Donors of Reptiles to London Zoo 1914/15: 5. M.C. Myres

Following up this series of posts, this is what Clin Keeling wrote in A Short History of British Reptile Keeping:

For instance, there was one M.C. Myres of The School House, Sherborne, Dorset, who presented two Horned Toads (as ninety-nine out of a hundred readers will know, these are Lizards actually) and an Undulated Lizard on 27th October 1914 — I imagine before going into the Army…

I am pretty sure M.C. Myres was Miles Claude Myres, the son of Professor Sir John Linton Myres, the archaeologist and Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at Oxford. Earlier in 1914 we find him, aged 14, accompanying his father plus a large portion of the British scientific establishment, on the Orient Line’s Orvieto en route to Australia for the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held throughout August. The ship left England on 3 July. Also on board were the incoming president, Sir Oliver Lodge FRS, the physicist and spiritualist (well, he was a physicist) who, at the time, was the first principal of the University of Birmingham. There was also the former president, Sir Edward Schafer (later Sharpey-Schafer) FRS (1850-1935), physiologist and author of Essentials of Histology which was used as a textbook into the 1960s [first year physiology students at Sheffield in 1962 were recommended to buy Hewer’s histology textbook instead, although a number of us had used Sharpey-Schafer at school].

Myres must have donated the lizards to London Zoo soon after his return from Australia. From the address given, it would appear that he had them at school. Horned ‘toads’ (Phyrnosoma) were not known for their longevity in captivity. Was he given them on his return from Australia but then decided not to keep them? Since these lizards are from North and Central America, it is likely that the ‘Undulated Lizard’ was Sceloporus undulatus.

Shipping records show that Miles C. Myres became a farmer in Southern Rhodesia, paralleling the life of John C Dendy, who featured in this series (see my post of 27 October 2012). Both Myres and Dendy were sons of professors; both kept reptiles; both gave the reptiles to London Zoo; both became farmers in Southern Africa. 

Miles Claude Myres, according to a family history website, died in 1931. He was married with children. Shipping records show his widow and children travelling from Liverpool to Montreal in 1940. It appears that some of his descendants are in Australia.

More on Hong Kong Rats

In the previous posts, I referred to the two hillside rats of Hong Kong, Niviventer fulvescens (Chestnut Spiny Rat) and Rattus andamanensis (Indochinese Forest Rat), to use their current nomenclature.

I also made reference to the Roof or Black Rat, Rattus rattus flavipectus, known as the Buff-breasted Rat. Well, things are not that simple with that rat now. The native house rat R.r.flavipectus is now considered to be included in Rattus tanezumi, the wide-ranging Oriental or Asiatic House Rat. The Black or Roof Rat proper, Rattus rattus, also seems to be present, introduced, like the Brown or Norway Rat (Rattus norvegicus) by ship.

Now, in a delicious twist, not only has R.r. flavipectus been included in R. tanezumi but so has Sladen’s rat — the true Sladen’s rat (R.r. sladeni) — not, please note, the form to which the name was misapplied in Hong Kong. So, in Hong Kong, the misnaming of what is now Rattus andamanensis was doubly wrong; Sladen’s rat could, more correctly, been assigned to R.r.flavipectus.

I now wonder whether somebody in Hong Kong realised the affinity between Sladen’s rat, R.r.sladeni) and R.r.flavipectus (all the Rattus rattus subspecies in fact) and lumped them as Sladen’s rat as a common name. Then, when it was realised that there were two forms of what was then Rattus rattus, was the Sladen’s name applied to the wrong one? In this respect, it is interesting that there is no mention of Sladen's Rat in Herklots’s book, The Hong Kong Countryside published in 1951. He thanks John Romer (who I think arrived as Pest Control Officer in 1946) for information on the rats. Ignoring the bandicoot rat, he provides notes only on Rattus norvegicus and Rattus rattus. However, he draws a distinction between Rattus rattus and R.r.flavipectus and goes on to note:

It (R.r.flavipectus) is a house-rat and is a serious pest but it is also abundant as a free-living species on the hillsides and in the fields [my italics] for it is native to South China.

My interpretation of that is what are now Rattus tanezumi and Rattus andamanensis (the free-living species on the hillsides) were not recognised as separate species. It is therefore possible that when they were, the wrong name was applied to our old friend in the lab roof.

The misnaming of species as well as changes in taxonomy has other consequences. It would appear that papers that reported research on Rattus sladeni or Rattus rattus sladeni could be interpreted as work on either Rattus tanezumi or Rattus andamanensis. If the animals were from Yunnan or surrounding areas, it would be the former; if Hong Kong, the latter.

I found an example of trying to update old information on Sladen’s Rat. My acquaintance with this species, like Huang’s Rat in an earlier post, began when I was given the offspring of some that had bred at London Zoo, in about 1963. Then in the website of the Bartlett Society (concerned with the history of zoos), I found a list, First and early breeding records for mammals in the UK and Eire. In the list is Sladen's Rat, Rattus tanezumi Temminck, 1844, bred, London Zoo 1967 (they bred there earlier as I noted). A note for the entry reads:

Zoological Society of London Annual Report 1967, p39 as R. rattus sladeni. The subspecies sladeni is no longer considered valid.

However, these rats, like (from the same source): 

Yellow-breasted Rat Rattus tanezumi Temminck, 1844 (bred London 1962) International Zoo Yearbook, Vol. 4 (1963) p227, as Rattus rattus flavipectus

and:

Chestnut Spiny Rat Niviventer fulvescens (Gray, 1847) (bred London 1964) International Zoo Yearbook, Vol. 6 (1966) p392, as Rattus huang. This species is also known as Huang's Rat.

were all sent from Hong Kong. Therefore, the record for Sladen’s Rat, has been incorrectly updated in this instance to Rattus tanezumi. 

I now find  (30 March 2026 update) from Zoological Society of London annual reports that it was Ken Searle (Dr Kenneth C. Searle 1927-2025) who sent the three types of rat to London Zoo. My guess is they were supplied by P.M. Marshall from the colonies she had established. In 1959 and 1964 he sent Huang's; in 1961 'Sladen's' and in 1962 'flavipectus'. 

The List of Mammals of Hong Kong on Wikipedia has the list of ‘ratty’ rats as I have described their current status in the last three posts. But taxonomy changes, and changes again with new evidence, new interpretations and with new fashions. So watch out to see what happens next.

UPDATED 30 March 2026

Links

Bartlett Society link to breeding records: http://www.zoohistory.co.uk/projects/first_breedings/rodentia

Rattus tanezumi:
http://www.ceropath.org/rdbsea/species/rattus%20tanezumi
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/biblio/19366/0
http://www.bucknell.edu/msw3/browse.asp?id=13001785

List of Hong Kong mammals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammals_of_Hong_Kong

What Happened to Hong Kong’s Sladen’s Rat

The second non-urban or hillside rat in Hong Kong was called Sladen’s Rat in the 1960s with the scientific name of Rattus rattus sladeni. However, it was evident even then that there was something very wrong with the taxonomy and/or identity of the rats in Hong Kong. One of the urban rats is the Black or Roof Rat (Rattus rattus), then assigned to the subspecies flavipectus. This form was thought to be native to southern China but it could, of course, have been a population derived from the native form and others brought in by ship as Hong Kong developed into a massive port from the 1840s.

The presence of two sympatric sub-species occurring as two distinct populations was clearly nonsensical. They did not appear to interbreed and sometimes their habitats overlapped. Chung Ka Bun, in his work on the two hillside rats, noted that the Buff-breasted (Rattus rattus flavipectus) occasionally strayed into the main study area, i.e. the one occupied by the so-called Sladen’s.

I have not been able to find who identified the form that occurs in Kong Kong as Sladen’s Rat. The authority usually referred to were Allen (1938) and Ellerman (1941) but they do not refer to Hong Kong or that region of China.

More recently, for reasons that will become apparent below, I found Richard Corlett’s 2001 article in Porcupine entitled, The Naming of Rats. He began his article by writing:

Whoever said "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" was surely thinking of rat taxonomy. I am therefore approaching this topic with some trepidation, but also, I hope, more as an unusually brave angel than a complete fool.

It seems that the Hong Kong rat we knew as Sladen’s Rat never was Sladen’s Rat or what became of it in the taxonomic reshuffles. From the British Museum, Corbet & Hill (1992) said it was Rattus remotus while Musser at the American Museum of Natural History called it Rattus sikkimensis. Corlett wrote that these names seemed to be complete synonyms, referring to the same species that occurs from Nepal to South China, and south to Thailand. Sikkim Rat was used as the common name on the Smithsonian Institution website but in Hong Kong there was no common name.

Rattus sikkimensis seems to have been adopted as the scientific name by those working in the University of Hong Kong. However, there is a further twist in the story. While remotus  (named by Robinson & Kloss in 1914) has priority over sikkimensis (Hinton, 1919), both names fall since they are both now included in Rattus andamanensis (Blyth, 1860) which has priority. Full details of the current nomenclature together with a bibliography (including Hong Kong) are given in the IUCN website. There, the common name is shown as Indochinese Forest Rat or Sikkim Rat. The former seems appropriate for Hong Kong usage.

The reason I looked up ‘Sladen’s Rat’ was because I was telling somebody about a very bright individual of this species and wondered if anything had been done to sort out the anomalous taxonomy. The University of Hong Kong in the 1960s would not pay for air conditioning for people but it would pay for air conditioning for equipment or animals. Therefore, if one could contrive laboratory/office space in an equipment or animal room, it was actually possible to get some work done during summer afternoons when the outdoor temperature would be in excess of 90°F (36°C) and the relative humidity higher than 90%.

We set up shop in an old animal room vacated by the medical school and taken over by Zoology. We knew a few Sladen’s rats had escaped from one of the rooms while being moved. I had my desk (a grotty old table covered in brown paper) under a window; my wife had her desk under another. Having worked all morning on salt glands, we had our lunch at our desks in the same room. I leant back to stretch and noticed a small hole in the corner of the ceiling above me. The next day the whole was a little larger; the next day larger still. Then, one day, a rat’s nose appeared in the hole. After a week or so the hole was about 40 cm in diameter and by this time the rat could put its head through the hole. Each morning our friend appeared and there it slept during the day, inhaling cool air from the room while ignoring all the activity below. One cool rat.

Further Reading and Links

Marshall, P 1967 Wild Mammals of Hong Hong. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Chung, Ka-bun 1971 An ecological study of two species of hillside rats in Hong Kong.

PhD Thesis, University of Hong Kong http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/65335

Allen, GM 1938 The Mammals of China and Mongolia. Natural History of Central Asia Series, Vol. XI, American Museum of Natural History, New York http://bit.ly/10cXBmf

Ellerman, JR 1941 The Families and Genera of Living Rodents. Vol. II. British Museum (Natural History), London http://bit.ly/15s3W1Z

Corlett, R 2001 The naming of rats. Porcupine No 23, July 2001 http://bit.ly/15s481m
Corbet, GB & Hill, JE 1992 The Mammals of the Indomalayan Region: a Systematic Review. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chung, K 2003 Hong Kong’s common rat species. Porcupine No 29, August 2003 http://bit.ly/12gkp4A
IUCN - Rattus andamanensis (with bibliography of taxonomy) http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/summary/19361/0

What Happened to Hong Kong’s Huang’s Rat

In Hong Kong in the 1960s there were two types of rat on the hillsides. In 2013 they are still there but their names have changed completely. One of these was called Huang’s Rat (Rattus huang).

I had been introduced to Huang's Rat even before going to Hong Kong. In the early 1960s some had been sent to London Zoo and had bred in the old Rodent House. I was given some of the offspring — they were beautiful animals which I reluctantly had to pass on to another rodent enthusiast. While looking at recent publications on Hong Kong mammals I realised that Huang’s Rat had disappeared from the lists.

To cut a long story short, Huang’s Rat, which had a number of common names (Eastern Spiny-haired Rat, Chinese Spiny-backed Rat) and has acquired even more (Chestnut Spiny Rat, Chestnut Rat, Chestnut White-bellied Rat), is now Niviventer fulvescens.

Huang’s Rat was originally described by John Lewis James Bonhote (1875-1922) as Mus huang in 1905. By the 1930s it had already been included within Rattus fulvescens and is shown as Rattus fulvescens huang in Allen’s (1938) The Mammals of China and Mongolia. 

Whatever the name, Niviventer fulvescens is an extremely attractive animal. PM Marshall summed up the appearance in her Wild Mammals of Hong Kong (1967):

Colour: rich orange with pure white belly.Distinctive features: rich orange coloured fur with small pale spines (thick stiff hairs) interspersed with the hairs on the back. Undersides of body and tail white.

In that excellent but now sadly discontinued publication, Porcupine, the newsletter of the then Department of Ecology and Biodiversity, University of Hong Hong, Richard Corlett described this species as cute and lovable (Number 23, July 2001), a designation with which I can only agree.

That was the easy one. Wait for the next species of rat in Hong Kong to see how complicated things can get and have got.

Donors of Reptiles to London Zoo 1915: 4. Harold Duncan Foster

The first example of an amateur reptile keeper I have found so far from the list given by Clin Keeling of those individuals who donated specimens to London Zoo around the time of the beginning of the First World War is Harold Duncan Foster. He gave two Slow Worms, a Delande's Gecko†, a Green Lizard, two European Tree-frogs, a Fire-bellied Toad, a Yellow-bellied Toad and two Great Crested Newts.

In the 1911 Census he is shown at the same address, namely, 43 Queen's Grove, St John's Wood — only a short walk from the Zoo. Born in Marylebone, he was a colliery owner, single, and employed a parlourmaid, another servant and a cook.

He married Alice G Anderson at Marylebone in 1913. Was it a coincidence that his reptiles and amphibians went to the Zoo in 1914? Or was it a case of me or those creatures? Alice died in Hampstead in 1934 aged 52.

Harold Duncan Foster died, a widower, in Hampstead in 1955, aged 71.

There is information on his family history at:
http://www.dannebrog.biz/whieldon/furley.pdf

†Delaland's Gecko?

Donors of Reptiles to London Zoo 1915: 3. Guy Aylmer

Following up this series of posts, this is what Clin Keeling wrote in A Short History of British Reptile Keeping:

It's 8th August 1914 and one Guy Aylmer of Risby Manor, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, enriches the 1883 reptile house with two Black-collared Cobras, an African Rock Python, a Green Night Snake, a Burrowing Viper, a Rufescent Snake, an Emerald Tree Snake (Boa?), a Smoky Snake (Tropidonotus fuliginoides), four Tree Frogs (species not stated), and a Senegal Chameleon. Again, we hear no more of him, and once again I suspect here was someone entrusting his stock to good and experienced hands before going off to face the foe; the contest was less than a week old, and this makes me wonder whether he was possibly an officer on the reserve list. Through the helpful offices of Mrs. S. Greening of the Barrow (a nearby village) local History Society, I've discovered he was the son of Colonel Henry Leycester Aylmer, who was living at the Manor in 1912, which rather strengthens this idea. The fact remains, though, that zoology has heard no more of him, so in all probability he was soon to find a far-off grave.

In fact, Guy Aylmer not only survived the war but achieved lasting fame as a falconer, as we shall see.

Guy Aylmer was born on 20 April 1887 at Corsley House, Warminster, Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester (he was at the school on the day of the 1901 census). He sent many reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates to London Zoo from Sierra Leone. In view of his later career and the fact that references are made to him with respect to the trees of Sierra Leone, I strongly suspect he was working in the Colonial Service in connexion with forestry in the years before the the war.

There is a reference to his having collected Picathartes gymncephalus (White-necked Rockfowl) in Sierra Leone in 1912. He also played a key part in showing that the Servaline Cat was not a separate species but a a colour form of the Serval. He found a litter with both forms present.

Mr. Guy Aylmer, F.Z.S., exhibited some skins of mammals from Sierra Leone, including those of a Serval (Felis capensis) and of a Servaline Cat (F. servalina), and stated that a native had brought him two kittens, almost certainly from the same litter, one being spotted like the Serval, and the other obscurely speckled like the Servaline Cat. This he regarded as proof that the differences between the Servals and Servaline Cats are of no systematic importance.

The many reptiles and amphibians presented to London Zoo at this time proved to be of wider interest. There is no evidence he was other than a temporary keeper of reptiles and amphibians. Edward G. Boulenger, Curator of Reptiles at the Zoo (not to be confused with his father, George Albert Boulenger FRS 1858-1937 of the British Museum (Natural History)), reported in 1915:

Among a collection of Reptiles and Batrachians collected by Mr. Guy Aylmer, F.Z.S., in Sierra Leone last year and presented by him to the Society, I found two frogs of the genus Rappia which have not hitherto been recorded. I propose for one the name of Rappia aylmeri, after its discoverer, for the other Rappia chlorostea, from the green colour of its bones, visible through the skin…

Sadly for Aylmer, R. aylmeri disappeared as a synonym of Hyperolius fusciventris. R. chlorostea, however, survives as Hyperolius chlorosteus.

Guy Aylmer was commissioned as a temporary (i.e. he was not a regular solider) 2nd Lieutenant in September 1914 and served with 12th Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He was promoted to Lieutenant virtually immediately. The 12th (Service) Battalion was part of Kitchener’s New Army. It was formed at Winchester on 21 September 1914. It landed at Boulogne on 22 July 1915. Aylmer survived the Somme, Passchendaele and Cambrai. From the 22 battalions in the regiment 12,824 men were killed and more than 123,000 were wounded.

He was promoted to Captain on 10 February 1915. He then moves up and down between Captain and, when employed as second-in-command of his battalion, Acting Major. Then on 27 November 1917, the London Gazette stated that he had resigned his commission to resume employment under the Colonial Office with effect from 1 December 1917 and that he was granted the honorary rank of Major.

During the war, he married Christabel Henrietta Rushbrooke on 12 January 1916. A son was born in 1925.

I have not been able to find anything of his activities in the 1920s, other than that in 1922 he published a paper, The Snakes of Sierra Leone (Sierra Leone Studies 5, 7-37). There are other possible references to a Major G. Aylmer in the Indian Army from 1919 until 1924 but I do not know if it is the same person. Similarly, a Major G Aylmer was chairman of a company that was wound up in 1925.

In the 1930s, there is much more information and this is where he achieved fame amongst the falconers. There are numerous comments on internet fora but this one sums up what he achieved in inventing, with a Bill Ruttledge, the ‘aylmeri’ jess:

Every day since I have flown my hawks and eagles, I have thanked Major Guy Aylmer for the peace of mind his invention has given falconers like myself, who religiously use the aylmeri jess. He came up with the idea whilst he was Conservator of Forests in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In his spare time he was not only Master of the Khartoum Foot Foxhounds, but flying his eyas and wild-caught Red-Headed Merlins. It was whilst flying, that these merlins, with their jesses trailing, attracted the unwanted attention of piratical birds, thinking the merlins were carrying snakes etc. His idea was to fly his merlins with just the anklets, leaving the field jess behind in the grip of the falconers glove. Little did he realise what a great contribution he would be making to future falconry, and that countless hundreds of hunting hawks and falcons lives would be safer. For this alone his name should live on as long as falconry.

http://www.eaglehunter.co.uk/Articles/Thank-you-GuyAylmer.htm

Aylmeri jesses are sold by falconry suppliers.

I then came across a fascinating account, published in 2007, by Mary Keenan of her tracing the steps of her mother’s cousin who was part of an expedition to the Sudan in 1933-34 (Sudan Studies 2007, 35, 3-17)(http://www.sssuk.org/SS/SS35.pdf). The sustained efforts she made to do so would put most people to shame.
Her mother’s cousin was James Edgar Dandy (1903-1976) then an Assistant at the Natural History Museum but eventually Keeper of Botany. The original expedition comprised the leader, Cecil Graham Traquair Morison (Agricultural Chemistry, Oxford), Dunstan Skilbeck (Soil Science, Oxford) and Dandy. Descendants provided Mary Keenan with the expedition diary and photographs.

When in Khartoum (arrived 16 December 1933), Dandy stayed with Guy Aylmer and his wife. They showed the nearby zoo and Sunt Forest, as well as the sights of Khartoum, Omdurman and Shambat.

Mary Keenan was shown the house, which was recognised from a photograph, when she was tracing the steps of the expedition in 2007.

Aylmer’s work (including an unpublished checklist of the trees and shrubs) in Sudan is quoted in botanical reviews and floras, for example, Flora of the Sudan-Uganda Border East of the Nile by I Friis and K Vollesen (Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 1998).

In 1935, the following notice appeared in the London Gazette:

Whitehall, January 21, 1935

The KING has been pleased to give and to grant unto Guy Aylmer, Esq., Conservator of Forests, Sudan Government, His Majesty’s Royal licence and authority to wear the Insignia of the Fourth Class of the Order of the Nile, which Decoration has been conferred upon him by his Majesty the King of Egypt, in recognition of valuable services rendered by him.
By 1939 he was back in England. My guess is that he would probably have retired in 1937 at the age of 50, the then usual age for retirement in the Colonial Service.

The Chelmsford Chronicle of 3 February 1939:

Otter Hounds Kill 38

At the annual meeting of the Eastern Counties Otter Hunt, held at Colchester...The Hunt Committee for the 1939 season consists of...Major G Aylmer…The Master reported a successful season, during which hounds were out on 81 days, finding 63 otters and accounting for 38 of them...Prospects for the coming season were excellent, and reports as to otters working the country are most satisfactory.

The Times of 15 September 1947:

Lost Falcon Found

The trained falcon lost by Major Guy Aylmer, of Risby, near Bury St. Edmunds, which is thought might have been shot on Thursday by a gamekeeper who saw a bird attacking partridges on the Denston Hall Estate, Newmarket, has been found in the Kentford district...

There is a report on an internet forum that he also lived in Spain.

Guy Aylmer died in 1954, aged 66. He was clearly a man of his class and of his time: a falconer and a hunter as well as a naturalist. His wife had died in 1951, aged 64. There is a gravestone for Christabel, her father and Guy Aylmer in Rushbrooke, Suffolk. He appears to have married again, to Beryl E Bland, in 1952; there is a matching death for her in 1959.

Aylmer Close in Risby, Suffolk is named after the family.

------------------------------
UPDATE—December 2014

Professor Bryan Tyson read the original post and provided the additional information:

I met Guy Aylmer in 1943, when he was living with his wife and son Michael (who had just started at Cambridge)  in Risby Manor—a large house a little further down the Green than ours (which is today called “Little Manor" but was, in those days, known as “Shepherd Elmer's cottage" where we lived throughout the War.) His house was majestic enough, with its white half-timbered frontage and  large well-cultivated grounds.  He took me on many a trip when I was about ten years old, showing me the nests of garden warblers and blackcaps, whose eggs were a little difficult to distinguish from one another; and upstairs in the rather cold house, where a pair of house martins had actually nested against the glass of his study windows, so that you could see into their nest! I remember he also had the head of a Tiger that he had shot on safari, and a big model Malayan house-boat.His wife used to make a fuss if mud was walked into the house, and we had to take our shoes off, I recall, before we went upstairs. His egg-collection was an absolute dream: all set out in cabinets with glass-topped drawers that slid open at the touch. I remember shyly offering the information I had received from a boy at school that it was impossible to “blow” kingfishers’ eggs, as their shells were too frail. For answer he opened a cabinet drawer to reveal a line of little round kingfishers’ eggs like a row of smiling teeth. He taught me a great deal about birds on our expeditions, and I remember his envy when I showed him my Stone Curlew’s egg (he didn’t have one).

On one occasion, he called over at our house with his son Michael, to see if I would accompany them to play in a scratch team, in a cricket match somewhere. I said yes, and we drove there in his car. The experience was positive, though I do not remember scoring many runs; but I remember observing that Michael—who was about eighteen at the time—breathed through his mouth with a slight panting. He had a heart condition, which had prevented him following his father into the Army, and which threatened to curtail his career in farming (he was reading something to do with Agriculture, I believe.) The irony is that he survived and prospered, while his father, the Major, fell dead one day in 1954,  at age 66, while gardening; and it transpired that he had the same heart defect as his son, but  it had gone undiagnosed all his life. Mrs. Aylmer, whom I recall as a very tanned lady, predeceased him, dying of cancer in 1951 at the age of 64,  shortly after we left the village. You mention his grave in Rushbrooke cemetery; but there is a gravestone for Guy Aylmer in Risby churchyard (where my own parents are buried.) It reads simply “Guy Aylmer. Falconer and Gentleman."

Henderson Island Rats: nil desperandum

One of the most disappointing pieces of news this year came from the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). The massive international effort in 2011 to rid the Pacific island, Henderson, a British possession in the Pitcairn group, of rats had not been successful. However, the reports indicate that the population had been greatly reduced and that the colonies of nesting seabirds were recovering as a result.

The Polynesian or Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) was introduced during the expansion of the Polynesians across the Pacific. Henderson was abandoned but the rats, identified as a major predator on nestling sea birds, remained. Quoting from the Henderson Island News (Issue 5):

Rats have had a devastating effect on the island, killing over 25,000 petrel chicks a year and driving the Henderson petrel towards extinction. Seabirds, which would have numbered in the millions before rats arrived, have beenreduced to just 40,000 pairs. Rats have also been limiting the populations of other endemic bird species, altered the forest through seed consumption, and preyed upon marine turtle hatchlings and Henderson’s unique invertebrate populations. 

The job of covering the island 43 square km in area with rodenticide (while capturing, holding (and breeding) Henderson rails in captivity until the exercise had been completed) while operating a long way from everywhere was a very great effort and attracted financial support from around the world, as well as from the UK government.

We visited Henderson on October 2010 on MV Clipper Odyssey during a Noble Caledonia Expedition Cruise from Easter Island to Tahiti. By the time we got to Henderson we had visited Ducie Atoll, also in the Pitcairns, now apparently rat free, with its incredible seabird colonies but no land birds. Henderson has its few land birds and some seabirds but in nothing like the numbers on Ducie. While looking in the undergrowth behind the beach we saw a rat and I managed to get a few seconds of video footage. It clearly had not read the information on this species stating that it is nocturnal.

I hope efforts to remove the rats will continue at this World Heritage Site and that those who provided financial support (including many individual RSPB members and expedition cruise passengers and the travel company Zegrahm Expeditions, as well as government and other charities) will continue to do so. Just seeing the contrast between Ducie and Henderson was enough for me to conclude: ...whatever it takes.