She kills to be kind: the mastermind ecologist eliminating invasive predators

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This was the proving ground for Elizabeth “Biz” Bell: a place and a family that revolved around a fierce love of birds, and that helped turn her into one of the conservation world’s great mass killers.

Honed in New Zealand and now exported to the world, they are called predator-free zones, and their primary tool is death: mass trapping or poisoning drives to eliminate introduced predators or pests.

In doing so, Bell and her colleagues hope to halt the cascade of extinctions exacerbated by the introduction of predatory or competing species, allowing native and endangered creatures, particularly birds, to return and thrive.

For a long time, Bell says, the idea of restoring pockets of the environment to their pre-introduced-predator state was seen as wishful thinking – an oddball, uncompromising, even utopian vision for preserving ecological worlds that had already slipped away.

Visit any elimination project around the world, she says, and you’ll typically find a New Zealander involved somewhere: piloting a helicopter to drop poisoned bait or demonstrating new forms of humane rodent traps.

In 2002, Bell began overseeing her first handful of overseas projects, taking techniques developed in New Zealand and applying them to Lundy, an island off north Devon in the UK.

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