On June 26, 2001, the beginning of the New Zealand winter, five helicopters and two ships loaded with 210 drums of helicopter fuel and 132 tons of rat bait left Invercargill, at the southern terminus of New Zealand, heading for the Southern Ocean. By the second week of July, McClelland and company had dropped their first load of brodifacoum on Campbell. Ten days and two hundred thousand dead and dying rats later, they dropped their last. In the following years the crews returned to find no evidence of survivors.

— Rat Island by William Stolzenburg (Page 173)