The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons Read online

  The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons

  My Obsessive Quest to Seek Out Alien Species

  GLEN CHILTON

  Dedication

  To Dr. Lisa Chilton, whom I treasure more than my next breath

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. The Last Place You’d Look for a Wallaby

  Wallabies in Scotland

  2. Universal Oysters

  Oysters in the Netherlands

  3. The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons

  Rhododendrons in Ireland

  4. The Last of the Mynas

  Mynas in Vancouver

  5. The Curse of the White Guys

  Tea in Sri Lanka

  6. Paradise Made to Order

  Weeds in Hawaii

  7. If God Were a Frog

  Frogs in Uruguay

  8. The Perforation of New Orleans

  Termites in New Orleans

  9. Through a Great Undersea Tunnel

  Macaques in Gibraltar

  10. Duck Hunt at the OK Corral

  Ducks in Spain

  11. If You Have Snails, Blame the Romans

  Snails in Great Britain

  12. “How Are You? RAHHUUURGGGH!”

  Eucalyptus Trees in Ethiopia

  13. Geothermal Heating and Diabolical Clichés

  Lupines in Iceland

  14. A Leap of Faith

  Viruses in Australia

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I WANTED A DOG. I got a turtle. Imagine my disappointment. Try to imagine the disappointment of millions of children who got turtles instead of dogs. Dogs are really good at returning affection. Turtles are really good at dying, which mine did in fairly short order. I swear that it wasn’t my fault. It was reluctant to eat much of anything, and I tried just about everything. So I got another turtle. It came from Kmart and cost 25 cents, which says something about the value that was put on the lives of animals back then.

  In the 1960s, 3 million turtles were imported to Canada from the United States each year. Given that the human population of Canada was less than 18 million at the time, you have to be impressed. Most of those turtles were red-eared sliders, native to the Mississippi Valley of the eastern United States.

  Well, that second turtle died too, so I got another. And so it went. Eventually I got a little better at turtle husbandry and my turtle didn’t die. Over the period of a few months it even managed to grow a bit. So imagine my rekindled disappointment when I was told that my turtle was a health threat and had to go. Like millions of other children, I released my turtle from captivity to live a happy life in the wild.

  It seems that someone in a position of power had made the link between turtle ownership and diarrhea, cramps, and fever in children. Salmonella bacteria live in the digestive tract of turtles (and a wide range of other reptiles), and they shed some of these bacteria with every bowel movement. Turtles suffer very little from being infected by salmonella bacteria. The same cannot be said for people, and so a ban on the distribution of turtles was put in place by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1975. Not all turtles were banned, just those under ten centimetres in length. The FDA figured that young children wouldn’t stuff larger turtles in their mouths. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimate that the ban prevents 100,000 cases of salmonella poisoning in children each year.

  Imagine the disappointment of the 150 turtle breeders in the United States, who were producing upwards of 13 million pet turtles a year. When the ban came into effect, some of these business people gave up, but the rest saw the obvious solution. If you can’t sell turtles domestically, then ship them to places that haven’t enacted prohibitory legislation. By the mid-1990s, 6 million turtles a year, bred in the United States, were being exported overseas. Parents in the receiving countries eventually got the salmonella message and liberated their children’s turtles into local waterways. Freed from the haphazard care of young children, many of the released turtles prospered. And so, from their humble beginnings along the quiet backwaters of the Mississippi Valley, red-eared sliders came to inhabit the world. Populations are established in Belgium, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Israel, Bermuda, Guyana, and, very likely, wherever you happen to be reading this book. The red-eared slider is considered to be one of the 100 worst invasive species in the world, outcompeting and hybridizing with native turtle species and eating other freshwater fauna.

  It seems likely that as long as humans have been humans we have been shuffling the deck, picking up plants and animals from one spot and plonking them down in another. The general consensus among biologists is that, nine times out of ten, the newly introduced creatures will simply die off. Something about the new habitat will fail to meet their needs or will exceed their tolerance, and the potential invaders will fail to establish a self-sustaining population. Even if the newly arrived creatures beat the odds to survive and flourish, nine times out of ten they will blend into the background without causing any hardship to native fauna or flora or to humans. No muss, no fuss.

  However, one time in one hundred, the creature that has been transplanted over some geographical barrier to dispersal proves itself to be very, very unwelcome. The guest is now a pest. What was once exotic is now unwelcome. The introduced species is now an invasive species. And so we find Australia covered with rabbits, the North American Great Lakes filled with zebra mussels, Africa’s Lake Victoria choked with water hyacinth, and pigeons hanging out in every town square in the world. Indeed, the only place in the world without introduced species is Bouvet Island, an incredibly remote and tiny chunk of rock poking out of the South Atlantic. The word “pest” is probably an enormous understatement. Along with habitat destruction and overexploitation, introduced species are considered to be one of the greatest threats to global diversity.

  I had just completed an around-the-world expedition to find every stuffed specimen of the extinct Labrador Duck. Sales of the resulting book, The Curse of the Labrador Duck, had gone some way to replenishing my savagely depleted bank account. It seemed the perfect time to throw myself back into penury by circling the globe again in search of introduced creatures. I wanted to jump from one continent to another, examining the alien pests that were creating biological Armageddon. If possible, I wanted to speak to someone who had actually made an introduction, and to the folks charged with exterminating the foreigners. Could I distinguish between noxious aliens and innocent victims of our tendency to move plants and animals from here to there? Examining the effects of an exotic disease might be fun. Perhaps I could even find an introduced critter whose presence was having a positive effect on the local landscape. Was it possible to put the whole issue of introduced species on a scale?

  It was time for a quest.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Last Place You’d Look for a Wallaby

  REASON NUMBER ONE FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE IT’S MY ISLAND, AND NO ONE CAN TELL ME WHAT TO DO.

  IN THE NORTHERN SCOTTISH CITY of Inverness, the museum and art gallery has an enviable assortment of landscape paintings and artifacts of local human history. It also has a representative sample of stuffed Scottish animals. For school-aged visitors, Felicity is probably the most popular attraction. Felicity was a mountain lion, discovered wandering the highlands in October 1980. Native to the wilds of western North America, Felicity was a fair few kilometres from home. She was trapped and transported to a wildlife park near Kingussie, where a keepe
r described her as overweight and unnaturally tame. There was little doubt that Felicity had spent her first ten or so years of life in the care of someone who released her after finally realizing that a house in the Scottish glens is not a naturally tenable place for a mountain lion. She lived her last five years in the wildlife park before shuffling off, apparently of old age. Museum taxidermist Philip Howard had given Felicity the look of an overgrown tabby just waiting to be scratched behind the ear before devouring the family poodle.

  There is no shortage of tales of large cat sightings in the less populated portions of Britain, some dating back to the sixteenth century. Further, there is no shortage of other introduced mammals wandering that green and pleasant land, including feral goats introduced some 4,000 years ago, ferrets introduced during Roman times, the so-called yellow rabbit brought from France in the eleventh century, North American grey squirrels introduced in the late-nineteenth century and now not-so-slowly pushing out the native red squirrel, and American mink from the 1950s that are chomping their way through Scotland’s population of water voles.

  The tale may be apocryphal, but it seems that a tanker driver had a small role to play in what must surely be one of the strangest introduced species stories in the United Kingdom. According to an article in the Glasgow Herald from October 16, 1982, local police were investigating the story of a tanker driver, hauling a load along Highway A82 on the west side of Loch Lomond near the village of Luss, who claimed to have collided with a kangaroo. Normally, this sort of claim calls for a Breathalyzer test. But five years earlier, several kangaroos had escaped from the Loch Lomond Bear Park at Cameron. Could one of them have been hiding out until clobbered by the truck? Alternatively, the creature in question may not have been a kangaroo at all, but rather a red-necked wallaby. A wallaby might have swum across a narrow channel in Loch Lomond from the island of Inchconnachan. How did red-necked wallabies come to be on Inchconnachan? The part of me that loves a good yarn wishes that they had something to do with warfare between the highland clans in the murky past. Luckily, reality is almost as much fun.

  The lives of people with titles like “Lord” and “Count” are an open book. We know, for instance, that our protagonist, Fiona, Countess of Arran, formerly Miss Fiona Bryde Colquhoun of Luss, married Sir Arthur Strange Kattendyke David Archibald Gore on June 11, 1937. December 28, 1958, was a pretty good day for Sir Arthur, when he became 8th Viscount Sudley of Castle Gore, County Mayo; 10th Baronet Saunders of Newtown Gore, County Mayo; 8th Baron Saunders of Deeps, County Wexford; 8th Earl of Arran of Arran Islands, County Galway; and 4th Baron Sudley of Castle Gore, County Mayo. Sir Arthur passed away in 1983, but the family has assured me that the Countess lives on. Fiona has had great adventures in her long life. For instance, in August 1980, she became the first person to surpass 100 miles per hour on water when her powerboat achieved 102 miles per hour on Lake Windermere in England; for this she became only the third woman to be decorated with the Segrave Trophy, awarded to those who demonstrate the great potential of travel by land, sea, or air.

  In 1972, the Countess reportedly released a pair of collared peccaries, native to Central and South America, on Inchconnachan. I suppose that she had every right to do so since her family, the Colquhouns of Luss, owned the island. One peccary vanished and the other was removed in 1984. As part of a plan to establish a small wildlife park, the Countess released red-necked wallabies on the same island sometime in the early 1970s, and these have persisted to the present. The current population is thought to number somewhere around forty.

  The Countess of Arran probably didn’t have to get her red-necked wallabies shipped from Tasmania by FedEx. As early as 1933, Whipsnade Zoological Park in Bedfordshire had wallabies in its collection, along with gnus, dromedaries, dingoes, hippopotami, and polar bears. Now called the ZSL Whipsnade Zoo, the institution still counts a herd of 599 free-roaming wallabies among its attractions, and it seems that this is where the Countess got her stock for Inchconnachan. Fiona and her husband, “Boofy,” reportedly also kept albino wallabies on the grounds of Pimlico House, their home in Hertfordshire, along with alpacas, foxes, and badgers.

  I first heard the story about wallabies on Loch Lomond in a Glasgow pub, which made me initially doubt its veracity. Asking around, it seemed that about 50 percent of Glaswegians had heard the story. But knowing about wallabies on an island is one thing; actually seeing them is another. Although Inchconnachan is part of Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park and is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, it is still owned by the Colquhoun family. My reading of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000) seemed to suggest that I had the right to walk all over the island without asking permission. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act (2003) seemed to suggest the same. Even better, the Scottish Outdoor Access Code (2005) made it pretty clear that as long as I stayed away from residences, didn’t commit an obvious criminal act, didn’t harass the wildlife, and didn’t let a dog run free, I could pretty much tramp over any bit of Scotland that I pleased. No need to ask; just do it.

  But that sort of behaviour just isn’t in my personality. I am more likely to ask for permission than for forgiveness, and so I did, and was rewarded with official sanction from Iain Sheves, factor of Luss Estates Company. Sheves asked that I write to a ranger in the national park to let officials know I would be on the island, and said I should stay clear of a small, environmentally sensitive spot on Inchconnachan, but otherwise I was welcome to have a poke around.

  This still left me without a means of getting to Inchconnachan. Luckily, through mutual friends, I had struck up an acquaintance with Klarinka Farkas. Klarinka was an architect from Hungary who had visited Scotland eight years earlier and had loved it so much that she stayed. Klarinka was far more comfortable out-of-doors than in, and being particularly fond of marine sports felt Scotland would provide her with greater opportunity than landlocked Hungary. To a large extent, she was able to ply her profession from the home she had purchased in the tiny west coast community of Mosachbean. Beyond her own gear, Klarinka had a spare kayak, a spare tent, a spare sleeping bag, and all of the other outdoor equipment that I didn’t have. Further, she was willing to spend a few days away from her computer to have a paddle to look for wallabies.

  THERE ARE FOUR SONGS of enduring fame to have originated in Scotland. The first is the rock classic “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers. The second is the bagpipe classic “Danny Boy.” The third is that other bagpipe classic that everyone knows, but no one can ever remember the name of or the words to. “Aaaa reee braaaad daaa daaa daaaaaa, Aaaa reee broooo daaa daaa broooooo”; you know the one. The fourth is “The Bonny Banks o’ Loch Lomond.” No one seems to be able to agree on the lyrics, but one version goes:

  Oh, I’ll tak the high road,

  An you’ll tak the low road,

  An I’ll be in Scotland afore ye,

  But me an’ my true love will never meet again

  On the bonny, bonny banks o’ Loch Lomond.

  There are endless notions about who composed the piece, when, and under what circumstances. My favourite story involves Donald Macdonald, a Scottish soldier awaiting trial after his capture at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Sitting in Carlisle jail, Macdonald was pretty sure he would be executed the following day for his role in the Jacobite Rebellion. Convinced that his soul would reach Scotland from the gallows before some of his fellow prisoners who would be set free to walk home, he wrote the poem for his beloved Moira. Whether or not Macdonald wrote the words to “Loch Lomond,” he appears to have escaped the gallows and lived for another twenty-four years.

  Death is not the only way to get to the bonny, bonny shores of Loch Lomond. If you are keen on staying off the gallows, you can take the train from Glasgow’s Partick station, and for just £3.10, it will drop you off forty minutes later at the town of Balloch, just a couple of hundred metres from the loch. This is what I did.

  I didn’t want to be late for my rendezvous with
Klarinka, so I caught a train that got me into Balloch an hour early. I plonked myself down on a stone wall to wait. Showing typical Hungarian efficiency, when Klarinka pulled up she had already purchased all of the groceries that we would need for our three-day trip. I would have appreciated the opportunity for a bit of input on our meals, but her efforts meant that we were away that much sooner.

  Klarinka drove us up the west side of Loch Lomond to one of the park’s interpretive centres. We unpacked all the gear from her car and moved the kayaks from the roof rack to the water’s edge. Now, I am generally a whiz when it comes to packing a lot of stuff into a little space. I have even been known to get two bodies into a single sleeping bag. But when it came to getting drinking water, food, and camping gear into the holds of Klarinka’s spare kayak, I just couldn’t make it work. After Klarinka had packed her kayak, she took over packing mine. Then we went through a checklist—or rather, Klarinka went through a checklist. Did I have sunglasses? No, because I was wearing eyeglasses. Did I have a rain jacket? Yes, because I was not an idiot. Was I wearing sandals? Yes, because I knew that shoes never dry on a kayaking trip. Did I have a hat? Yes, it was perched right there on top of my head. It all left me with the rather uncomfortable feeling that I was being directed by a Girl Guide leader.

  I love to canoe, and I love to kayak. I haven’t done a lot of either, but I claim to be reasonably confident in either craft. This made me feel all the more incompetent when my kayak was as tippy as a Glaswegian on a Saturday night. Klarinka got back out of her kayak and steadied mine while I got in and adjusted the spray skirt.

  Then we were underway, en route to an adventure with wallabies on Inchconnachan. Less than 30 seconds into the three-day trip, I discovered that my kayak had no rudder, which Klarinka described as a “North American thing.” No matter what I did, with every pull on the paddle the kayak pulled to port, and I didn’t have a rudder to counteract it. It wasn’t just that I was paddling harder on the right side; as soon as I stopped paddling, the craft coasted in a lazy arc to the left. I was told that I must be sitting wrong. I tried shifting my weight, but I had to choose between a position that made the pulling bad and one that made it even worse.