LONDON: 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 on Monday. 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 beaten 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.
