CHAPTER 4
The ocean is roiling, and this is what it means to batten down the hatches.
The ship’s captain has ordered that all the portholes and exterior doors be shut. Bolted shut. With actual screws and giant wing nuts. The storm is wild, and chatter amongst the passengers is that we’re changing course for a few days to get clear of the worst of it. If we don’t, the choppers might be plucked from the heli-pad up top and tossed into the southern Atlantic like toys.
This is the Roaring Forties. It’s late in the southern winter of 2008 and I finally get to see what all the fuss is about.
The hull of the scientific research vessel, the SA Agulhas, leans into the shoulder of another wave, and heaves through the solid silver-grey mass which erupts in a cloud of spume. We plummet into the trough below, in time for the next wave to crash into the starboard side. The body of water that engulfs us is so dense, so solid, that the porthole stares down into midnight-blue waters.
We could be a dozen fathoms deep.
The floor lurches beneath me, whipping my stomach about with it. There’s a reason ship furniture is bolted down, and I cling gratefully to a piece of it while I watch with equal measures of awe and fright as the colour of the water against the porthole lightens to turquoise and white, and is replaced again with cloudy sky and horizon as the ship bobs back up.
The vessel’s screws dig deep into the briny waters once more, getting traction as it heaves us deeper into a stretch of the ocean where, as one traveller put it, the ‘world’s wildest weather is born’.
The Roaring Forties is a band of uninterrupted ocean running around the bottom of the planet between 40° and 50° south, and in Antarctic lore it has personhood of its own. This is where ceaseless westerly winds conjure the most formidable and turbulent storms, and it must be crossed if I’m to make the voyage to a place that has transfixed me since childhood: the great white continent; terra incognita; Antarctica.
Spoiler: I haven’t made it there yet, but it’s not for lack of trying.
This is my second trip to the Prince Edward Islands, which is about as close as I’m likely to get to the frozen south, and the ocean is not disappointing this time.
The southern Atlantic was so placid on my first trip to Marion Island — the larger of the twin volcanic outcrops that sit about half way between Cape Town and Antarctica, and have been South African territory since 1948 — that I scribbled something in my journal about how someone could have kayaked behind the ship for much of the way.
I’d joined a team of scientists and university students on a trip to Marion to see how the place is being transformed by the changing climate — we still used the innocuous and somewhat misleading term back then. This gave me a rare-as-hens-teeth berth on the SA Agulhas, and a passage across those legendary southern latitudes. I didn’t know it at the time, but this is where my first book was about to be born, and it was the start of two decades of misadventures, from the Cape Fold Mountains around Cape Town in South Africa, to Alexandria in Egypt, and almost a dozen African countries in between. There would be more than ten books, countless pieces of journalism, and a seemingly unflagging sense of certainty that this would somehow help us redress the mess we’ve made of things.
What a thrill to have so many days to experience such an old-fashioned form of commuting, the kind that allows you to be transported from one geographical place and state of mind to another at a pace that might be closer to how we evolved to journey: slowly. There were many unbracketed hours to test my sea legs on the rear deck of the ship as it see-sawed over the calm surface, leaving me to watch the continental land mass of Africa disappear from view. What took it first, the twilight, or the horizon? The last text messages left for home as the bars dropped on our mobile phones, cutting us free from this routine communications tether. The ship’s propellors churned up clouds of bioluminescence in our wake, amidst hours of contemplative quiet and the smell of diesel fumes.
It was 2003. I was 30. My career hadn’t exactly bolted out the starting blocks: I was four years older than most of my contemporaries when our class graduated, and I’d just quit my first job with a lifestyle magazine where I’d fitted in about as well as an Antarctic tern belongs in a tropical rainforest. I had aspirations of becoming a science writer but no track record to show, and no clue if I even had the aptitude for it. I was hunting for something, though. I didn't yet know what, but there was an existential itch that needed some kind of satisfaction. Was it loneliness? Was it a search for meaning? Or was it a frivolous pursuit of adventure?
Either way, the berth on the ship was a chance to answer Mark Twain’s call to ‘throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.’
I must confess, though, that I come from the LBJ school of nature appreciation — there are Little Brown Jobs, and Large Brown Jobs — and I’d never been much of a birder. It’s only now, all these years later, that I appreciate how monumental those days were, when there was little else to do but rug up in foul-weather gear and watch the seabirds milling behind the ship on motionless boomerang wings, magically keeping apace with us as we rolled and rumbled through our passage south.
I had, as American ornithologist Robert Murphy wrote a century earlier, now joined a higher cult of mortal, for I have seen the albatross.
I was tiny and fleece-wrapped; excited, naive, anxious, voyaging uncertainly into being a documentarian of the Anthropocene.
The Rock
Every story must have a beginning, and it is the preserve of the storyteller to decide where that will be.
This part of this story begins on a day in the southern summer of 1966, a few nautical miles offshore of the Antarctic peninsula, in Marguerite Bay, when a British Antarctic research vessel, the RRS John Biscoe, was cruising through some unchartered waters.
The ship’s captain was breakfasting below and had left his third officer in command on the bridge. The young mariner was just 26, with an auburn beard and the prematurely thinning crown typical of his clan. He was doing what officers do when they’re in charge of steering a ship — I don’t know what that is, to be honest, so I’m a bit thin on the narrative flare here — when the depth sounder began shouting out a warning. The sea floor was coming up to meet them, and fast.
The officer hit the brakes —or whatever they’re called, and I’m imagining a dramatic handbrake turn and shower of spray, but big ships don’t work that way — and narrowly avoided the vessel skewering itself on a submerged rock that hadn’t yet been marked on any of their nautical maps.
That was the last the young officer thought of it. British-born but South African bred, the seaman wrapped up his time in the navy, married his Liverpudlian fiancé, returned to South Africa to study engineering because he didn’t want to live a life at sea away from his family, and took a teaching post on a university campus in the south-east of the country.
It wasn’t until his 70th birthday, when a bog-standard genealogy search turned up a nugget of historical gold.
That submerged piece of rock that the ship had narrowly avoided: now marked on the map as Joubert Rock.
Arthur Bruce Douglas Joubert, my father, was not a man for flights of fancy, and didn’t crow much about his achievements in life. But this one tickled him. He’d sat on the secret for weeks, months even, and was waiting for his birthday for the big reveal.
It seemed too fanciful, though, especially for him. Could this really be real? Had he become a prankster in his dotage?
As true as non-fiction, there it is, in the nautical records of the US Geological Survey: Joubert Rock 68°12'S, 67°41’W.
‘A rock with a least depth of 6 fathoms 5 feet, lying 5 miles South West of Pod Rocks and 9 miles West South West of Millerand Island, in Marguerite Bay.
Charted by the Hydrographic Survey Unit from RRS John Biscoe in 1966. Named for Arthur B.D. Joubert, third officer of John Biscoe and officer of the watch when the rock was discovered.’
A storyteller couldn’t ask for a better plot device in the narrative arc of a memoir that ends with the protagonist becoming a science writer and reflecting on two decades on the job.
What got me into science writing is, in part, an obsession with Antarctica but it wasn’t this nautical near-miss that started it for me.
When my siblings and I were ‘littlies’, as our parents called us back then, Bruce would set up a slide projector of a rare evening, and click through the carousel of yellowing slides spanning his four seasons of adventuring in the great white south.
There they were, from the archive of our father’s life, magnified against the lounge wall: Bruce as a bearded officer, eye pressed to a sextant; a grainy image of a single wandering albatross hovering next to the ship where the scale of its giant 3 m wingspan is swallowed up by the expanse of the ocean; frivolities down on the deck during a crossing-the-line ceremony, someone dressed as a bare-chested Neptune; the front of the ship crashing down into ocean spray as they haul through the Howling Fifties; the first icebergs on a flat-as-glass flint-coloured Weddell Sea, the spume from an orca’s breath in the near distance; pack ice like lily pads on a still pond; and there, eventually, in the far distance, the Filchner ice shelf. The RSS John Biscoe’s snow-blanketed deck ploughing a route through the pack ice, and later moored against an ice shelf; a team of huskies pulling a sled over an icy surface — this was back in the day when dogs were allowed south, but women not.
The one slide that tickled us kids most is one of a young Bruce and a ship mate stripped down to their white sports shorts and perched on the edge of the ice. They’re steeling themselves for a plunge into the water that, apparently, earned them a bottle of Scotch.
The wildlife that dominates are the penguins: adelies, chinstraps, gentoos, and even an emperor, the grandest of them all, inspecting the ship’s gangplank.
One slide captures the ship offloading ‘av gas’ — aviation gas — for the Otter aircraft along the shore of Marguerite Bay, not far from that piece of geology that would soon be named after the ship’s third officer.
Unstoppable force meets immovable object
The philosopher Alain de Botton says a writer should always travel with a sketchbook in hand. He’s right. It tunes us in to a richer spectrum of experience.
A wobbly ink sketch at the bottom of a journal entry captures my first glimpse of Marion Island in autumn 2003. It is that place where the unstoppable force meets the immovable object: the tideline.
Here, the ocean agitates with enduring patience against the volcanic black cliffs of Marion’s rock-solid self.
Few have seen these remote islands, author John Marsh wrote in 1948, and ‘few ever want to. They thrust their lava peaks out of the vast sea. Their name is synonymous with storm, disaster and death’.
A bit melodramatic if you ask me, but it is hard not to get caught up in the adventure of it all. The Agulhas put down anchor in the crescent of Transvaal Cove on the sheltered north-eastern side of the island, and we waited for the cloud to lift enough so that the choppers could ferry us across to the weather-beaten research station that creaked uneasily on stilted platforms suspended over the uneven rock and soggy marsh surface.
The island’s remoteness makes it an ideal study site for natural scientists. Marion bubbled up out of the ocean floor about a million years ago. Today it’s a thimble of volcanic rock with a polar desert at its centre, mossy fellfields around its midriff which are dotted with domed cushion-like Azorella plants that are topiaried by freeze-thaw cycles. The coastal skirt meanders over grassy stretches, and is booby-trapped with bogs covered over with deceptive caps of lush greenery that look like neat lawns but can swallow you up to the waist. Fern slopes and grassy verges give way to beaches as black as tar.
When I was little, mesmerised by these slide shows, I’d never have imagined I could visit a place as rarified and special as this. My scope of possibility had always been too small, too limited. I’d always lived under the constraints of the-girl-with-little-potential.
But here I am, and this is where I discover wilderness. Raw, beautiful, perilous, enchanting wilderness. For a month, I trekked about on foot through the fidgety maritime weather, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, documenting what the researchers were up to. Counting penguins in their rookeries, sidestepping barking seals and inspecting the radio tracker glued to the hide of an elephant seal. Digging core samples out of Azorella cushions, and hiking back to a lab to squint through a microscope to study a species of water bear (a tardigrade, or moss piglet) collected in a sample on the edge of the lake inside an extinct volcano.
This is also where I learned that climate ‘change’ doesn’t care for national borders or geographical boundaries. It’s not a case of the pollution I dump in my back yard staying in my back yard. It is a case, though, of out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Other than a handful of nature-obsessed scientists who nerd-out on Antarctica and Antarctic-adjacent studies, barely anyone knows how dramatically places like this are being altered in response to us treating the ocean-atmosphere system like an open sewer for our industrial-scale pollution.
By the time I make my voyage to the Prince Edward Islands in 2003, temperatures have already risen by an average of 1.5°C over the 50 year period of record keeping there. Ocean temperatures are up by 1.4°C. Rainfall is down by a third. The ocean current that regulates the climate here has shifted south noticeably, disrupting the algal blooms that normally bring fish for the near-shore feeding penguins. Penguin numbers are down because of it. The island’s interior glacier has all but disappeared. The spread of alien plants and insects is speeding up, allowing them to outcompete indigenous species.
2003 is an important year in this story, and not just because it's when I launch into the unchartered waters of a science writing career. It’s the year that scientists make the first grizzly discovery that the non-native house mice has taken to eating seabird chicks alive in their nests.
Of mice and men
The video makes for grim viewing, and confirms a pattern of mouse behaviour at seabird nesting sites along the Marion Island coastline that has escalated dramatically since 2003.
The footage is captured by remote camera at a grey-headed albatross colony in 2015. In it, the first mice emerge from a burrow shortly after sunset and move confidently between the chicks that are roosting in their peculiar eggcup-shaped nests. At first, the fledgelings fend off the unwanted advances by standing up, but they can’t maintain this defence throughout the night. Eventually, the fatigued chicks settle back down, and the mice quickly scurry onto their heads, where they begin tearing into the birds’ skin.
The video documents the moment when one chick gives in to the assault. Exhausted, the young bird tucks its bill under a wing and resigns itself to endure the hours-long attack. Eventually, though, it can’t stand the pain anymore, and summons enough energy to shake its attacker off.
Researchers had noticed a clear pattern over the years: when mice come upon younger, down-covered chicks, they tend to go for the birds’ wings or rumps. But with older fledglings, whose body feathers have toughened, the mice find easier pickings on the chicks’ heads, where the soft crown feathers give easy access to the skin. Over the course of hours, a single mouse can gnaw the chick’s entire crown away.
By dawn, the camera footage shows that the wounded chicks are still alive, but weakened by pain and exhaustion. Scalped, their wings drooping, the frail birds are less likely to clap their beaks defensively at an approaching threat, and are easy prey to predators such as grey petrels. If they survive being picked off by scavenging birds, the fledglings will most likely succumb to a slower death, a fatal infection caused by their open wounds.
Marion Island is about 2,200 km or five days’ ship voyage southeast of Cape Town, South Africa, give or take a bad storm or two. Together with its smaller twin, Prince Edward Island — the two now make up the Prince Edward Islands Marine Protected Area — the two are a globally important seabird colony, home to about half of the world’s breeding wandering albatrosses. They’re also an important breeding spot for other seabirds, such as the sooty, grey-headed and light-mantled albatrosses, a number of burrowing petrel species, loads of penguins, and a rare sheathbill subspecies that has traded in its need to fly, along with its adventurous spirit.
The non-native house mouse has been on Marion for two centuries, most likely coming ashore when the island was a stop-off point for seal-hunters during the heyday of blubber harvesting in the early 1800s. Since then, the humble mouse has become one of Marion’s most significant ecosystem engineers.
Prince Edward is 20 km away as the crow flies, and close enough to see its black cliffs from the Marion base at Transvaal Cove if the clouds lift. Somehow, Prince Edward was lucky enough to avoid a mouse landing. This makes it a good control study site, allowing researchers to compare the two islands and monitor just how much of a force of nature these mice can be when they’re allowed to run riot.
Until now, the mice survived on Marion by eating mostly insects and some plants. But mouse numbers have exploded in the past three decades.
Quick sidebar: the mice were such a problem around the base when South Africa built its first settlement back in 1948, that men would wake during the night to find mice nibbling at their beards. Yes, in keeping with Antarctic and sub-Antarctic tradition, there are a lot of beardy men in Marion’s history books.
There aren’t that many beardy women in the photo records. This is not because women generally don’t have beards, but rather because women were barred from adventuring on research expeditions like this. Apparently the presence of us in our bloomers on long trips away from home is too disruptive of the fragile male libido, or some such nonsense, but this is a story for another time. Hashtag: ChapterSix.
So these fellas, way back then, decide to take a few pet cats down to the island. No one thinks to sterilise them first — the cats, that is — and before long they are breeding like bunny rabbits and happily going feral. It doesn’t take much time for these wily predators to figure out that the seabirds haven’t evolved much of a startle response. No need for it, what with there being no natural pouncy-type predators in these parts. Soon, the cats are eating their way through about half a million seabirds a year, give or take the odd hors d'oeuvre.
The cats do get their comeuppance: in 1984, the South African government sends out hunting parties to blast and trap the cats into buck-shotted oblivion, and by 1991 the feline eradication programme is ticked off as ‘mission accomplished’.
Mouse numbers, on the other hand, are heading in another direction entirely, and not just because the cats are gone.
The mice are thriving because warmer, drier summers linked with rising global temperatures are giving them longer summer breeding seasons. The winters, which previously helped keep their numbers in check with the odd case of hypothermia, aren’t quite so chilly anymore either. Ka-boom! Another explosion.
Now, with more mouths to feed, the mice are running low on their usual food.
This is where we meet the humble sheathbill. The lesser sheathbill is to the sub-Antarctic scenery what the domestic chicken is to the farmyard: unremarkable, next to the grandeur of a wandering albatross in courtship dance or a haughty king penguin in its cobble-beach fiefdom. The sheathbill has largely given up its ability to fly, a skill set that allowed its early ancestors to cruise in on the wing and settle here. It lacks the pizzazz of the other birds in the ’hood.
Like the farmyard bantam, though, this pint-sized snowy bird is a busy little body, and all too often somewhere in the background grubbing about for bugs and worms.
The sheathbill’s main food source on Marion is insects such as a rare flightless moth, weevils, springtails and mites, amongst others, and the self-same critters that are on the mouse menu. With mouse numbers going up, Marion’s invertebrate populations are collapsing. Researchers have counted a 90 per cent drop in invertebrate populations since the mid-1970s. Unsurprisingly, the sheathbill population is tracking the same downward trend: in 1976, birders counted 3,602 sheathbills; by the mid-90s, they were down by 20 per cent, to 2,850 birds. A study in 2000 also showed that breeding sheathbills were leaner, and their clutch sizes smaller.
This is starkly different to wildlife abundance across the way on Prince Edward, where inverts are thriving and sheathbill numbers remain steady.
Prince Edward’s insect life is positively humming, according to the few researchers who have been allowed a rare visit, since access is strictly limited in order to keep it invader-free.
‘There are flightless moths wandering everywhere on Prince Edward, they crawl over you,’ says veteran Marion researcher emeritus professor Peter Ryan from the University of Cape Town. ‘But you barely see one on Marion.’
Prince Edward’s vegetation is also pumping with life. The azorella plants that are typical of the otherwise largely barren fellfields on sub-Antarctic islands should be described as loungers, not cushion plants: they look like the soft furnishings in your living room, and can grow way bigger than your couch; a full 10 m across, if they’re undisturbed.
On Marion, the azorellas are much smaller than those on Prince Edward, and often punctured with mouse tunnels. Azorellas are crucial nurseries for insect life, little islands of shelter and food in a sea of barren, windswept, rocky ground. The cushions release leaf litter which helps build the soils and form the peat in the lower boggy areas of the island, as do the insects that graze on the plants and release nutrients into the surrounds. Azorellas are delicate plants, though, and easily upset by any form of disturbance. Mice, burrowing into them for shelter and food, can easily destroy cushions that are 30 to 80 years old.
Tipping point
In the natural world, a tipping point is that moment where a bunch of incremental shifts in a system push it to the point where it lurches from one relatively stable state, to another. It’s a Rubicon moment, a point of no return. Like rocking further and further back on the legs of a chair, and everything’s groovy until suddenly it’s not. You push it just a little too far, and whack, you’ve cracked the back of your noggin on the floor.
Climate science has got a few notable tipping points. Hashtag: DoomsdayGlacier. Hashtag: AMOCConveyorBelt. Hashtag: AmazonDieback. Hashtag: ArcticPermafrostThaw. Hashtag: GreenlandIceSheet. Hashtag: SahelMonsoon. Hashtag: OhMyShatteredNerves.
Marion’s mice crossed a tipping point in 2003. After 200 years of cohabiting with the nesting birds in relative peace, their numbers suddenly exploded and they figured out that the birds are a meal in themselves.
But researchers have just made another discovery, one that shows a cultural tipping point for these clever little rodents, and one that could be devastating for the bird population.
In April 2023, exactly 20 years since the first mauled chicks were discovered, researchers came upon the carcasses of two wandering albatross adults on Marion’s northern coastline.
They were a few days old and fresh enough that researchers could see distinct clues as to the cause of death. Then they found other adult bird carcasses in different stages of decomposition nearby. There were eight dead birds in total, all within walking distance of each other. All had died within weeks of each other.
‘It’s unusual to find albatross carcasses on land, because these birds spend most of their lives at sea,’ marine ecologist Dr Maëlle Connan from Nelson Mandela University explained over the phone one day, shortly after the finding.
The two fresh carcasses had deep wounds at the elbows, and the surrounding blood pattern suggested that the injuries had been inflicted while the birds were still alive. The likely cause of death: secondary infection, or starvation as the crippled birds would have been unable to head out to sea to feed.
When Connan and her team saw these wounds, they knew immediately that they were looking at injuries caused by mice.
This kind of animal behaviour is thought of as cultural knowledge, and given what conservationists know about mouse behaviour on other seabird breeding islands, they fear this could spread like a fever amongst the opportunistic predators.
Hawaii’s Midway Atoll island chain in the Pacific had something similar happen. In 2015, mice started attacking Laysan albatrosses, and the escalation in just one year showed how quickly they learned and transferred this behaviour. Birders monitoring Marion’s bird life say this would have devastating consequences for the colony’s albatrosses and other breeding seabirds.
‘On Midway Atoll, in the first year there were 42 albatrosses killed, and a year later it had escalated to 242 killed adults, and many more wounded ones,’ says Connan. ‘That’s a huge number.’
Even though these first adult albatross fatalities are small in number, this change in mouse behaviour is extremely concerning because of the implications for the bird population, according to Ryan.
‘The difference between chicks and adults dying is massive from a demographic perspective,' he says.
Wandering albatrosses only start breeding when they’re about eight to 10 years old, they only have one chick every two years, and it takes almost 12 months for chicks to grow large enough to fly. Wandering albatrosses may be able to reach a ripe old age of about 60 — the data are a bit thin on this, but this is the nearest guesstimate — but from the age of 30 their breeding potential drops.
‘To have a sustainable albatross population, you need to have a high adult survival rate,’ Ryan says. ‘Every one adult killed is the equivalent to many more juveniles dying.’
There is a plan brewing to get rid of the mice, though. Although it’s not going to be easy, and it’s going to cost a fair whack.
The idea is blitz the island with blood-thinning rodent-targeted poisoned bait. This will mean sending a fleet of helicopters to sweep the entire island through the colder late autumn and winter months, when mice are cold, hungry and their numbers lower. This is how conservationists have dealt with similar rodent problems on other sub-Antarctic islands, such as South Georgia, Macquarie and Campbell, where heavily impacted seabird colonies have recovered well as a result.
In preparation for what’s being called the Mouse-Free Marion project, some of the 2022 over-wintering research team spent a fair bit of time trekking across the island to set up remote cameras to monitor cloud cover over the dormant volcanic peaks in the island’s interior. A series of hourly time-lapse photographs built a map of cloud cover patterns over the hard-to-access inland peaks. Together with weather data collected through the 2022 winter, these will allow the operations team to plan for unpredictable flying conditions that may vary between the thickly vegetated coast and the highest polar desert region where barely anything grows.
The mice are concentrated around the coastline, where their main food source is and where the birds nest, but the helicopter pilots will need to spread bait evenly, including over the cold, harsh interior in case the odd outlier rodent family has settled there.
The weather will be the biggest challenge. Baiting has to be done outside of the mouse breeding season, and when it’s harder for them to find food and survive. The population will be stressed and their numbers down because of the cold and their main food source — invertebrates — will be low. Hungry mice will be more likely to take the bait.
A winter operation also means pilots will have fewer daylight hours and shorter windows in which wind and cloud conditions are suited to flying and bait dropping.
An operation like this is risky: it has to be done in one season, it has to kill off enough mice that there aren’t any breeding pairs left, and it has to be done with very few available flying hours, in pretty foul conditions.
It also needs to account for the risks of non-target species being exposed to the bait, so there’s an advisory group dealing with this. Sheathbills and kelp gulls are most likely to scavenge dead rodents. But the poison is slow-acting, and the mice are expected to return to their burrows before it takes effect, reducing the number of bodies out in the open. A winter operation means that most other bird species will have left the island for the season.
But the Mouse-Free Marion project is nothing more than a grand idea at this stage, because of how costly it’ll be: the final bill is expected to run up to nearly $28 million (R500 million in our currency).
The South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) is the managing authority responsible for conservation of this marine protected area, but say they simply can’t foot such a big bill. They can put $3.6 million (R66 million) into the kitty, but no more than that. The plan is for the government’s implementing partner, the conservation non-profit Birdlife South Africa, to raise the rest of the funds. By March 2024, when I last asked the department for the latest figures, there was $4.2 million (R78 million) in donations. The DFFE and Birdlife still need to scrape together another $20 million (R356 million).
It’s a big risk, an operation as logistically complex and expensive as this, but one that they cannot afford not to take. The consequences of allowing mouse numbers to continue to grow as they are, exponentially, is too horrible to contemplate.
There’s a lesson to be drawn from a similar rodent eradication attempt on Britain’s Gough Island in the south Atlantic, 3,900 km northwest of Marion, where conservationists did a similar wintertime poisoning blitz in 2021.
Sadly, in December that year, one of the remote camera traps delivered a crushing blow: a single mouse appeared in a frame, evidence that the programme had failed. They hadn’t managed to kill every mouse.
The UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which is managing the restoration effort on the island, is still trying to get to the bottom of what went wrong, and there’s a scientific review pending. But in spite of that, they can show what a dramatic recovery the birds can have if they’re allowed just one breeding season without the pressure of hungry mice.
By the end of the 2022 summer, researchers described the breeding season on Gough that year as ‘spectacular’. Tristan albatrosses had a 75.5 per cent breeding success that season, compared with a 30.2 per cent annual average since 2001. Gray petrels bounced back to 78 per cent from a 30 per cent average in recent summers. MacGillivray’s prions, which had been down to 6 per cent breeding success in previous years, recovered to a ‘phenomenal’ 82 per cent.
These bird numbers won’t stay bullish for long, though, given what will happen when the mouse population inevitably recovers.
Slum life
It’s probably hard to believe that a father and daughter could spend so little time in each other’s company through the course of a lifetime, but I can count the number of times Bruce and I were alone together on just one hand, give or take a bit of fudged accounting.
Between Bruce being away at university for the first few years of my parents’ marriage, and my siblings and me going off to boarding school young, he and I spent very few years living under the same roof. In the few weekend and holiday visits that happened over the next decades, we seldom hung out together. We were acquaintances, mostly, with awkward silences clogging up the space between us.
One occasion with him stands out, though, when I was back home for a visit, a few years and a few books into my writing career. He and I were out on a pony ride, clip-clopping through the muffled stillness of the mist, beads of water collecting on the horses’ manes, and the hoof-beats muted on the wet soil. Frogs clicked delightedly in the near-distance.
Bruce nodded towards the tree canopy, beaded with water droplets, and muttered something about a ‘botanical slum’. I hadn’t heard it described this way, and it stuck with me. It made a good introduction to a book I went on to write soon after that, a collection of stories on the extent of invasive species in South Africa and their impact on the systems that they smother as they grow and spread.
The woodland surrounding us on that outing wasn’t the indigenous forest or the mist-belt grassland that once covered these beautiful mountain slopes. It was a mono-crop of black wattle trees, Acacia mearnsii, a prolific hardwood from Australia that has become one of the biggest botanical pests since being introduced to our shores in the mid-1800s when settlers needed a fast-growing source of timber in a country with relatively little natural forest. Here, set free from the conditions back home that kept its numbers in check, the black wattle has flooded into grasslands, wetlands and river systems. This thirsty tree crowds out indigenous species, poisons the soil, changes the fire regime, hardens ground until it’s like cement, and strangles water flow.
Invasive species will be another relic of the Anthropocene. When those alien anthropologists find our post-human planet and sift through the geological strata, they will find the many pollutants left in our wake: concrete and brick structures, plastic, forever chemicals, asphalt. But the addition of these residues to the geological layer will stop when we stop making them. Biological pollutants won’t. Even if humans were plucked from Earth tomorrow, the invasive species we’ve spread around the planet will keep on growing and spreading like a self-perpetuating oil spill until Earth’s ecosystems re-write themselves to accommodate some new kind of stasis.
Tramping through a dense stand of black wattle like the one my father and I were surrounded by that day really does curdle the mood when you’re conditioned to feel contempt for these trees. In your mind, it’s a weed, not a companionable wildling. But we shouldn’t demonise the slum dweller for being part of the slum. The black wattle has only settled here because we humans have changed the system in such a way that it couldn’t not be where it is. Like the wind blowing a pile of leaves into a road culvert, these trees have gathered in the place where the newly changed system has driven them. We can’t hate a tree for doing what a tree does.
When news trickles through about the dead albatross adults on Marion in early 2023, it’s a chance to revisit a story I haven’t thought about in two decades. I scan a PhD thesis which maps the mouse attacks on chicks from 2016 to 2019. Monochrome dots of different sizes appear in between the contour lines on a map of the island, exploding along the coast like graphics of bomb strikes. Each is a data point where the researcher has found a mauled or dead chick. Behind each data point is a story: a story of a hungry mouse, and a brutalised bird.
In between the paragraphs of Times New Roman text are photographs of birds in different states of trauma: one with the back of its neck flayed by gnawing teeth; some, their crowns missing as if someone’s scooped off the top of a boiled egg with a teaspoon; some, with a mouse still perched in the wound while the stupefied bird seems utterly incapable of understanding how to respond; some birds have their elbows bloodied, and is that the bone visible? The worst are the photographs of the chicks who are catatonic in the wake of the attack, waiting for death; death by predation or a slower death from infection.
When the story hits the digital news stand, my editor and I are pleased. It’s a global scoop, and I take to spreading it on my socials: ‘breaking news!’ — as if it’s a good thing — and a link to the headline Fatal mouse attacks on adult birds spark red alert at world’s biggest wandering albatross colony.
It’s hard to know how many people pay the story much attention, but its safe to say it’s no match for the column inches taken up by the war in Ukraine or the US debt ceiling crisis.
Like the photograph of the charred kangaroo, you can’t look at the photographs of these distraught and traumatised birds. But you can’t not look. An island like Marion is so far from our field of view — so far from us geographically as we sit here on our dramatically transformed continent, and so far from our awareness — but someone has to bear witness to the suffering. Someone has to take charge of trying to fix it. Someone has to take responsibility.
But in a few months from now, the wandering albatrosses whose parents and grandparents and great grandparents have been returning to Marion year after year to nest, will float in from their months-long forays at sea and alight on its green and boggy coastal edges once more. They’ll search through the landing parties to find their life partner, who they’ll dance in front of with clacking bills, and their vast wings stretched in courtship display, before getting down to the business of parenthood. But unlike their earlier ancestors, this generation of birds will be bringing their chicks into a world that is crawling with this new threat. And the mice will continue to feast on their vulnerable offspring until someone, somewhere, decides that $20 million (R356 million) isn’t that much money to clean up a pollution spill that causes this much suffering.
The party
Back on mainland South Africa, nearly two decades after that first trip to Marion and one pandemic later, and hard lockdown rules have eased enough that a bunch of us can get together for our first mask-free party in what feels like a lifetime. We’re jolling together at a rowdy house party outside Cape Town to celebrate someone’s 50th. As the evening ebbs, I strike up a conversation through the din of the music with a posh-sounding British fellow whose name turns out to be… Biscoe.
‘Biscoe?’ I say. ‘My dad was a naval man in his youth. In his early 20s he was an officer on a British Antarctic research ship called the RRS John Biscoe.’
‘Yup,’ this fellow replies, ‘that ship was named after my distant relative. He was a seal clubber.’
Indeed, he was. One John Biscoe, Antarctic explorer, mariner, trader, and, yes, killer of seals for their blubber.
The coincidence of this floors me. One man’s name goes down in nautical history for his Antarctic exploits, and is recorded on the hull of the RRS John Biscoe. My father’s name goes down in nautical history because he saves that very ship from hitting a rock.
What are the chances of the descendants of these two family lines meeting at a house party in Cape Town in 2020?
But the story gets even more bizarre, though, and when I tell my friends I have to convince them I’m not spinning a yarn.
Just off the Antarctic Peninsula, there’s a cluster of rocks named after John Biscoe: the Biscoe Islands.
It isn’t much more than a 360 km boat ride from there to the place that is now marked on the maps as Joubert Rock.
The following weekend I fire up Skype to have a catch-up with Bruce and my mum, Elena. We meander through the usual sorts of things. My latest assignment in the Kalahari and the thrill of having a wild pangolin walk up to me in the veld and sniff my boot. Their most recent mushroom foraging trip into the forest, and how it’s not the right season for their favourite kind, pine rings. They show me the prototype for their latest crafting idea and what materials they think they should use so that they could improve on it.
I save the Joubert-Biscoe encounter from the Saturday before for last: one wants to build the story to a bit of a climax.
This is the last conversation Bruce and I have.
The call
My brother’s voice is brusque on the other end of the line. It’s a week after that Skype call with my parents, and Simon doesn’t start with any of the usual niceties.
His words come as a shock, but not as a surprise. Four missed calls and a text from someone saying they’re sorry for our loss and they hope we’re all ok.
There really should be an etiquette about texting people about such matters.
‘Dad’s dead.’
Strange. It feels as though I’ve been waiting for this call for years. Bruce’d had some health difficulties through much of his adulthood, and yet he managed to sidestep a few near-misses — including a close shave with an aneurysm 15 years earlier — and was able to stroll unfussed into his advancing frailty. A video clip from that morning captures him belting out a tune on his harmonica — I’m sure it was Amazing Grace — his eyes twinkling directly into the camera.
By that afternoon, Lena and his two sisters were singing and praying at his side, his death doulas as he slipped away. A stroke, most likely, or heart attack.
‘Old pipes, high pressure.’
Simon’s a civil engineer, he would say it like that.
Bruce was nudging up to his 81st birthday.
His passing didn’t take long, a few minutes at most, and in those moments he had the one thing he’d ached for most in his life but often didn’t seem to think he had: people at his side who he knew truly loved him.
He left this world as most of us enter it: surrounded by minders and carers and people who want you here.
Throw off the bowlines
Bruce and I barely knew each other. By the time he reached the end of the story arc of his life, he was more of a concept than a relationship. It’s hard to know someone when all you have over decades is the occasional sterile telephone audits about what’s going on in your lives. My tears are a brief downpour of shock, rather than a cut-off low of grief or loss.
When I sit to write his eulogy, though, it’s a chance to bury the hatchet and reflect on how much he’d given me, even if it wasn’t a sense of being loved or seen. I pull a book from the shelf, one that was a favourite Christmas present: The Long Grass Whispers, an illustrated collection of fables about African animals.
The inscription reads: Christmas 1982. All our love. Dad and Mum, written in Lena’s distinctive billowy cursive.
Four decades later, this book is like the Velveteen Rabbit: it’s been loved so much that its fur is threadbare, and one eye has popped off.
I’d just turned 10 when they gave it to me, and I devoured it. Our family had recently settled in the bucolic mountain community of Hogsback in what is today the Eastern Cape, up in the misty grasslands of the Amatola Mountains. Local lore has it that Tolkien got his inspiration for Middle Earth from the Afro-montane forests that tuck into the folds of the mountain — not true, sorry folks — but the place has a special kind of hobbity charm.
Those early years in Hogsback were a time of mind-expanding nature-awakening.
Everything I do today, I realise as I write the eulogy, every bit of wordsmithery, is somehow infused with that… thing… that awoke in me back then. It was a time of pure enchantment, like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, but with a different kind of magic. The late biologist Edward O Wilson calls it biophilia, something inherent in us that makes us want to be with nature, in nature, and bonded to other forms of life. That existential ache I felt on the first trip south through the Roaring Forties, that feeling of a hole in the heart, I realise now that it was a yearning for wilderness and to return to the wildness in our own hearts.
Bruce and Elena’s tutelage wasn’t in that they told us that nature is precious. They let us simply experience it. They didn’t instruct us on the value of life. They showed it in how they move through the world.
They’d pause to listen to a frog song chirruping in the mist. It was in their awe when the sky above us flashed with the green plumage of Cape parrots, or the scarlet wings of a Knysna turaco gliding between the tree tops following its distinctive meniscus flight path. It was there when we walked in silence in the late dusk while fireflies swarmed around us, alighting on a horse’s rump and the strands of the farm fence and every bit of foliage, turning them into a fairground installation.
It was there when they let us run wild and barefoot through the snow, howling in self-inflicted pain, simply because we could and that’s how children test the material limits of the world.
Even though I chose not to have children myself, looking back I see how much I learned from them about what it means to be a parent, and what it means to be a child.
It’s easy to be a genetic parent. Mammals have been doing that without much thought for thousands of generations. Being a mimetic parent is another thing altogether, because it means passing on to others — not just our biological children — the ideas, the values, the world views that may have a bearing on every aspect of their lives.
Bruce and Elena took on the task of mimetic parenting. This isn’t to say that they gave us their values and ideas so that we should slavishly replicate them. Their task was to allow us to absorb those ideas and values, to consider them, to adopt some, borrow others, reject bits and pieces, to change and adapt and develop them.
Our task as children was to take the source material and to grow it into the next generation of ideas, and hopefully use them to make the world a better place.
The source material that fed into who I have become goes back to those early years: the real, like the forests and grasslands of Hogsback; and the imagined, like from the pages of books I devoured as a child.
I arrived at Marion Island not caring much about birds, but when I left, I realised just how much all of those hours of unintended tutelage as a child had tuned me in to other creatures. I may not have cared to pair this bird call with that Latin name. But I saw these beings without realising it. They were already part of the palette that painted my world so richly.
When I left Marion, it was after having sat within reaching distance of wandering albatrosses as they unfurled their impressive blade-like wings, tilted their beaks skyward and courted each other into a lifelong mating bond. I left understanding that those two birds could live as long as me, if they don’t get snagged on a long-liner’s fishing hook or mauled by a hungry mouse while they’re rearing a chick.
One decade and all these books later, and the ache that I felt in my chest when I boarded the SA Agulhas hasn’t left. I still long for meaning, for connection, for purpose in a world that only seems to be more chaotic. But the discomfort doesn’t unsettle me quite so much anymore. It propels me forward into writing, and into exploring.
Writing isn’t, as Hemingway said, necessarily a lonely life. But it is a solitary one. Finding comfort in that solitude is where the magic lies.
To journey into the wilderness is to go in search of yourself, I learned on that trip half-way to the frozen south. Now I use the Cape’s wildness to settle this dis-ease. Moving in solitude along Table Mountain’s sandstone trails, my feet grinding over rocks in low-range, I walk into my aloneness and towards myself. Just me, my trail shoes, and the sound of my breath: crunch-crunch, breathe-breathe, crunch-crunch, breathe-breathe.
I wouldn’t have learned this if I hadn’t been stirred by dissatisfaction and that hunger, if I hadn’t boarded that ship, if I hadn’t had a childhood that whetted an appetite for wilderness.
Bruce and I disagreed on a lot of things. Politics, mostly, and gender roles, on religion and god, on countless other things. These led us into many chilly conversational cul-de-sacs. We both had an unshiftable sense of loneliness, a sense of being unworthy of love, and it soured our individual sense of self. This meant the two of us repelled the other like negative poles on a battery, as if there was an invisible forcefield that made us slip past each other.
As ordinary as that last phone call was with Bruce, on Sunday the 29 November 2020, it was far from ordinary. In the narrative arc of our relationship as parent and child, the final paragraph couldn’t have been more aptly written.
There were still so many things unsaid, still so many expectations unmet. But I realise now that that’s ok, because that’s just how it is. Between all of us. That’s what it means to be human.
What matters is that we show up. In each messy, imperfect moment, with our messy, imperfect selves, we show up, and we try to find each other within the noise of it all.
Surely this is what love is. Trying, even when we know we may not get it right.
‘And so, to Dad,’ I say in the closing words of the eulogy, ‘as you sail off over the distant curvature of the horizon and beyond our field of view, may you join the celestial wonders that you once used to navigate by, as a young man, on a ship, all those years ago.’