Which island or island group:
1 Gained psittacine relief?
2 Was discovered on New Year’s Day?
3 Had an Imperial association with an eminent MHK?
4 Take their name from a mainland feature 450km distant?
5 Were named after the Tory member for Great Marlow during a welfare voyage?
6 Saw the surgeon accidentally marooned and obliged to survive on avian-polluted water and sulid blood?
7 Was noted for cannibal land-crabs and stunted tree ferns?
8 Was home to the poor people who lived on a cinder?
9 Is partly both inaccessible and luscinial?
10 Is home to a unique fiscal?
I’ll wager a pocketful of Napoléons that the surgeon in 6. is Stephen Maturin, given the setter’s ongoing fondness for Patrick O’Brian (in the teeth of universal apathy among Wikki-illiams quizzers).
Jeff: it was Desolation Island, if memory serves.
1: does “psittacine” have something to do with parrots (or their removal)?
10: “fiscal” (as in procurator fiscal) is an office of state in scotland, so maybe this where this is going?
9: there’s an inaccessible island in mcmurdo sound in the antarctic but unless “luscinial” means you can walk across to it over the ice for part of the year i don’t know if this is relevant
are these islands real or fictional?
@mark – could be both, especially as MHK = a Manx parliamentarian (Member of the House of Keys) so likely to relate to a real person?
4 could be the Cape Verde islands; the Cape Verde itself is on the western part of the African mainland.
10 – a fiscal is a name given to a number of different shrike species. Wikipedia’s list of shrikes includes the Sao Tome fiscal, an endemic species, so São Tomé and Príncipe.
9. Inaccessible Island and Nightingale Island (Luscinia megarhyncos) are both part of the Tristan da Cunha archipelago.
A bit of bird knowledge plus Wikipedia useful for this one!
I did think about Cape Verde but Wiki says it’s 570km from the coast (but either it or the quiz could be wrong)
The Lurker: fyi the convention here is not to post googled/wikied/otherwise-assisted answers and info before next question is up, but as this rule is not posted in every round, it’s easy to miss.
That said (and as this only opens Q4 up rather than closing it down), measuring on Google Earth confirms your misgivings about Cape Verde. Hm.
Ah, sorry. They were assisted answers rather than blind googling (eg I knew what a fiscal was, just not the species), but I’ll hold back a little longer in future.
Googling for this round OK now, I think.
On 1., not saying this is the answer but I was interested to find that one part of the world, viz the Seychelles, has rid itself of the invasive ring-necked parakeet:
http://www.seychellesnewsagency.com/articles/6673/Eradication+of+ring-necked+parakeets+in+Seychelles+could+be+confirmed+this+year
7. is South Trinidad, from an account recalled in “The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-1913” by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a narrative of Captain Scott’s last (fatal) expedition. {Googled}
Googled 5 – wiki sez the Falkland islands were named after Anthony Carey, the 5th Viscount Falkland. (The dude who did said naming was on a ship called Welfare.)