Getting The Rats Off Of Rat Island

Rat Island, like many other treeless, volcanic islands in the 1,000-mile (1,609-km) long Aleutian chain, is infested with rats that have proved devastating to wild birds that build nests on the ground or in rocky cliffs.

"They pretty much made the island worthless for a lot of wildlife," said Art Sowls, a biologist with the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which sprawls across the Aleutians and other Alaska islands."A lot of the birds you find, the only parts the rats eat are the eyeballs and the brains," Sowls said.

Rodents have reigned at Rat Island at the western end of the Aleutians since the 1780 shipwreck of a Japanese sailing ship, wreaking havoc on millions of seabirds with no natural defenses against land predators.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to find an effective way to wipe out rat populations without harming other wildlife.

Rats are a problem shared by remote islands all around the world. Biologists said successful rat removal programs have taken place in more than 250 islands including Campbell Island south of New Zealand and Langara Island in British Columbia.

"A lot of people go, 'Oh they're just rats, what's the big deal?'," said Ron Clarke, assistant wildlife conservation director at the Department of Fish and Game. But, "They're very good swimmers. They'll eat anything. They're just very good at surviving," Clarke said.

Since the early 1990s, wildlife refuge managers have maintained a "rat-spill" program -- in which emergency responders prevent the spread of rats from shipwrecks -- similar to oil-spill contingency plans maintained by state and federal agencies.

"It's entirely possible that in a shipwreck situation, the environmental damage created by the introduction of rats into the environment would be even worse than that of a major oil spill," Sowls said.

Farmers Chase Freed Mink

About half the 2,500 minks released from unlocked cages in Mustasaari, 400 km (250 miles) northwest of Helsinki, had been recaptured, but it could take several days to round up the others, police said.

"We have no firm suspects at the moment. But the letters EVR were spray-painted on a feed silo at the farm. In this connection it usually means Animal Liberation Front in Finnish," Chief Inspector Mika Jylha told Reuters, but added: "Of course, anyone could write that."

Cat Poop in Coffee is Very Popular

Enzymes in the cats' stomach break down the proteins that give coffee its bitter taste, thus enhancing its flavour and creating a brew many consider superb. A cup of the special civet cat or luwak coffee sells for as much as 50 Australian dollars in trendy cafes Downunder while hip New Yorkers pay around 75 U.S. dollars for a quarter pound.

Parents Try to Name Baby @

The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.

"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.

Li told a news conference on the state of the language that the name was an extreme example of people's increasingly adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialization and the Internet break down conventions.

Li did not say if officials accepted the "@" name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages.

Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognize them and even fluent speakers were left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government Web site (www.gov.cn).

Crocodile Survives Twelve Floor Drop

Diving out of the window has become a habit for the crocodile, called Khenar, with concerned neighbors saying it was the third time he had used that method to flee, Moskovsky Komsomolets daily reported.

The crocodile lost one tooth in the latest fall but was otherwise unscathed, said a spokeswoman for the emergencies ministry in the Nizhny Novgorod region of central Russia.

"It seems the owner was not at home when the crocodile came out of the window," she said.

Emergency services put the crocodile in a local aquarium to recover from his fall. Within a few hours his concerned owner came to pick him up and the crocodile was last seen lying on the back seat of his owner's car.