A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 143

appears to be almost indestructible: one specimen was seen happily
consuming a lit cigarette butt. 63 Scarcely anything which tries to eat it
survives: it is as dangerous to predators as it is to prey. Unlike other
amphibians, it can breed in salty water: it could have waddled out of
the pages of Karel Capek's novel War with the Newts .
The world's most important seabird colony - Gough Island in the
South Atlantic - is now being threatened by an unlikely predator: the
common house mouse. After escaping from whaling boats 150 years
ago, it quickly evolved to triple in size, and switched from eating plants
to eating flesh. The seabirds there have no defences against predation,
so the mouse simply walks into their nests and starts eating the chicks
alive. Among their prey are albatross fledglings, which weigh some
300 times as much as they do. A biologist who has witnessed this carn-
age observed that 'it is like a tabby cat attacking a hippopotamus'. 64
But even more mundane invasions can be devastating to the richness
of native ecosystems. Rhododendron ponticum , which - as the name
suggests - is native to the shores of the Black Sea and lands at similar
latitudes, works its way through British woodlands, smothering and
poisoning other plants. It can kill even the mature trees among which it
grows. I have seen entire stands of ash dying from canker, apparently as
a result of the moist conditions sustained around their boles by the
rhododendron's thick cover. It harbours sudden oak death fungus,
which kills a number of trees in Britain, though not, as it happens, oaks.
While the hawthorn in Britain supports 149 species of insect, the birch
229 and the oak 284, the rhododendron is reported to harbour none. 65
This is one of the reasons why it thrives here: it has escaped from the
restraints imposed by the plant eaters of its native lands. Interestingly,
however, Rhododendron ponticum was native to these islands during a
previous interglacial period. 66 Its natural pests, predators and competi-
tors appear to have been destroyed by subsequent ice advances, allowing
it, once imported by enthusiasts, to return here unchallenged, our flora's
deus invictus . Is it possible that one of our missing herbivores - the
ancient elephant or the Merck's or narrow-nosed rhino, for example -
was able to eat it? If it is not controlled, it will eventually supplant
almost all the vegetation of the places it invades.
I am struck by how unassuming some of the species which cause
havoc abroad are in their native range. In the Himalayas where it