Conservation groups began a campaign to remove invasive rats from Lundy, a rocky island in the Bristol Channel in 2002. Ten years later, surveys found about 3,000 breeding pairs of Manx shearwaters, up from roughly 300 when the recovery project began. Guillemots were also using breeding sites on cliffs and areas that had previously been accessible to rats. The project was launched because rats were preying on seabird eggs and chicks. Lundy had suitable nesting habitat, but several bird populations had fallen sharply. The removal effort eventually made the island rat-free, and subsequent surveys recorded increases across several seabird species. The same basic problem is being tackled on islands thousands of miles away. In the Marshall Islands, a rat-eradication campaign completed in 2024 was followed by the return of thousands of native seedlings and a colony of about 2,000 sooty terns within a year.
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