South Georgia Habitat Restoration Project — Island-Wide Rodent Eradication for Seabird Recovery

Two centuries of visiting sealing and whaling ships left South Georgia infested with Norway rats and house mice, which devastated the ground-nesting colonies of the South Georgia pipit — the world's southernmost-breeding songbird — and the South Georgia pintail across the island's 3,528 km² of mostly ice-free habitat.

Between 2011 and 2015 the South Georgia Heritage Trust, with the Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and the Friends of South Georgia Island, ran three helicopter-based aerial baiting phases in stages of increasing scale (128 km² in 2011, 580 km² in 2013, 360 km² in 2015), followed by a multi-year verification programme using more than 4,600 detection devices and three trained detection dogs.

On 8 May 2018 the government declared South Georgia officially rodent-free, more than eight times the scale of the previous largest eradication (Macquarie Island, Australia). Peer-reviewed monitoring published in Oryx documents that South Georgia pipits recolonised the mainland and were the first bird to breed in newly rat-free areas, and that skua and snowy sheathbill numbers recovered within five years of baiting, though 7 of 30 monitored bird species suffered documented short-term losses during the operation.