Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust Gugh, brown rat ("Rattus norvegicus") free, to help breeding sea birds, which lost 25% of their populations between 1983 and 2006. The rats eat eggs and kill the chicks of those birds that nest in burrows or on the ground. Rat removal began in October 2013 by a team of thirty volunteers led by Wildlife Management International Limited (WMIL) of New Zealand, and there has been no signs of rats on St Agnes and Gugh since December 2013. WMIL will return to the islands to do a final check for rats in 2016. In 2014 Manx shearwater ("Puffinus puffinus") bred
Persian shearwater off Oman and Socotra, Yemen, while "P. p. temptator" has been estimated to number fewer than 500 pairs on Moheli Island in the Comoros (reviewed by Brooke 2004). It is thought likely that more breeding colonies lie undiscovered elsewhere in the northern Indian Ocean (Onley and Scofield 2007), thus the total population probably includes more than 10,000 mature individuals. The population trend is believed to be downwards. Persian shearwater The Persian shearwater ("Puffinus persicus") is a seabird in the family Procellariidae formerly lumped in with Audubon's shearwater ("Puffinus lherminieri"). There are two listed subspecies of the Persian shearwater: After breeding,