Story and Pictures by James Woodford

See Stuart Cohen’s Flickr site - a fantastic collection of Brush Island photos from this week’s expedition

After a night trying to sleep amidst thousands of feathered revellers, seabird scientist, Nicholas Carlile, says it is as if Brush Island has just survived a huge, impromptu party.
Uninhabited by humans, the thickly-vegetated, 47-hectare nature reserve a few hundred metres off the NSW south coast village of Bawley Point is a lot noisier at night than it was a few years ago.
“In the morning it feels like the island has a hangover,” says Carlile, a seabird project officer with the National Parks and Wildlife Service (pictured above).

Armies of birds leave to forage on the ocean before first light each day and return after dark. Their noise and fighting during the evening is incessant and the mess visible in the daylight is extraordinary.
A massively successful program to eradicate feral rats in 2005 has resulted in a surge of wildlife, making Brush Island the richest for seabirds in coastal NSW.
The Black Rats were the survivors of a shipwrecked steamer, Northern Firth, which ran aground on Brush Island in 1932.
Eggs, native vegetation, chicks, crabs, frogs and almost every other creature and plant was either directly or indirectly impacted by the sudden invasion.

Although no studies were done at the time, it is almost certain that at least one species – the 60-gram White-faced Storm Petrel – was made locally extinct because of rats.
In 2005, after months of planning and preparation to ensure no native species were impacted, parks service staff, particularly from the nearby Ulladulla office, set 100 kilograms of poison in 550 bait stations across the entire island. Follow-up programs have failed to find any evidence of a single rodent left on Brush Island.
Both Carlile and his colleague, local National Parks and Wildlife Service acting area manager, Mike Jarman, say the ecological bounce has been “astonishing”. Numerous species of frogs are again calling, crabs are back to their previous numbers in rock pools, there is a fresh flush of shrub, tree and grass growth.
Bush birds also seem to be recolonising but it is the endangered sea and shore birds that have been the biggest winners.
Only the World-Heritage-listed Lord Howe Island, 600 kilometres off the mainland, has a greater diversity of seabirds.
The White-faced Storm Petrel is back and the Sooty Shearwater, has been recorded on the island for the first time.
At dusk this week Carlile and Jarman, accompanied by the Herald climbed to the summit of the island. At least half a dozen whales were breaching and tail-flapping nearby in the ocean – a pair of hump-backs cruised just twenty metres off the island’s rocky northern coast.
As soon as the sun was gone and the predatory raptors had headed back to the mainland swarms of seabirds began to arrive. Some 2,000 penguins charged up the island’s 44 landing sites and shearwaters flew in like aircraft whose controls had failed.
Even those responsible for the eradication, like Jarman and Carlile, had no idea the program would be so successful.
The efforts at Brush Island will now form the template for restoring the balance to the state’s other offshore islands as part of the Island Sanctuary Program: a government initiative that aims to eradicate all mammalian pests from all NSW offshore islands.
If sea levels rise as predicted due to climate change seabirds will need all the safe coastal habitat possible, says Carlile.
“Brush is a nice high island so it’s a critical location in the face of rising sea levels. Eradicating ferals gives endangered species room to move and in this case, the choice of coming back.”

First published Sydney Morning Herald 15/11/08