Seabird Chicks Eaten By Massive Mice

Supersize mice on a British island in the South Atlantic are eating seabird chicks alive. The house mice, who are three times the size of mice in the UK, attack at night and are devouring more than one million seabird chicks on Gough Island every year.

The mice have been caught on camera attacking the chicks, after suspicious researchers decided to collect video evidence of who was causing the birds' injuries.

The island is one of most remote places in the world. It's windy and mountainous, and no humans live there.

It is one of the group of islands known as Tristan da Cunha, which are part of the UK even though they are far away from the British Isles.

Gough Island is the most important seabird colony in the world - home to more than ten million birds, including Tristan albatross like this one.

Dr Geoff Hilton, who works for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) says: "Gough Island hosts an astonishing community of seabirds and this catastrophe could make many extinct within decades."

"We think there are about 700,000 mice, which have somehow learnt to eat chicks alive - much like blue tits learnt to peck milk bottle tops, " says Dr Hilton.

In the photo on the left, you can see one mouse is attacking a chick's eye.

"The albatross chicks weigh up to ten kilograms… the mice weigh just 35 grams. It is like a tabby cat attacking a hippopotamus," he says.

After they hatch, the albatross chicks spend eight months sitting waiting for food from their parents. This makes them an easy target for the mice, who gnaw into the chick’s body, creating a gaping wound. The chick weakens then dies over several days.

The chicks are nearly a metre tall - you can see how huge they are from this photo.

They're 250 times the weight of the mice but can't move easily, so they can't defend themselves.

The island is home to nearly all of the world's Tristan albatross and Atlantic petrels, and there are only 2,000 Tristan albatross pairs left.

That might sound a lot, but it's a tiny number compared with how many are needed to keep the population growing - especially if they're under attack.

Dr Hilton and his colleagues are worried that the mice are also eating the eggs and chicks of this bird - the rare Gough bunting, a small finch found nowhere else in the world.

"There is no other population in the world," he says.

So what do you think? Is there anything the scientists can do to protect the chicks from the hungry mice? If you have any bright ideas, then Get In Touch!

To find out more about birds click here to visit the RSPB's fantastic kids' site, or visit one of these great museums:

Ulster Museum, Belfast
The Hunterian Museum, Glasgow
The Scottish Seabird Centre, North Berwick
The Manchester Museum, Greater Manchester
The National Museum & Gallery of Wales, Cardiff
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxfordshire
Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, Tring, Hertfordshire
Colchester Natural History Museum, Essex
The Natural History Museum, London
The Booth Museum of Natural History, Brighton, East Sussex
Portsmouth Natural History Museum, Hampshire
The Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro

You can also learn more about seabirds at the The Scottish Seabird Centre, Make A Bird Cake, or take a look at the Swifts Webcam, which is quietly spying on a family of swifts who are nesting in the tower at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

All images © rspb-images.com.
Photographer credits: Ross Wanless (picture 1), Dick Newell (pictures 2 and 6) and Richard Cuthbert (picture 5).