Mice Are Eating Albatross Chicks Alive on Marion Island

Marion Island in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean is a breeding refuge for millions of seabirds including close to a third of the world's wandering albatrosses, whose chicks sit motionless on open nests for months because nothing has ever hunted them there. Introduced house mice have turned predator, and warming has extended their breeding season, so the attacks are getting worse rather than stabilising. Mouse-Free Marion, run by BirdLife South Africa with the South African government, plans to clear the entire island in a single winter operation — helicopters spreading bait in overlapping swathes across every hectare, the only method that has worked at this scale, because leaving a handful of pregnant mice means starting again. The baiting was deferred from 2025 to the austral winter of 2026 so the team could study two recent eradication failures elsewhere, and roughly 60% of the funding is secured.