It wasn’t always this way. In fact, if you’d visited Redonda even five years ago—no easy feat, then or now—you’d have seen a place that locals from nearby Antigua (of which Redonda is technically part) had written off as a dying island falling into the sea. For a half century in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Redonda bustled with activity as the site of a mine that used a large pulley system to lower buckets of guano and phosphates—used as fertiliser—down to the shoreline below. More than 100 men were employed at the mine’s peak, most of whom lived full time on the island.

But the mine shut down following the outbreak of World War I, and two critical things were left behind: goats, and rats. For the next hundred years, these foreign species would team up to eat everything in sight until there was nothing left but dust and scraps of old machinery.

In recent years, however, a stunning ecological turnaround has taken place on Redonda at a rate faster than even its most optimistic supporters could have imagined. For many people, “rewilding” brings to mind a quiet and passive process, like stepping away from a garden to let the natural weeds back in. For the Redonda Restoration Programme, rewilding has been a more complicated journey involving helicopters, goats wrapped in plastic, mountaineers armed with rat poison, and protective gear made out of pool noodles and yoga pants.

Long gone? Not so fast.

For a long time, Redonda was assumed to be beyond repair, in part because of the scope of the damage from the animals, in part because of the island’s inaccessibility, and in part because the very idea of conservation took time to catch on in the area.

“By and large, conservation in Antigua is seen as an elitist thing,” says Natalya Lawrence, a coordinator with the non-profit Environmental Awareness Group, which oversees the Redonda restoration project. “If you have money, you can be concerned with trees and lizards. But if you need a dollar today to feed your children today, you don’t really have time to see the long-term effects.”

The EAG was started in the late 1980s and has since grown to include many restoration projects in and around Antigua. Over the past few decades, they’ve managed to eradicate rats from more than a dozen islands in the area. Still, Redonda, which looms on the southwest horizon, was always the organisation’s dream project. And finally, in 2016, after multiple rounds of stakeholder consultations and feasibility studies, a group of volunteers set up camp on the island’s main plateau and got to work.