Unalaska, AK – A staffer from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge will be filling Unalaskans in on a plan to eradicate rats from an island in the western Aleutians in a talk at the Museum of the Aleutians this evening.

The FWS is poised to start the project this fall on Rat Island, an island about 200 miles west of Adak that is believed to be the first place in Alaska to become infested with Norway rats, as early as the 1780s.

The plan is to use helicopters to spread a rodenticide across the island, a method that has been used on islands off the coast of California and New Zealand. Refuge Public Programs Supervisor Poppy Benson, who's giving tonight's talk, says that with rats, it's all or nothing.

"You have to get rid of every single rat," she said. "You can't control them--you have to eradicate them, because their birth rate is so fast. So we have to eliminate them all if this island is going to come back."

Rat Island has few birds and virtually no seabirds because of its rat population. Benson said that past experience in the Aleutians suggests that once you get rid of non-native predators, those bird populations return much more quickly than you might expect.

"We've taken fox off so many islands, and we've seen such incredible rebound in the birds," she said, citing the example of the Aleutian Canada goose, which bounced back from near extinction to a population large enough to support a hunting season.

In December, the FWS released its environmental assessment for the Rat Island project, and received 38 public comments. Benson said tonight's meeting is in response to interest from community members, some of whom expressed concern over the idea of dumping rat poison across an entire island.

Benson conceded that the method will most likely harm the few birds currently nesting on the island, mostly winter wrens and rosy finches. But she said that refuge managers believe those impacts will be temporary.

"There will be some mortality [among] those birds, because they will pick at the bait," she said. "But those are birds that are preyed on by rats, and our thinking is that they will come back so quickly once they no longer have rats preying on their eggs and baby chicks, that it'll be worth it."

Benson's talk on the Rat Island project will be at 7 p.m. this evening at the Museum of the Aleutians. The environmental assessment for the project can be downloaded here.