IT hardly screams dream job.
Yet experts from across the world are hoping to spend winter in one of the most remote and northerly outposts of Scotland hunting thousands of bird-eating rats on perilous cliff faces, with just a small two-room bothy for cover.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) Scotland is close to completing its search for a team to spend the coldest and darkest months of the year on the Shiant Isles in the Outer Hebrides, tasked with exterminating a colony of black rats believed to have arrived after a nearby shipwreck more than a century ago.
It said it had received bids from across the globe for the contract, despite a warning the contractor will not have running water or electricity, will regularly face stormy seas which will cut them off from the mainland and will work on challenging terrain.
When not cut off by poor weather, the nearest shop is a 20-mile sea voyage away, while the bothy on the 350-acre isles has room for four people with no toilet. The roof has been known to blow off in high winds.
The team is expected to complete the project between November next year and March 2016 when the seabirds are away and the rat population, which rises to 30,000 in the summer but is believed to plummet to between 1,000 and 3,000 in the winter, is at its weakest.
It is hoped that the project, which will see a contractor paid around £300,000, will see every rat eliminated from the isles and will allow important seabird species to return to the Shiants.
The privately-owned islands, 20 miles from Stornoway harbour, were described as the Scottish Galapagos by RSPB Seabird Recovery Officer Philip Taylor. He said the eradication of the rats would allow the Manx sheerwater and the European storm petrel in particular to flourish.
He added: "These are among the most important places for seabirds in the UK and, ecologically, among the most important in Europe.
"The skies can get dark with puffins as there are such high numbers breeding there. But as well as that, we have black rats which probably arrived through a shipwreck a couple of hundred years ago when there was a lot of international trade going on. They'll eat the eggs, chicks and even the seabirds themselves.
"These are amazing birds - the storm petrel will spend the first five years of their lives at sea. They're robust little guys, but as soon as they arrive on land to breed they can get gobbled by rats as they can only shuffle around and the chicks are fluff balls. So we need to remove these pests and revert the island to what it used to be."
A tender for the work closed this month. Although bidders are asked to set out their own plan for eradicating rats, some temporary accommodation could be built on the island to help house the extermination team, expected to be around 10-strong.
A project manager is also being hired. A job description warns they will spend extended periods of time on the Shiant Isles, which support 10 per cent of the UK's puffin population and seven per cent of the UK's razorbills, while undertaking "strenuous physical labour daily, often in challenging conditions" for between £28,000 and £32,000 per year.
Although it is hoped rats will be eliminated from the Shiants with the help of poison in around five months, the whole project will last around four years.
Work will begin next summer to take an ecological snapshot of the isles while still covered in rats, and work will then take place to tempt Manx shearwater and European storm petrel back to the islands once it is rodent-free. The EU has provided funding of £450,000 to the project, expected to cost a total of almost £1 million.
Mr Taylor added: "It's going to have to be some pretty hardy characters carrying this work out. It's not for the faint of heart - they'll be up and down the cliff face - but it's going to be worth it."
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