Gough Island Blues

It was 14 December 2021 and I was feeling pretty good.

- By Peter Ryan

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.