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MICE BROUGHT TO a remote South Atlantic island by sailors in the 19th century are threatening seabirds including the critically endangered Tristan albatross, a British charity said today.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said the rodents have proliferated on uninhabited Gough Island, part of a British overseas territory, and are killing two million birds every year.
“We knew there were large numbers of chicks and eggs being eaten each year but the actual number being taken by the mice is just staggering,” Alex Bond, a researcher from the Natural History Museum in London, said in a statement released by the RSPB.
The predatory mice have evolved to become “two or three times larger” than the average house mouse and they attack in groups, eating away at the flesh of chicks which can suffer for days before the open wounds lead to their deaths, the RSPB said.
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Other threatened species endangered by the mice include the Gough bunting and Atlantic petrel, the RSPB said.
Gough Island is part of the same territory as Tristan da Cunha and Saint Helena, the island where Napoleon was exiled and died in 1821.
The RSPB and Tristan da Cunha government are teaming up with international partners to eradicate mice from Gough Island in 2020, using two helicopters laden with poisonous pellets.
“Restoring the island to a more natural state will prevent the deaths of millions of seabirds,” said John Kelly, RSPB manager for the Gough Island mouse eradication programme.
The RSPB said the operation would be “logistically complex” because staff and equipment would have to be shipped to the island, located 1,550 miles from South Africa.
The project is inspired by a successful eradication programme on the British overseas territory of South Georgia, where rats were introduced by sealing and whaling ships in the 19th century.
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Why the hell would relatives refuse to let them move if the HSE are doing it for safey reasons. Bet they wouldn’t care for the fire fighters having to enter the building in an event of a fire.
Because its seen as an excuse to close the facility permanently-a lot more to this story than whats in the article
This is par for the course for years.. underfund a community hospital to the point where it’s both unsafe and not viable to repair it and then shut it down. These faults didn’t happen yesterday. Years of neglect.
HSE transparency…if this doesnt work to close the place permanently then they will call in the big guns…the “independent and impartial” HIQA.
They paint the building upgraded the parking new entrances parking meters (not used) its like the Guinness Ad Putting the Cart before the Horse you would think that they would start on the inside and work out to the ( road) It certainly wort a bet it will never open again The H S E H have no heart Watch this space
Whats the bet, that the hospital wont re-open due to other issues discovered with the electrical work.
And how come it will take 5 months to do the work, is there only one electrician being hired?
I’m for the life of me trying to work out what exactly would take five months. An entire housing estate wouldn’t take that and it’s not as if the nursing home wouldn’t have the “ground work” already done such as walls chased etc.. There’s something else going on here.
oh PLEASE!! the HSE care about vulnerable patients……there is certainly an agenda here and it is most certainly not for the good of the patients…..5 months to fix electrical work!!! the same crowd that has minimum entry ( if that) looking after vulnerable people and some dont even have functional english!!!
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