Officials of the program charged with keeping Guam’s brown tree snakes from spreading to other Pacific islands are hopeful that recent funding increases will give them the resources they need to catch up with their increasing workload. But time is critical.

“Right now we’re facing budgetary constraints and we’re not able to deliver 100 percent containment anymore,” said Daniel Vice, assistant state director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division. “We’ve had a number of aircraft slip off island without inspection and other things are slipping through.”

The Guam Wildlife Services office is responsible for keeping ships and aircraft free of snakes at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam Naval Base, the Guam International Airport and the island’s commercial sea port.

Wildlife Services officers catch about 6,000 snakes annually using three methods — traps, dog teams and by hand.

Three thousand mouse-baited traps are hung on the fences that surround the exit ports and around 32 commercial freight forwarding businesses. The traps catch about 65 percent of the snakes caught on Guam. The mice are not harmed by the snakes and the service maintains the 3,000 rodents weekly.

Until recently, almost all of the remaining 35 percent of the snakes were caught by hand. At night, the snakes hunt the huge numbers of geckos and skinks — their primary food source — that live on the chain link fences.

“We drive along, illuminate the fence with a spotlight, see the snakes and pull them right off the fence,” said Vice. “On a good night around the commercial airport it’s not uncommon to catch 10 or 12 snakes in a couple of hours.” The hand capture segment of the program has been discontinued because of the budget shortfall.

In addition, Wildlife Services currently has nine full-time dogs and handlers that act as the final barrier. Though they catch very few snakes — fewer than 10 a year — those they catch are in the cargo. The number of dog teams has been reduced during the past year. In September, 34 aircraft are known to have left Guam uninspected — 31 of those departed from Andersen.

Two separate congressional appropriations fund the snake program — the Department of Defense budget for military ports and the Department of Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs appropriate money to cover commercial traffic. While the traffic through Guam has grown substantially due to increased Navy and Air Force activity, Wildlife Service’s DOD allocation has remained the same as it was when the Guam program began in 1993.

The Office of Insular Affairs has a budget of $2.7 million for brown tree snake activities. The Defense Appropriations Act of 2005 includes an additional $500,000 infusion to the program, but that has yet to make its way to Vice’s office. “We have been told there has been a line of funding provided through both Navy and Air Force bases,” he said. He thinks the money will reach his office in February or March.

“Until I’ve got something clearly identified as having that money there, I’m still operating under the premise that we’ll be operating under that constraint.” The office will lose another eight employees without the funding.

On Oct. 30, President Bush signed the Brown Tree Snake Control and Eradication Act of 2004, authorizing the expenditure of up to $15.5 million on snake-related programs for five years beginning in fiscal 2006. The money is to be divided among a number of programs, including “a pre-departure inspection protocol that goes into effect when the federal funds are made available,” said Guam Congressional Delegate Madeleine Bordallo. “It will help protect trade and commerce between Guam, Hawaii and the Northern Marianas.”

Officials from Hawaii and the Northern Marianas had indicated they were considering a quarantine of cargo coming from Guam.

The money also will be used for rapid response teams in Guam, Hawaii, the Northern Marianas and the Freely Associated States (Palau, the Marshalls and the Federated States of Micronesia) to help detect snake populations.

One promising research project has developed a poison that is “extremely effective at killing snakes,” Vice said. Once research is completed and funding is identified, the poison will be “another tool to this integrated wildlife damage management approach that we’ve got.”

Officials are concerned that if snakes establish a population in tropical areas with no native snakes — similar to Guam before the 1950s — particularly Hawaii, the Northern Marianas and the Freely Associated States, the snakes will cause the same kind of environmental mayhem.

Of 12 bird species native to Guam, “the snake is definitively responsible for the complete loss of nine of those in the wild,” Vice said. The other three species now are found only in isolated areas.

The brown tree snakes are native to northeast Australia, Papua New Guinea, eastern Indonesia and the Solomon Islands. Current thinking is that they arrived in Guam in huge shipments of military construction materials that passed through Guam from a Navy base on Manus Island in the Solomons after World War II.

Finding a virtually unlimited food supply — originally birds, now lizards and rodents — they spread so that today they average as many as 30 per acre of forest habitat. “The numbers of snakes are orders of magnitude greater than snakes anywhere else in the world,” said Vice. “Nowhere else are snakes really considered a pest like this.”

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