaving rabbits and rodents to rule the roost. The rabbit population reached 150,000 before the viral disease myxomatosis, introduced in 1978, temporarily checked their advance. However, by the early 2000s, the seemingly indomitable rabbits had reasserted control over the virus and the island. “The last time I wintered on Macquarie, in 2004, I was really shocked at the damage rabbits were causing,” says Carmichael. Hillsides were described as “alive” with the pests and the level of grazing as “catastrophic”.
After years of buck-shoving, planning and pleading, the Tasmanian and Federal governments finally stumped up a combined $24.6 million to attempt the seemingly impossible: the eradication of rabbits, rats and mice from this inhospitable landmass three days’ sailing from Australia.
In 2010, there was a worrying false start: almost a thousand seabirds became collateral damage to the first use of poison baits. After a pause until the following year, the deadly calicivirus was introduced and a fresh baiting onslaught unleashed on the rabbits. This time there were extra mitigation measures to protect the seabirds. The baits — 307 tonnes’ worth — were dropped from special buckets suspended 10m below helicopters. A grid system, aided by GPS, ensured virtually every inch of the 12,860ha island was baited, twice.
Then 14 armed hunters with 12 dogs — trained to hunt rabbits and rodents but to leave penguins and seals unmolested — moved in and mopped up the 13 surviving rabbits. A tense wait ensued as dogs and hunters maintained vigilance before the island was finally declared pest-free in 2014. “It is an amazing achievement,” says Carmichael. “Macquarie Island is the largest island where three species have been eradicated at the same time.”
Chris Howard is finishing a 12-month stint as ranger in charge of the island. He believes the best is yet to come. “We are at the very, very beginning,” Howard explains. “No one has ever seen the island as we do today. Each day is a new day. The real changes will come in 10, 15, 20 years’ time.” Already, in places, boardwalk installed before the eradications to halt erosion has been overgrown, smothered by vegetation free from rabbit teeth. The ground itself has changed, the surface returning to “green sponge”, even outside the disconcerting areas of “quaking mire” (mosses, herbs and grasses floating on a waterlogged underlayer). The botanic boom has been matched by a resurgence of burrow-nesting birds, such as Antarctic prions and grey and blue petrels. “They have all increased in numbers and are starting to recolonise some of the areas where they were before the most intense rabbit grazing damage,” Carmichael says.
Blue petrels, before eradication largely confined to a few offshore rock-stacks, have returned in droves to number more than 300 breeding pairs. Grey petrels have at least doubled to 200 breeding pairs. In an act of marvellous revenge and poetic schadenfreude, some petrels appear to have made their homes in former rabbit burrows. The four species of albatross that breed here are benefiting from the booming vegetation and more stable ground, although the full impact is yet to be seen due to their breeding cycles. “It will create a more favourable nesting habitat for the albatross,” explains Annie Philips, a wildlife veterinary ecologist at the end of a five-month stint on the island. “Previously, there were issues with nest stability and they were exposed to the elements and potential predators.”
The seabirds hit hardest by the poison baits, such as endangered northern giant petrels, appear to have bounced back to pre-baiting levels, much to everyone’s relief. The only species that seems to have gone backwards is the sinister skua. “They were preying on the rabbits and so we’ve taken away a large proportion of their food source,” Carmichael says. “Skuas have gone back to a more natural, sustainable level.”
The rampant vegetation makes life harder for expeditioners needing to hike across the island to remote field huts. “It can make it quite challenging walking through some of the slopes and up and down some of the valleys,” says field training officer Stuart Matheson. “But it’s really nice to see. It’s the island returning to what it should be.”
The absence of rodents is a compensatory benefit. Diesel mechanic Lionel Whitehorn, spending his ninth winter on the island, bitterly recalls the rats: “They would be in all the machinery and I’d have to do repairs to chewed wire and hoses. There was a constant smell and cleaning required. The eradication was just a blessing. People can’t understand just how unpleasant the conditions were. I’ve had rats chewing my hair at night. You’d wake up to an unpleasant surprise.”
Such is the scale of the recovery that discussion has turned to the introduction of close relatives of several species driven to extinction by the pests. “The most obvious candidate is the Macquarie Island parakeet,” says Carmichael. The original species, similar to a ground parrot, was wiped out by cats and rodents. “The species we are looking at introducing, the Reischek’s parakeet, is found on the [New Zealand-owned] Antipodes Island, which is a little further north than Macquarie,” he says. “They are the most closely related species we are aware of.”
The doomed parakeet’s Kiwi cousins should fit right in, with no adverse ecological impacts. “It would be reoccupying a vacant niche in the ecosystem,” Carmichael says. Its introduction would highlight the need to keep the island pest-free. Rats and mice remain a constant threat, potentially hitching a ride back to their former enclave aboard supply vessels and tourist ships.
The frontline of that vital defence falls to a unique father and son team: Flick and Nui, scruffy fox terrier crosses who can detect the slightest whiff of rodent at the bottom of a cargo container. The dogs regularly sweep the Antarctic Division’s cargo centre on Hobart’s waterfront and the supply vessels bound for Macquarie. One dog stays aboard as the ship travels south, accompanied by a handler. Nui is on our voyage aboard the icebreaker Aurora Australis and seems at ease with high seas and walkies on the helicopter deck. Once at Macca he is one of the first ashore, like a pampered VIP. A collapsible wooden ramp allows him ready access to cargo crates, which cannot be moved to the store until he gives his approval.
The remarkable resurgence of nature on the island is matched by a reinvigorated human engagement and it, too, promises to be transformative for this far-flung outpost. Australia’s Antarctic program is rebooting its presence, having reversed a short-lived decision to close the island’s ageing research station after the Federal Government intervened to provide $50 million to build a new base from scratch.
Home to about 14 expeditioners in winter and roughly double that in summer, the station plays a key role in research programs ranging from wildlife and meteorology to monitoring radioactive particles for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Its myriad timber and tin buildings are full of charm, sprinkled around a “market square” like a Wild West town. Dating to the dawn of Australia’s modern Antarctic program in 1948, the station includes “Chippy’s Church”, built that year from scrap material believed to include timbers from a hut erected by Mawson’s 1911 expedition. (These days it houses hydroponic vegetables.)
They are much-loved historic buildings but come at a rising cost. “It’ll be a shame to lose the old station, because it’s got a lot of character,” says station leader Ali Dean. “[However] the old station requires a lot of maintenance now. It’s getting to the end of its life. Most of our job through the winter was actually maintaining the services: leaking buildings, wiring that fails. Everything is getting to the point where it needs replacing. And I guess the best way to do that is to pull down the old and to start again.”
Building a new station in a hostile climate in the remote Southern Ocean amid an Attenborough-esque abundance of wildlife is as daunting as it sounds. It is unlikely any of the old buildings will remain,riddled as many are with asbestos, but lead architect Andrew Williamson, of Hobart based IDW Architecture, is keen to design a new station that tips its hat at the island’s expeditionary spirit. “A station has a lot to do with the people and the teamwork they feel just by being here,” he says. “I think the buildings are part of that fabric.”
The new site is just south of the existing station, on the same flat isthmus. Groups of enormous male elephant seals, some wallowing in pools of foul feculence, can be seen — and smelt — lounging on the proposed construction site. Ranger Chris Howard says an elephant seal-proof fence will be erected at just the right time between the males departing and the start of the breeding season.
Project lead Travis Thom says the new station — to be built by the end of 2022 — will be compact and more efficient. It will consolidate 48 buildings to no more than 10, while the island’s six remote field huts will also be revamped or replaced.
Even those reluctant to farewell the old station are heartened by the renewed commitment to the island and to Australia’s Antarctic program that it represents. The Macca rebuild is part of a broader $450 million plan to modernise Australia’s four Antarctic stations. At a time of increased speculation about the potential for militarisation or exploitation of the frozen continent and the oceans that surround it, Australia is firmly restating its position as an Antarctic nation. Canberra has also committed $2 billion for a new icebreaker, as well as a paved runway at Davis Station and a new overland ice traverse capability.
Macquarie Island is a key part of this historic re-engagement; no longer the forgotten outpost, left to its ruin. “One would like to think that we are now astute enough to value the island and to look after it,” says Howard. “The lessons have been learnt.”
ISOLATION STATION
A mechanic doubling as a surgical assistant? All part of life in a remote sub-Antarctic outpost
Suffer a medical mishap on an Antarctic station and you may look up from the operating table to see a mechanic or plumber scrubbed up, scalpel poised. Using tradies as “lay surgical assistants” is just one of many forms of multiskilling vital to keeping a small, isolated community ticking, thousands of kilometres from home and physical help. On sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, one of four Australian Antarctic Division stations, the communications expert for the past 12 months was also the station brewer, with a sideline in nuclear test monitoring and ham radio. The storeman was also a firey, while the doctor typically has an unofficial role as keeper of station secrets. All personnel — from diesel mechanics to scientists, even the station leader, must take turns as “slushy” (kitchen hand and cleaner).
Diesel mechanic Chris Burns jumped at the chance of doubling as a lay surgical assistant, or LSA, requiring two weeks’ training and surgical observation at the Royal Hobart Hospital before his year-long stint on Macquarie Island. “It was a bit confronting at first being part of the theatre operating team,” says Burns. “But we’ve got a farm back home in Mackay so I’m used to guns, guts and gore. We learnt how to set up the operating theatre, lay all the instruments out, operate the medical machines and count the instruments to make sure you’ve got them all back at the end.”
Thankfully, he hasn’t been called on to assist station doctor Cathryn O’Sullivan with more than dental work and the taking of blood. Even so, the experience has left an impression on Burns, and may inspire a career change. “If they stop needing diesos, there’s always a job in medicine,” he says.
O’Sullivan, who also served as station postmistress, says the LSAs’ practical skills often make them more useful than “nerdy medical students”. She is well placed to judge. After being involved in an accident at Casey Station about four years ago, she needed the help of LSAs to reset a broken bone in her hand. Guided by doctors in Australia via video link, they did a sterling job.
The psychological challenges of station life begin once the icebreaker Aurora Australis sets its course for home, having dropped off supplies and a change of personnel for another season. “It’s the most surreal experience,” says Kat Panjari, beginning her second winter “down south”, as Macquarie Island station leader. “You look around at your colleagues and you think ‘it’s just us now’. It can be a difficult point of grief and separation.” Diesel mechanic Lionel Whitehorn, who has spent much of the past 30 years working on Macca and the continental stations, agrees: “It’s when people realise they are isolated and are here until the next ship comes. It doesn’t strike home until the ship’s gone.”
Attempts are made to celebrate the abandonment. Flares are lit by way of send-off, and a ban on alcohol imposed for safety reasons during the busy resupply period is lifted.
A degree of vulnerability and the need for self-reliance breeds a sense of community, says Panjari, a Melbourne project officer when not expeditioning. “We can share that sense of being away from loved ones. You do become a family.” Even so, a key role of station leader is maintaining morale and dealing with inevitable tensions within a small group — typically 14 to 16 over winter — forced together in extreme isolation. “You hear horror stories of fractured communities, where there’s been different camps of people that didn’t interact with one another, and it’s quite useful to draw on those,” says Panjari. Ali Dean, who served as station leader for 12 months before Panjari took over in March, agrees: “It’s the personality clashes that would probably be the hardest thing to deal with,” she says. “You can’t put a group of people together and expect them all to be best friends. So it’s building that expectation of community that doesn’t always happen organically.”
Decent tucker helps. This winter’s chef, Kerryn Oates, says this can be a challenge — particularly when mishaps occur, such as a bug wiping out the hydroponic vegetables. “We become fitters and turners — fit it into a pot and turn it into something else,” she says. A rival for most important person on station is the brewer. “The bar is quite often the social centre, so the right things to stock it with can be crucial,” says Norbert Trupp, who has just finished a 12-month stint as communications technical officer, ham radio operator and brewer, among other duties. “We’ll put on a special brew for summer, like a light pale ale. In winter, we might put out a darker ale or stout.”
Whitehorn, 66, is spending his ninth and probably last winter on the island; he has spent more of the past 30 years on Macquarie and Antarctica than he has in Australia. “I have more trouble fitting back into life in Australia than I do on Macca or the continent,” he says. “Looking back to the island as it recedes into the darkness when I leave, it will be a sad time.”
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