After years of neglect, the Government is trying to ensure the survival of wildlife and nature sites in Britain's last remaining colonial possessions, including the Falkland Islands, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, the British Virgin Islands and Anguilla.
The review follows Britain's signing of the Biodiversity Convention, drafted at the Rio summit in 1992, and subsequent criticism by zoologists and wildlife groups that overseas possessions were being left out.
As a first step, the designation of a large area of the Cayman Islands as a nature reserve will be announced today by Robert Atkins, the environment minister.
The reserve on Little Cayman, which holds a third of the Caribbean's red-footed booby birds, is to be designated a wetlands site of international importance. The RSPB said yesterday that it had identified about 100 sites in the colonies deserving of listing but so far only one had been endorsed, in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
The Foreign Office said the decision to list the reserve, which includes a salty mangrove lagoon, on Little Cayman was partly due to the determination of Michael Gore, the islands' governor for the past two years.
The Little Cayman site is home to a wide range of exotic native and migratory birds including the Greater Antillian grackle, the West Indian whistling duck and the Caribbean flycatcher.
The Foreign Office is to spend รบ20,000 on a study into eradicating feral cats on Ascension Island. Before the British arrived in 1815, the island was one of the most significant seabird colonies in the world.
However, the cats brought by settlers and the military have devastated the bird life and led to the extinction of the Ascension rail.
The Foreign Office has decided to back the UK Dependent Territories Commission, an alliance of wildlife groups, to see if the island can be cleansed of feral cats to protect species including the sooty tern. The scheme, to include rat eradication, has the support of islanders and administrators who until recently were opposed.
The report is expected to recommend a neutering programme for domestic cats and setting up a supply of neutered kittens. It is hoped that the study can be used for other possessions also threatened by rats and cats.
