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The Million Dollar Mouse Campaign is now halfway to raising the one million New Zealand Dollars that will be required for the Department of Conservation to eradicate the introduced House Mice Mus musculus on Antipodes Island.  Once the campaign target is reached, the intention is to conduct a poison-bait drop by helicopter on New Zealand's southern island.

An Antipodean Albatross pair on Antipodes Island.
Photograph by Derren Fox

A mouse-free Antipodes Island will give respite to its indigenous invertebrate population as well as ensuring that hungry mice do not turn to killing seabird chicks in winter months, including those of ACAP-listed albatrosses and of burrowing petrels, as they have on Gough Island in the South Atlantic and Marion Island in the southern Indian Ocean.  It will also mean that only the introduced feral pigs and cats and mice still present on the main island in the Auckland Island group will require removal for all of New Zealand's southern islands to be free of alien mammals.

You can follow the fund-raising campaign on the campaign's web site, which gives information on how to contribute to this worthy effort to clear yet another Southern Ocean island of its introduced mammals - and protect its indigenous fauna and flora.  See also http://au.news.yahoo.com/queensland/a/-/latest/14447389/million-dollar-mouse-campaign-reaches-halfway-point/.

Click here to read of recent progress with other eradication efforts on islands in south latutudes.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 8 August 2012