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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/10/she-kills-to-be-kind-the-mastermind-ecologist-eliminating-invasive-predators-aoe>
"In the middle of the night, nine-year-old Elizabeth Bell sprints through the
narrow bush tracks of Maud Island, racing toward the nearest ridgeline. The
darkness beyond her is almost total. There is no ambient glow from distant city
street lights: the island is a 1.2 sq mile (3.2 sq km) uninhabited speck
covered with forest, off the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.
Somewhere out there in the 1am darkness, on tracks skirting the dense, latticed
native forest, her siblings are running too, sprinting for the other headlands.
They listen for the sound of distant booming, resonant and low, like the throb
of a timpani drum or the buzz of a phone on a hard table.
The boom is the mating call of the kākāpō, one of New Zealand’s rarest birds.
Its rarity is enough to send the entire Bell family scrambling from bed in the
midnight hours. Scattered across the island’s high points, Bell and her
siblings triangulate with their father, Brian, a conservationist and ranger on
the island. Each turn on a radio transmitter and listen for the telltale beep
signalling a nearby kākāpō tag, tracking the nesting zones.
“Some people would say it was a very unusual childhood,” Bell says now, decades
later, as she steers a truck towards a nature reserve in New Zealand’s upper
South Island. “But it was just what we did.”
This was the proving ground for Elizabeth “Biz” Bell: a place and a family that
revolved around a fierce love of birds, and that helped turn her into one of
the conservation world’s great mass killers.
Today, she is one of the primary architects of a series of ambitious
conservation projects from the Caribbean to the Channel Islands. Honed in New
Zealand and now exported to the world, they are called predator-free zones, and
their primary tool is death: mass trapping or poisoning drives to eliminate
introduced predators or pests.
In doing so, Bell and her colleagues hope to halt the cascade of extinctions
exacerbated by the introduction of predatory or competing species, allowing
native and endangered creatures, particularly birds, to return and thrive."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
