Gough Island Restoration Programme — RSPB-Led Rodent Eradication for Critically Endangered Seabirds

Gough Island, a UK Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, hosts globally important populations of albatrosses and petrels, but introduced house mice, arriving with 19th-century sealers, evolved into voracious predators of seabird chicks, driving several species toward extinction on the island.

Eradicate invasive house mice island-wide to halt seabird chick predation and restore breeding success, in a first-ever attempt at whole-island mouse eradication.

In 2019 the RSPB, the Government of Tristan da Cunha, BirdLife South Africa, South Africa's Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and Island Conservation launched the £9 million Gough Island Restoration Programme, funded in part by the UK Government, Darwin Plus, the EU's EDF-9 and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Between May and August 2021 an expert team broadcast brodifacoum rodenticide bait (20 ppm active ingredient, ~8 kg/ha per application) island-wide by helicopter.

The operation was not fully successful: a single surviving mouse was detected roughly three months later, and the population had rebounded by the following summer, per peer-reviewed monitoring published in Animal Conservation. In the interim, however, breeding success climbed sharply - MacGillivray's Prion success rose from an average of around 6% to 82%, and Atlantic Petrel success roughly doubled to about 63% - direct, quantified evidence of the mice's impact and of what full eradication could achieve.

The RSPB has been transparent about the setback and is using the lessons, including interference from invasive slugs during baiting, to plan a future eradication attempt.