Rats Go, Birds and Beasts Return

The New York Times Magazine

Here's an easy prediction: In the coming months you are going to see and read a lot about North Island. A new resort on this speck of land in the Seychelles has all the features that glossy magazines and TV shows (travel, décor, faux adventure, you name the genre) love -- azure sea, white beaches, full butler service, private plunge pools.

Lost in all the hoopla, though, will be an important fact: North Island resort is the carefully orchestrated result of sound ecological philosophies and conscientious building practices. In the process of creating a $1,700-a-night (for two) resort, the island has been brought back from the brink.

Like many of the 115 granite bits and coral pieces that make up the Seychelles -- 175 square miles of country sprinkled across more than half a million square miles of Indian Ocean -- North, some 20 miles northwest of the main island of Mahé, once had a population. In the days when copra, not tourism, was the major industry, as many as 50 people lived here. But in the 1970's, when the copra market fell, the inhabitants of North, and many other of the smaller islands, began moving to Mahé, which is now home to most of the country's 80,000 people.

The islanders who abandoned North left behind imported flora and fauna: hundreds of coconut, casuarina, banana and citrus trees, bougainvillea, cows, rats, Indian mynah birds, cats, barn owls and an invasive weed called lantana, referred to locally as ''lannier.'' 

''Nothing likes the lannier,'' says Patrick, dismissively, sucking at his umpteenth cigarette of the morning.

When I visited North at the end of 2000, Patrick was the first of its new settlers. A Mr. Chips lookalike, except for his dark skin and bare chest, he was employed by the island's new owners as a watchman. Although it looked like paradise, the island was a total wreck. The rodents had multiplied over the years, eating bird eggs to the point that few species were left.

Unlike several islands closer to Mahé (Cousine or Frégate, for instance), where there are huge numbers of extremely vocal noddies, crested terns, Mascarene martins and white-tailed tropic birds, here it was their absence and the silence that hit you.

The lush green vegetation that looked virginal and unspoiled, wasn't. If the hardy, invasive lantana and weeds hadn't overwhelmed the indigenous plants, the cows and pigs had. The unchecked watering of fruit trees had dried up the marshland long ago, causing the extinction of its resident freshwater turtles.

Degraded as the island was, a South African ecologist, Peter Hitchins, saw its potential and brought it to the attention of Johannesburg-based Wilderness Safaris. He thought they'd be the perfect match: an outfitter that has won international awards for its conservation track record in Africa paired with an island off Africa that was in serious need of help.

Hitchins calls what Wilderness has done on North over the past two years ''the Noah's Ark concept,'' by which turtles, tortoises and various birds are being shipped back again, as are trees like the takamaka, badamier and the coco de mer -- whose fruit Gen. Charles (Chinese) Gordon thought might be the kind Adam and Eve ate, for he also believed that Praslin Island's Vallée de Mai was a remnant of Eden. ''This is an attempt to recreate the islandic biodiversity that mankind destroyed,'' says Hitchins, who also worked on Cousine.

On Cousine and North, as well as on several other islands in the Seychelles, man is undoing what he did in centuries past. Aride was bought by Christopher Cadbury of the chocolate family in 1973 for the Royal Society for Nature Conservation; Cousine was bought by BirdLife International; and Denis and Frégate were bought by foreigners who built eco-resorts on them.

''It's a rescue operation,'' says Hitchins.

The ''rescue'' takes place because of government decree and private zeal. As recently as December 2001, according to Hitchins, the authorities in the capital, Victoria (Mahé), once again committed themselves to ''the protection and conservation of the natural environment and biodiversity.'' They also demanded that anyone who buys one of the islands must conduct a thorough environmental study, and then stick to its recommendations.

The list of do's and don'ts for North has been much the same as it was for Cousine and the others: limit development, limit noise, preserve historical sites, eradicate alien fauna and flora, plant anew (takamakas and badamiers in particular), conserve water and install ecologically sensitive sewerage.

The resort that Wilderness has built consists of 12 secluded bungalows, with ylang-ylang roofs thatched by a team from Bali, stonework created by men from Mahé, carpentry by Malawians and South Africans and interiors by a Mauritian.

''It's been a dream project for everyone involved,'' says Silvio Rech, a South African architect, who, with his wife, Lesley Carstens, has also designed lodges in Africa, including the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge in Tanzania. Living on the island for much of the past year, Rech has adapted his plans almost daily, often to make way for materials that could be recycled. Alien trees that were cut down, like the casuarina, have been used for building; old sinuous roots from takamakas were incorporated into the design of the main lounge; and one of the copra shacks was turned into a library and dive center.

If the landscape of North is changing, not every change is without its critics. Why, for instance, cut down the coconut palms? While they aren't endemic and they may have provided food for rats through the years, they also are a favored home of brown noddies. And some of the amenities may seem excessive.

Besides a staff of two for each bungalow, DVD's and Internet access, there is a health spa carved into the granite rocks and, to get around this rocky island that's barely 1.5 miles long, electrically powered golf carts. The reason? The clientele that North is aimed at is people with money. Saving paradise costs a lot, and it's the rich who are going to foot the bill. The same strategy was used by Cousine and Frégate, where exclusivity (4 bungalows on Cousine, 16 on Frégate) has helped pull in clients like Pierce Brosnan and Rupert Murdoch.

Before North Island receives its first guests, sometime this spring, a small band of New Zealanders will pay a short visit. Their job will be to exterminate the rats. This will be the sixth place in the Seychelles that the team has de-ratted; and to reduce the chances that rodents will come back again, boats won't be allowed to beach and there will be no jetty. The end of this one alien species means the return of at least three indigenous ones, all of them highly endangered: the black paradise flycatcher, the Seychelles warbler and, most important of all, the Seychelles magpie robin.

One of the rarest birds on earth, the magpie robin was once resident on at least seven of the Seychelles, but was eventually found only on Frégate. Its slow return has taken place almost in tandem with the rebirth of the islands, although its future is much more tenuous. When a few rats did get onto Frégate from a passing schooner in 1995, they were such a threat that a number of the birds were hurriedly caught and relocated to Cousine and Aride. They should have thrived on both islands, but only took to Cousine.

And those still seem to be the odds of the magpie robin's survival: 50-50. Whether the bird will take to North is impossible to predict. As for the island itself, says Hitchins, two decades of recreating lie ahead.