New Zealand's cheeky kea are among the brainiest birds on Earth – and now scientists think using that smarts could stop them eating the poison dropped to protect them.
How to stop some of the famously curious alpine parrots eating 1080 cereal baits deployed to kill their predators has been a headache facing conservationists.

Approximately 40,000 ha of public conservation land in the remote Wet Jacket peninsula area of Fiordland National Park was included in the DOC’s Tiakina Ngā Manu predator control operation last month.
DOC Operations Director southern South Island Aaron Fleming says the primary purpose of this operation was to protect vulnerable kiwi chicks which have been suffering from heavy stoat predation. “Through the Save Our Iconic Kiwi programme, we’ve been monitoring kiwi chick survival at Shy Lake, in the northern peninsula, for the past three breeding seasons and every year it’s the same story. Chicks are hatching, but not making it to adulthood.

Published by the Entomological Society of America
By Ravneel Chand and Belinda Cridge, Ph.D.

Editor’s Note: Here at Entomology Today, integrated pest management is a vital subject, though one usually examined through its application to insect and arthropod pests. But IPM is a framework for management of all kinds of pests, and the Entomological Society of America’s Journal of Integrated Pest Management welcomes research from beyond the confines of entomology. Today we share a look at a new case study in JIPM on brushtail possums, a major pest in New Zealand, and state of IPM approaches toward it.

There are calls for pest control measures to stop possums from attacking the large tree and other giant rātā in the Akatarawa Forest, in Wellington.

​Environmentalists fear hundreds of birds may have been killed in a 1080 drop in Otago but Department of Conservation (DOC) staff say no such conclusion can be made.

On Monday DOC announced six of 12 monitored kea in the Matukituki Valley, near Wānaka, died following an aerial 1080 predator control operation.

​A Taranaki farming couple are seeing the benefits of predator control after a family of whio, or native blue ducks, took up residence on their land.

Matt and Vanessa Vujcich farm a 100 hectare dry stock farm near Inglewood on the Egmont National Park boundary, which has been the subject wide scale pest management through aerial 1080 and trapping.

Six kea have died following an aerial 1080 predator control operation in Otago.
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The Department of Conservation is awaiting post-mortem results to determine the cause of the deaths in the Matukituki valley near Wanaka.

​Predators will be eliminated from a second block on the West Coast and the land defended from new predators without the use of fences.