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Witness History

Saving Guadalupe from goats

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.41.6K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2000, an expedition to the Mexican island of Guadalupe launched a fight to save its ecosystem from being eaten by goats. Russian whalers had introduced the goats to the island in the 19th Century and the population exploded as they ate their way through Guadalupe’s plants, shrubs and trees. Several species of birds were already extinct when a group of scientists, from the San Diego Natural History Museum, visited to inspect the damage. Their expedition would begin the campaign to save the island’s wildlife from extinction, as Professor Exequiel Ezcurra tells Jane Wilkinson. (Photo: Goats on Guadalupe Island. Credit: Northern Light Productions)

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Jane

0:09.2

Wilkinson. We're going back to 2000 to the Mexican island of Guadalupe, where the ecosystem

0:15.8

was almost destroyed by goats and to meet a man who helped restore it to a Pacific paradise.

0:24.4

The island had been described as a dead ecosystem, like a walking dead, like a zombie ecosystem.

0:29.5

It was definitely somewhat apocalyptic, less and very beautiful and very sad at the same time.

0:37.0

That's Professor Ezekiel Escura, a conservationist, describing Guadalupe 250 kilometres of the western

0:44.4

coast of Mexico and almost constantly shrouded in fog. For thousands of years no one had ever lived

0:52.2

and it blossomed. It must have been really so beautiful at that time. In the north of the island

0:58.2

there it had oak forest, pine forest, a little bit further south it had a cypress grove, a very dense

1:04.4

cypress grove and then as you move south you reach large areas of prairies where you had a number

1:10.6

of plants that are spring flowering, beautiful vegetation. The island had no land animals

1:17.8

other than birds because it's too far away for any animal to have migrained it there so it was a

1:23.1

bird paradise. And then 200 years ago humans arrived. In the 19th century traders who were mostly

1:32.3

Russian studied using the island as a stopping place to get water but they had this traditional

1:39.0

wringing goats with them and releasing them on the island so the next year they could come to the

1:45.5

island and hunt for goats and get meat and the island proved to be an initially an amazing ecosystem

1:51.8

for the goats. It was a domestic goat, very very large prawns that came out horizontally from the head.

1:59.2

The population initially exploded because it had so much food. They reached huge numbers,

2:05.7

we don't know how many, there's assumed they might have reached somewhere between 100,000 to

2:11.0

four million. By the turn of the century the goat numbers had settled at around 40,000 on land

2:18.3

measuring just 300 square kilometers. They're really gorge during the spring, they're during the

2:24.6

rest of the year they were trampling and excavating in the soil trying to get seedlings,

...

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