Saving Marion Island’s Seabirds
Regular price $35.50Join The Explorers Club on December 11th and learn about a groundbreaking project aiming to save a vital seabird breeding ground from an invasive threat.
Saving Marion Island’s Seabirds: The Mouse-Free Marion (MFM) Project offers an opportunity to solve, not merely mitigate, one of the world’s most pressing island conservation challenges. Through a single, carefully planned intervention — the eradication of invasive House Mice from Marion Island — the project will safeguard one of the planet’s most important breeding sites for seabirds and leave a profound, enduring global conservation legacy.
Marion Island belongs to a small group of sub-Antarctic islands scattered across the Southern Ocean. These remote refuges host some of the world’s largest concentrations of breeding seabirds and seals, and the scarcity of these refuges makes each one vital to the region’s albatrosses, petrels and penguins.
Marion Island alone supports more than two million seabirds, including over 30% of the global breeding population of the Wandering Albatross. Yet this ecosystem is under escalating threat. House Mice, accidentally introduced by sealers in the early 19th century, have devastated the island’s invertebrates and damaged its vegetation for over two centuries. They now attack seabird chicks and adults, including Wandering Albatrosses, causing agonising deaths among endangered and vulnerable populations. Without intervention, experts predict that 19 of the 29 bird species breeding on Marion could face local extinction, some within as little as three decades. Warmer, drier conditions driven by climate change are allowing mouse numbers to climb, accelerating the harm.
The MFM Project will address this through a method proven worldwide: aerial application of rodenticide bait. Removing the island’s single greatest threat will trigger a cascade of recovery, with seabirds and invertebrates rebounding and native vegetation regenerating. As a critical link in the sub-Antarctic marine ecosystem, a restored Marion Island will strengthen the ecological integrity of the wider region.
In-person tickets are $20 for Members, and $35 for the General Public.
Check-in will begin at 5:00 pm, with a beer and wine reception from 5:00 – 6:00 pm