In the 1980s, ferrets were released on Northern Ireland’s Rathlin Island to control rabbits; decades later, they threatened seabirds at a colony of more than 250,000 birds

Ferrets were released on Rathlin Island in the mid-1980s, off the north coast of Northern Ireland, to deal with the island's rabbit population. The ferrets established a feral population and, over the following decades, became predators of the island's nesting wildlife. By the 2020s, conservationists were trying to remove them from an island that supports Northern Ireland's largest seabird colony, with more than 250,000 seabirds including puffins, razorbills, guillemots and Manx shearwaters. The Rathlin LIFE Raft project states that ferrets were released in the mid-1980s and later became one of the invasive non-native predators threatening the island's wildlife.

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