Cadbury-funded Seychelles island now hosts over 1 million breeding seabirds

For decades, the small island of Aride in the Seychelles was treated less as a wildlife sanctuary and more as a source of income. Its forests were cleared for cultivation, coconut plantations covered parts of the island and its seabirds became a resource that could be harvested. Sooty tern eggs, in particular, were collected in huge numbers and shipped to other islands. Then, in 1973, British conservationist Christopher Cadbury stepped in.Cadbury, a member of the family behind the Cadbury chocolate company, provided £40,000 to enable the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, now the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, to acquire Aride and protect it as a nature reserve. That sum would be equivalent to almost £1 million today, according to Silhouette, the Air Seychelles magazine. More than five decades later, the 74-hectare island has become one of the most important seabird colonies in the Indian Ocean.