Hey, remember Trevor? The world’s loneliest duck? He showed up one day on the remote Pacific island of Niue, and nobody knows where he came from. Then he became a god to the locals, who brought him water and fed him bok choy and fretted over the need for a Mrs Trevor.
Well, now he’s stirring up trouble with his newfound celebrity status. Niue is a very small and not-very-well-known island, as it turns out, and lonely old Trevor pretty much put it on the map. Now everyone wants to go there. And the tourism boost threatens to be more than the country’s humble size and infrastructure can handle.
Videos by VICE
“I think Trevor is an excellent ambassador for Niue and the reason I say that is that he has raised the profile of people globally who may or may not have been aware of Niue’s existence beforehand,” said Felicity Bollen, chief executive officer of Niue Tourism, in conversation with the ABC.
The story of Trevor the mysterious bachelor has been so effective at putting Niue’s star in the ascendent, in fact, that some skeptics have suggested the whole thing was just a marketing ploy to get more people to the island. Felicity insists that she had nothing to do with it.
“I wish I’d had the brilliance to think of it myself but no, he literally just showed up one day,” she said. Now there are fears that the international attention could cause big problems for Niue, which has undergone one of the fastest rates of tourism growth in the past 12 months.
The local population of the 261 square kilometre island is just 1,600 people, but 10 times that amount have visited in the last year—most of them from Australia and New Zealand. Felicity speculates that Niue may now be one of the first countries in the Pacific to put a cap on the amount of tourists they receive.
“The impact that it has had already on our infrastructure, the pressure it’s putting on our infrastructure is becoming evident so yep, we’re watching it very carefully,” she said.
“Maybe what I can do is get some postcards made of Trevor and send them out to interested people… We may have to do that.
“That’s the price we’ll pay for retaining our cultural integrity and environmental integrity.”
