Campbell Island

Date: January 1, 2025

Sailing overnight, we arrived at the southernmost of the subantarctic islands of New Zealand, the Campbell Island group:

Campbell Island was discovered in 1810 by the sealing brig Perseverance and named after the ship owner Robert Campbell. The island quickly became a sealing base, but the seals very practically eradicated after only five years.

A Cape petrel seen from the ship:

Campell Island was settled in the late 19th century for sheep and cattle farming and all the usual pests were introduced by the early settlers. The settlement was abandoned in 1931 and the sheep and cattle left to roam free until the 1980s where they were culled and finally exterminated. After cattle, sheep and cats had been removed, the rats still remained and in 2001 the world's largest rat eradication program started. Campbell Island was thought to have the densest population of Norway rats in the world with 200,000 individuals on the 11,331 hectare island. During the eradication program, 120 tons of poison was distributed by helicopter and finally in 2003 the island was declared rat free.

A seal is looking at us from the kelp:

Behind the beach, you can see some tussock grass which is some of the original vegetation on these islands.

Look closely at this picture:

There is a bird among the rocks:

It is a Campbell Island teal. Here is another picture:

As the name implies, this species is only found on Campbell Island. It was thought to be extinct by the second half of the 1800's due to the rats. Then in 1975 a few individuals of the bird were rediscovered on a small island called Dent Island which is right next to Campbell Island. The population there was very small and in 1984 and 1990 a few individuals were moved off Dent Island to insure that the population weren't accidentally eradicated.

After many attempts, researchers finally succeeded in getting the Campbell Island teal to breed in captivity in 1994 when a bird called Daisy laid eggs. Since then, the breeding program has been a success and when the rats were eradicated, the birds were reintroduced to the main Campbell Island in 2004 and are now thriving there.

In the middle of the low vegetation, there is a tree:

It turns out that this is no coincidence. The tree, a Sitka spruce, was probably planted in the early 1900's by Lord Ranfurly, who was the Governor of New Zealand from 1897 to 1904. The tree is believed to be the world's most remote tree with the nearest neighbor 274 km away, on the Auckland Islands.

Here you can see the kelp filled water in front of the beach, then tussock grass:

Behind the tussock grass there is a dwarf forest of Dracophyllum, or turpertine scrub, topped with bare rocks.

A close up shown a male sea lion sitting among the kelp:

Hillside with a sea lion rookery with lots of newborn sea lions:

The light-colored sea lions are the females and the large dark ones are the males:

We did a hike on a boardwalk trail. Here we're looking back towards the ship in Perseverance Harbor:

The megaherb, Pleurophyllum speciosum in bloom:

View of the inner part of Perseverance Harbor. The small peak to the left is Beeman Hill:

A New Zealand pipit of the Campbell Island subspecies, probably looking for insects:

Overlooking Northwest Bay:

The steep rocky island seen in the right side of the picture is in fact Dent Island where the Campbell Island teal was discovered in 1975. The name is French and means tooth. Like many of the other characteristic topographic parts of the Campbell Islands group it was named in 1874 by a French expedition visiting the islands to view the transit of Venus.

Campbell Island is by far the most important breeding area of the southern royal abatross with more than 8,000 pairs breeding here compared to the 69 and 20 pairs, respectively, that were recorded breeding on Enderby Island and Auckland/Adams Islands in 2001.