Find out about the efforts to rid Gough Island of rodents at goughisland.com
Gough Island is in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. It's about 3000kms from South Africa and 3000 kms from South America and it receives around three metres of rainfall every single year.
It is steep and volcanic and it looks luscious and moist, sort of like the fantasy island in Jurassic Park, but much, much colder and much more isolated.
Gough is one of the only blobs of land in an area of fertile ocean upwellings and that means it is a sea bird nesting island: a solid place to build a nest, with plentiful food nearby. Accordingly, millions of seabirds nest every year on Gough Island.
It’s a bird-persons dream and nightmare in one.
Dr Jaimie Cleeland is an Australian marine ecologist, and she spent a year working for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds on the remote island. Every day she’d be out monitoring nesting seabirds, and the population data she helped collect tells the life stories of the individual birds monitored, as well as the latest chapter in the biography of the planet.
Listen as Jaimie takes us on a tour through one of her most favourite places on earth, on a typical autumn day on Gough Island.
Sounds in this episode were recorded by Jaimie Cleeland along with Chris Taylor, Zacharia Mogale, Kate Lawrence and Michelle Risi. There are also many, many recordings from unnamed sound recordists from the ABC archives.