Nicholas Carlile, one of the leaders of “Australia’s most ambitious rodent eradication” on Lord Howe Island, is sharing the secrets. Find out how his work is helping our own Little Penguins on Bowen Island. Don’t miss his talk at the Jervis Bay Maritime Museum on 20 November, for Shoalhaven Landcare.
What does it take to restore a whole ecology, ravaged by invasive species and suffering extinctions and untold hidden damage? A talk for Shoalhaven Landcare at their upcoming AGM by Nicholas Carlile will reveal the highs and lows, the challenges and successes of the work on Lord Howe Island to eliminate the feral rat population.
We caught up with Nicholas ahead of the talk on Thursday 20 November, to find out what we can expect, plus his deep connection to the islands of NSW and in particular, the South Coast.
In his talk, “The science underpinning Australia’s most ambitious rodent eradication: Lord Howe Island” Nicholas Carlile will share the many pieces to the puzzle that helped in the massive project to fix some dire problems on this World Heritage site.
There is a documentary called ‘Protecting Paradise’ with Nicholas as one of the principal storytellers about some of the research going on around the eradication.
“Lord Howe is such a complex biodiversity site that there are so many pieces to the puzzle that we had to be getting knowledge of before we started and then also managing during the eradication,” Nicholas explains.
“That’s everything from the bird fauna, such as the Lord Howe Island Woodhen, which was down to 22 individuals back in the 1970s, all the way through to the more common but still endemic things like golden whistlers and silver eyes that breed in numbers on the island. We had lots of seabirds there that were showing the impact of rodents on them prior to the eradication, partly to give us something to measure the effect of removing rodents.
“We looked at breeding success of some of the small burrowing seabirds that were suffering quite badly due to rats.”
Incidental Ornithologist
Nicholas describes himself as an “incidental ornithologist” – one who has received a Churchill Fellowship to study birds, no less, when I ask him where he started out with studying birds.
“I’m interested in lots of things and originally started work with the Australian Museum in Terrestrial Ecology. I was working with flying foxes and pollination biology of plants and small mammals and bushbirds. And I sort of settled into seabirds when I moved over to National Parks & Wildlife, as it was then. They were looking for someone with boating skills to work on a project looking at the super abundance of silver gulls, the common sea gull. And that’s sort of how I cut my teeth and discovered these amazing creatures called seabirds, which we know pretty well nothing about.
“I have spent the best part of 30 years chipping away at what I can, certainly within New South Wales, and also having travelled overseas to look at the bigger picture stuff, which the Churchill was one such thing.”
Work on Islands
“The wonderful thing about islands,” says Nicholas, “is we can do stuff there that land managers on the mainland of Australia can only dream about.”
The crux of that work is to remove feral mammals, which was Nicholas’s focus for more than 20 years, the eradication of feral mammals from all New South Wales offshore islands, of which Lord Howe was the last one.
“So in New South Wales, as a jurisdiction, we are free of introduced mammals on our offshore islands, and there’s almost nowhere else in the world that can claim that,” Nicholas states.
Including Lord Howe, NSW has 54 islands within its jurisdiction, with six or seven islands requiring an eradication program (the smaller islands were not suffering from the invasions).
Nicholas says Lord Howe was definitely the biggest and most complex of those, followed by Broughton Island off Port Stephens and Barunguba, Montague Island on the South Coast off Narooma, which is an 80-hectare island invaded by mice and rabbits.
“And the beauty with the islands is once you’ve removed the feral mammals, there’s a very little chance of them getting back,” he says.
Little Penguins, Big Research
Nicholas and his family have lived in the Shoalhaven for a long time. “We live in a place called Budgong, which doesn’t even have a postcode,” says Nicholas of their 80-acre bushland home at the back our the Cambewarra Range Nature Reserve. “We’ve been living here with my partner, we’ve raised our kids here and they’ve all gone to the local schools. We’ve been here just over 20 years.”
Part of his deep connection to the South Coast includes some recent work on the Little Penguin population of Jervis Bay. He has been involved with penguin surveys on Bowen Island recently and has just written a paper about the island’s seabirds that came out earlier this year.
“We’d been running a program in New South Wales before I left the department, which was just over 12 months ago,” he says, “called the Great Big Little Penguin Count. And it was about trying to work out how little penguins were faring in New South Wales in terms of the major populations on our offshore islands. That obviously includes Jervis Bay, Bowen Island, which isn’t technically part of New South Wales, but it’s on the New South Wales coast. We carried out surveys which included Bowen Island working with the Wreck Bay community and with the Booderee National Parks people, and the Parks Australia people.”
At the same time, Nicholas and a band of volunteers did some extra research on what other sea birds were on the island, and the findings were published by Nicholas personally in a paper.
“It develops part of the picture of how Bowen Island is travelling in terms of how it’s managing seabirds and how they’re faring on the island. Their numbers aren’t as big as they were in the 90s, but that seems to be the case up and down the coast, which is what our four years of surveys have found out, that Bowen, like other larger populations, including Montague Island, have gone into a decline.”
As we speak, Nicholas says, there is a story breaking on the ABC about a revival of the Little Penguin breeding colony further south, at Eden.
“A story is breaking today on ABC News for the South Coast of little penguins now breeding again in Eden, which is another project that I’ve been involved with for about six or eight years, trying to get penguins breeding down there again because they got wiped out in the 1990s on the coastline there at Eden.
“It’s always a surprise that a flightless bird, and particularly a seabird, would consider bringing close quarters to humans, but they will do it. If you can keep the ferals away. There’s a lot of breeding right near the main wharf. That’s one of our successes.”
Invasive Grasses, Hungry Seals
Nicholas says the penguin decline is a multifaceted situation.
“Nothing’s ever clear and straightforward,” he explains. “We do know places like Bowen Island and Montague Island suffer from invasive kikuya grass and that impacts the populations over the long term.
“On Bowen Island they put in some huge effort in the 90s to try and manage it, but it’s something you’ve got to put decadal investment in. And it’s really hard with offshore islands to get the funding for decadal investment.”
The invasive grasses are just one of a number of things that could be impacting the penguins, including food sources and changes in sea temperature.
“And there’s other issues as well, like the increase of seals,” says Nicholas.
“Jervis Bay has got a healthy seal population just outside the Heads there at the Drum & Drumsticks. That’s where their stronghold is. But if they are New Zealand fur seals, which are different to the Australian fur seal, they will eat penguins.”
The Future Dr Nicholas
There’s an exciting new phase about to start for Nicholas, who is embarking on a PhD.
“Even though I’ve been publishing papers for 30 years, I’m involved in seabird recoveries. There’s a species I’ve been working with for eight years, which I’ve just come back from on Phillip Island off Norfolk Island, it’s one of the most amazing seabird islands in Australasia in terms of species.
“I’m looking to answer one of our big questions. Where do seabirds go? Particularly the young birds when they first leave an island because they don’t travel with their parents.”
Reserve a free ticket to this talk at the Jervis Bay Maritime Museum for Shoalhaven Landcare, commencing at 4pm.
