However, on Campbell Island, a remote sub-Antarctic island south of New Zealand, that routine ended in 1931. According to a 1986 paper by M. Rudge in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology, farming was discontinued that year and more than 4,000 sheep were left behind.
Most sheep usually get a haircut once a year. R. No one came back to shear them.
By 1961, only about 1,000 sheep remained. A 1969 count found about three times as many sheep. In 1970, a fence split the island, and the sheep on the north side were removed to protect the plants. Ten sheep were collected in the summer of 1975-76 to be returned to New Zealand as a rare breed . Rudge’s paper notes that by 1980, the native herbs that the sheep preferred to eat had been restored in the north end of the island . He also argued, drawing on other feral flocks, that the roughly three decades between the 1931 abandonment and the early 1960s recovery was long enough for fleece characteristics like these to appear.
Because grazing pressure had fallen so far from the island’s peak population that the land finally got a chance to recover, rudge linked the rebound to a warmer climate and regrowing vegetation, made possible in part. Researchers had expected the decline to continue. It didn’t. It also reflects changes in the sheep themselves. The scientists were particularly interested in foot rot, a painful hoof disease, and whether the flock was resistant to it. The rest of the sheep were eventually removed in phases to allow regeneration of the native plants. The story of those abandoned sheep shows how a failed farm turned into an unexpected, unplanned, quiet experiment in natural selection.
