By Eva Vergara
ROBINSON CRUSOE ISLAND, Chile
It's still a natural paradise far out in the Pacific, with thick
jungles and stunningly steep and verdant slopes climbing out of the
sea. But much of the splendor in the tiny Chilean islands that likely
inspired Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" castaway novel is being eaten
away.
Nearly four centuries of
human contact have left many slopes denuded, their trees and plants
lost to logging and fires, or devoured by imported goats and rabbits.
Jungles remain, but invasive species are crowding out the unique native plants and birds that evolved during more than a million years of splendid isolation.
"It's a textbook example of how to degrade an ecosystem," said Cristian Estades of the University of Chile, an expert on the ' birds
A
handful of biologists, environmentalists, teachers and Chilean
government officials are working with islanders on projects to save
endangered species by eliminating non-native plants and animals. In a
world full of daunting environmental challenges, they say this one can
be solved with enough time, effort and money, in part because the three islands
are so remote — 416 miles (670 kilometers) west of the Chilean mainland.
Chile has a $12 million plan to keep more outside species from reaching the Juan Fernandez archipelago and control what's already here. Island Conservation
and other nonprofit groups say $20 million is needed just to start, by
baiting the jungles with poison and flying hunters in on helicopters to
eliminate animals that don't belong. Millions more would then be needed
to keep invaders out and restore the natives.
Neither plan is
fully funded, however, and at this point the scientists involved can do
little more than document what's disappearing.
The
islands were declared a world biosphere reserve by the United Nations
in 1977. For their size, a total of just 38 square miles (100 square
kilometers), they are 61 times richer in plant diversity and 13 times
richer in bird life than the Galapagos, according to Island
Conservation.
They still have
137 plants and a handful of bird species found nowhere else in the
world, including a brilliant red hummingbird and the Dendroseris
gigantea, a species so rare that until a few years ago, there was only a
single tree left alive.
Forty-nine
of the islands' plant species and seven kinds of birds are classified
as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation
of Nature. At least eight others have already become extinct.
Their
main enemies are the plants and animals imported by humans: Not only
goats and rabbits, but cats, rats, mice and the carnivorous coati, a
type of raccoon native to the American tropics. The cats are
particularly adept at hunting the hummingbirds, whose numbers have
dropped to as low as 1,000, in part because they didn't evolve in ways
that made them fear feline predators.
Chilean
settlers have cut down native trees and planted other types that foster
wildfires and transform birds' habitats. Fast-growing blackberry
brambles native to Europe and North Africa and maqui fruit trees native
to mainland Chile have done the most damage, along with imported
eucalyptus trees that grow as high as 230 feet (70 meters), sucking up
groundwater and acidifying the soil.
"I
don't want to think that this kind of cancer can't be solved," said
Juan Carlos Ordenes, who teaches history and geography in the islands'
only school, and regularly leads his students on root-pulling
expeditions.
Skeptics wonder
if it's worth spending millions of dollars to preserve a few birds and
plants on islands so small that they don't appear on many maps. But Hugo
Arnal, the South America director for Island Conservation, says "the
cost of inaction is much more expensive."
Without the dense
jungles and unique trees and hummingbirds, tourists won't come, topsoil
will blow away and fresh water for the 700 islanders will dry up.
Supplying their town with food and essentials would become much more
expensive for Chile's navy, which currently sails to the island once a
month.
"The economic development of Juan Fernandez will depend on
maintaining a healthy biodiversity: controlled and sustainable shrimp
fishing, and ecotourism based on its unique species," he said.
Key
to any solution are the islanders who live in the neat little town of
San Juan Bautista on Robinson Crusoe, the only island inhabited
year-round. Domesticated cats ruled theirgardens during a recent visit
by The Associated Press, and while most townspeople have agreed to
sterilize their pets, many more cats are loose in the jungle.
U.S.
ornithologist Erin Hagen, who has spent 10 years studying the
hummingbirds, said few islanders are willing to abandon their pet cats
or give up goat and rabbit meat for their dinners.
"There
are people who are making the decision to live without these invasive
animals, and others who are very attached to their pets, and others who
like to go out hunting," Hagen said.
Chile
has protected 96 percent of the territory as a national park since
1935, but the budget "is insufficient, without a doubt," said Ivan
Leiva, who runs the park for the state-owned forestry corporation. "The
problem is growing and defeating us."
Leiva,
whose office is surrounded by small gardens and makeshift greenhouses,
has made each of his eight park guards personally responsible for two
species of particularly threatened plants. The guards monitor their
charges, note when they flower and seed, and confront challenges that
might arise.
Such tactics
worked with the Dendroseris gigantea, a member of the asteraceae family
whose broad, long-stemmed leaves were munched to the nubs by wildly
propagating goats.Leiva marshaled an international group of biologists
to prevent its extinction. They kept vigil throughout the year,
measuring weather and soil conditions and managing to collect enough
seeds to produce 50 more trees. Most now grow in the park's gardens,
while 15 have been planted around the "mother" tree.
An
earlier six-year, $2.5 million effort eliminated goats and rabbits from
Santa Clara, an islet not far from town. Islanders were paid for each
pelt and even provided with replacement bullets.
Goats
were introduced by the Spanish in the 1600s to provide food for passing
sailors, and their meat helped save the life of Alexander Selkirk, the
marooned Scottish sailor whose four-year ordeal on the main island is
widely believed to have helped inspire Defoe's 1719 castaway novel.. On
the island Chile later named Robinson Crusoe, goats have been contained
to a manageable area, but rabbits and rats run wild.
Meanwhile,
on Alejandro Selkirk, the most remote of the islands, thousands of wild
goats are destroying the habitat of the Rayadito de Masafuera, a small
ovenbird whose numbers have dwindled to about 550.
Hunting down these animals on that island's steep slopes would be impossible by foot, but Chile can follow the lead of Ecuador in the Galapagos, where helicopters were used to eliminate wild goats and pigs from a much larger area, said Arnal.
"Using
helicopters for eradication and restoration is to island conservation
what the introduction of penicillin was to medicine," Arnal said. "These
goats aren't going to die off naturally until they've eliminated all of
the plants and the island is turned into a desert where there's nothing
left to eat."
Unemployment
can make it harder to get a job. That sounds strange, but it's a truism
in the placement and recruiting industry. Once you spend any amount of
time without a job, getting one at all becomes more difficult. Even
though corporation have unfilled job openings, they tend to not hire the
unemployed.
Reindeer at risk from snow sport
