Red-Tailed Hawk

by Jim Stevenson
For centuries, the native Cotton Rat scurried around Galveston Island, nibbling mostly green grass, leaving stashes laying beside runways. A ubiquitous creature of the Deep South, these “hispid” rats form integral parts of the food chain, feeding rodentivores from snakes to hawks.

Galveston and beyond, these prolific rodents produce nine litters/year, with a 27-day gestation period, and half-dozen or so siblings/birth. With an average of twelve adults/acre, you can see why they get the attention of predators.

Hurricane Ike brought the smorgasbord to a screeching halt, drowning the vast majority of Cotton Rats, leaving their predators high, dry and hungry. The winter of 2008 saw virtually no typical rat-eating birds in Galveston’s skies, the Coyote population suffered enormously, and the few snakes that survived the storm struggled mightily to find warm, furry meals.

Curiously, hawks called harriers made an interesting discovery that I, in turn, noticed along the FM 2004 wasteland. They found the distantly-related Black Rat, a European species that lives in roofs, eking out a clumsy survival in the huge piles of boards and debris along the West End Road.

That virtually hawk-less winter led to a bonanza of Cotton Rat reproduction in 2009-10, with a geometric population rise the likes of which has rarely been witnessed. They were simply everywhere in their grassy comfort zone and some fields even suffered from overgrazing.

Black Rats were dealt a terrible blow by Ike (and the harriers!), fellow alien Norway Rats, which live ground level around human dwellings, were only beginning to recover, but Cotton Rat densities, in the absence of most predators, skyrocketed. Finally, word got out.

American Kestrel

While flightless snakes and mammals were slow to recover their numbers, the aerial predators began the assault. By fall of 2010, American Kestrels, the tiny, colorful falcons, sailed in by late September’s cooler winds and laid low the latest generation of young rats.

October brought mighty Red-tailed Hawks, hunting from their telephone pole tops, treating adult rats like M&Ms. And right on their heels arrived a squadron of Northern Harriers, floating effortlessly over the dry marsh, plopping their deadly talons on unsuspecting fuzz balls.

By the spring of 2011, when these three wintering hawks were slow to leave the furry bounty, the non-migratory, ghostly-gray White-tailed Kites moved in to nest, hovering over ratville like Britain’s Harrier Jets over the Falklands. And to complete the foursome, Crested Caracaras turned back from their seashore-scavenging ways to the bounty of rats.

Now, in the emerging spring of 2012, Coyote numbers have returned to pre-Ike status and snakes like Cottonmouths and Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes are slithering over the Island once again. The rats’ dinner guests have re-assembled and all is well with the ecology of Galveston.

Life on Earth can handle the natural events our planet inflicts upon them. It’s the unnatural and hurried changes at the hand of man that send our biological treasures helplessly into oblivion. Otherwise, as the mathematician on Jurassic Park said, “Nature finds a way.”