Above Picture: Lucia Liu Severinghaus, Australia, 2018

To date, only four persons have joined the prestigious ‘Wandering Albatross Club’ by sponsoring 100 hectares or more towards the planned eradication in 2023 of introduced House Mice on South Africa’s sub-Antarctic Marion Island.  Previous posts to this website have covered the generous 100+ ha donations of Roeloff Botha, Pamela Isdell and Shaun Schneier; now it is the turn to feature Lucia Liu Severinghaus, who, unlike the other three, is not a South African, but lives in Taiwan.  She was also the first to sponsor a hundred hectares.

Professor Severinghaus is a now retired ornithologist who has worked and published scientific papers and books on mainly terrestrial birds, notably owls, with the Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center.  Her work has extended to the conservation of Asian birds and their habitats and she has written “I am a lucky person who has seen Taiwan in its most beautiful state.  A person who cares about conservation usually cares through his/her life.”  In 2010 the multi-volume Avifauna of Taiwan was published, which she co-authored and edited

The Mouse-Free Marion Project reached out to Lucia to learn more about her most welcome sponsorship.  In reply she writes “As the then President of the International Ornithological Union I heard a plenary lecture on seabird conservation given by Professor Peter Ryan, Director of the University of Cape Town’s famous FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, at the 27th International Ornithological Congress held in Vancouver, Canada in 2018 and was very moved by what I heard and what I saw.  So instead of donating to the other causes I normally support, I focused on supporting the Mouse-Free Marion Project.  I understand the original removal of cats from the island was expected to be successful, as shown by predator-removal projects carried out in many places in New Zealand, but the Marion case reminds us that nature is always much more complicated than we assume.”

At risk from mice: a Wandering Albatross chick close to fledging on Marion Island, December 2008; photograph by John Cooper

The MFM Project is hugely thankful to Lucia Severinghaus for her sponsorship.  To date, no less than 884 sponsors have donated over 2.3 million South African Rands towards the eradication of Marion’s albatross-killing mice as part of the “Sponsor a Hectare” scheme, but with only 7.8% of the island’s 30 000 hectares spoken for so far there remains quite some way to go over the next two years.  So here’s hoping Lucia’s welcome donation will encourage others, both in South Africa and elsewhere in the world, to join the ‘Wandering Albatross Club’.

John Cooper, Member, Mouse-Free Marion Scientific and Technical Advisory Group, 23 July 2021