After Klein Curaçao removed goats and feral cats and restored habitat, nesting birds climbed from 140 pairs of one species in 2002 to around 650 across multiple species in 2022 as eight more species began breeding

There's a speck of land barely bigger than New York's Central Park baking in the southern Caribbean sun with a shipwreck rusting on its reef and a lighthouse fit for a postcard. For decades, this islet barely had any birds on it. Then humans took away exactly two things: goats and cats, and it became one of the busiest seabird nurseries in the region.

According to a 2023 study titled “A case study of sea and shorebird breeding recovery following goat and cat eradication on Klein Curaçao, southern Caribbean,” by Debrot et al., published in the Journal of Field Ornithology, the island of Klein Curaçao went from hosting a maximum of 140 breeding pairs of a single species in 2002 to roughly 650 nesting pairs of multiple species by 2022. For a generation raised on grim headlines about collapsing ecosystems, this is the kind of study that reads like a conservation underdog tale, and it's worth knowing how it happened.

The island that birds gave up on


Klein Curaçao is located about 10 km from the coast of Curaçao, in the Dutch Caribbean. This flat, uninhabited island should be a prime nesting spot for birds that nest on the ground, but for most of the twentieth century, a combination of feral goats and feral cats kept that from happening: goats stripped the few trees and shrubs of their leaves, while cats preyed on the nests of any bird that tried to breed on the islet. By the 1960s, researchers say the Least Tern was essentially the only confirmed breeding bird left on the island, according to the 2023 research.

The recovery was not accidental but happened sequentially. Curaçao's Agriculture, Animal Husbandry and Fishery Service removed the island's feral goats in 1996, according to the study's main text; though the paper's own abstract states 1997, so the exact year is not fully consistent even within the source. Starting in 2000, the conservation group CARMABI began replanting native coastal vegetation that the goats had destroyed, a project that ran through 2005. Feral cats were eradicated from the island by CARMABI in October 2001, meaning the cat eradication happened in the middle of the multi-year replanting effort, not after it, as a stray phrase in an earlier draft implied. Of the two eradications, researchers credit the removal of cats as the bigger driver of the seabird comeback, since cats are especially devastating to birds that nest directly on the ground.

The comeback, by the numbers

The results took time to show up, but when they did, they were striking. Field surveys in 2021 and 2022 documented eight additional sea and shorebird species nesting on the island for the first time on record, on top of the Least Tern that had endured the hard times. Two of these, the Sooty Tern and the Bridled Tern, marked the first confirmed breeding records for either species anywhere in Curaçao. The total nesting pairs climbed past 430 in 2021 and to around 650 in 2022. Of the nine species now breeding on the island, the four most numerous: Cayenne Terns, Laughing Gulls, Sooty Terns, and Least Terns, account for the bulk of those pairs; the remaining five species (American Oystercatcher, Green Heron, Bridled Tern, Roseate Tern, and Common Tern) nest in much smaller numbers but are still new or newly confirmed breeding records for the island.

Klein Curaçao's story fits into a much bigger, well-documented pattern. According to Jones et al., in their 2016 study titled “Invasive mammal eradication on islands results in substantial conservation gains,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, invasive mammal eradication efforts on islands around the world have led to 236 native species benefiting through recolonization, population recovery, or reintroduction, including 88 seabird populations that recolonized islands they'd been wiped out from, specifically (one category among several the study tracks).

A more recent global synthesis by Spatz et al., in a 2022 paper titled “The global contribution of invasive vertebrate eradication as a key island restoration tool,” in Scientific Reports, found that of 1,550 invasive vertebrate eradication attempts on nearly 1,000 islands since the 1870s, 88 percent of these attempts have succeeded. In other words, Klein Curaçao is not a fluke but a textbook example of a conservation tool that keeps working when it is applied.

The part that should give us travelers pause

There's a slightly uncomfortable twist to this story. Klein Curaçao is one of the most popular day-trip destinations from Curaçao's main island, attracting a steady stream of catamarans and speedboats full of tourists, many of them Americans, looking for turquoise water and lighthouse photos. This islet is recognized internationally as a Ramsar wetland and an Important Bird Area; the study itself doesn't make a specific claim about its domestic legal protection status, so that detail has been removed rather than left unverified.

Researchers behind the study flagged growing, largely uncontrolled recreational traffic (currently more than 600 visitors a week), and the constant risk of cats or rats hitching a ride back onto the island as the main threats to two decades of recovery. It's a reminder that rewilding a place is only half the job. Keeping that place that way, especially when it's a bucket-list beach stop, is the other and far less photogenic part.