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A private conservation block in the Coromandel is teeming with life thanks to four generations of one family.
Almost 100 years of care has secured a 4000-hectare pocket of flourishing native bush home to a healthy population of 150 endangered brown kiwi and flocks of kererū up to 100 strong.
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The Department of Conservation is concerned after a higher percentage of rats than expected have survived the first 1080 drops intended to battle this years "mega mast".
This year's build-up of the rat population in New Zealand forests can be attributed to unusually high seed production, called a mast, experts have said. "Wake up in paradise" is New Zealand's proud boast. It has a rightful swagger: its turquoise glacial lakes are ringed by untouched mountain ranges, while historic Māori sites speak of a people at one with the natural world.
But there are stains on the environment. In this corner of the South Pacific, waterways are increasingly polluted and, from the suburbs to the alpine peaks, an untold army of feral pests is running amok, putting about 80% of New Zealand's bird species at the risk of extinction. A widespread ‘mega-mast’ mass seeding event is likely to lead to a large plague of rats and stoats in New Zealand southern beech forests.
In response, the Department of Conservation (DOC) is aiming to control predators over an unprecedented one million hectares of conservation land, to protect vulnerable native species such as kaka, whio, mohua and orange-fronted parakeets. I have to admit to a few doubts.
In a recent press release about the planned 1080 drop in the Hunua Ranges I ended with the statement, "I would be happy to drink the water from the reservoirs downstream of the 1080 operation." Millions of dollars have been spent killing pests in Greater Wellington forests to give native wildlife a chance and keep TB at bay, but has it been worth it? Piers Fuller reports.
The threat posed by rats, stoats and possums to our bird species is "significant and urgent" and the battle continues to quietly rage in forests large and small around the greater Wellington region. Over the past decade hundreds of tonnes of the controversial poison bait 1080 have been dropped in the Tararua, Aorangi and Remutaka ranges in an effort to push back a tide of pests, but the advent of new technology is making ground trapping a more attractive option. Letting rats live a little longer by ceasing to poison and trap them proved a killer move by the Bream Head Conservation Trust.
The successful predator removal scheme involved ceasing the regular poison - not laying for a few months so rats lost their wariness about it, letting them breed up in numbers, then hitting them with a ground-laid 1080 bomb. It was a double whammy because then stoats ate the rats that ate the poison and died too. The result of the major operation that started in April was very satisfying, according to head ranger Adam Willetts. New Zealand First wants to ban 1080. What would that mean for our native wildlife? Dave Hansford writes
Even for Wellington, it was bloody awful weather. A small, sodden group of anti-1080 protesters huddled against a biting southerly, the rain melting the slogans on their placards. Over the wind, they strained to hear New Zealand First list MP Richard Prosser, who told them he had a few “new truths” to share about 1080. Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright's new report, Taonga of an Island Nation: Saving New Zealand's Birds, released last week, highlighted the "tragic" state of many native birds.
And the picture was no more encouraging in Northland, according to Northland conservation advocate for Forest & Bird, Dean Baigent-Mercer. "A regional priority needs to be turning around the state of the collapsing native forests across the North, including the aerial use of 1080, expanding pest control along coastlines, including dog control on beaches, and resuscitating wetlands," he said. Dave Hansford wrote a book about the pest poison 1080 because "someone had to".
"I'd grown tired of seeing the volume and the extremity and the sheer amounts of BS in circulation about 1080," he says. The result is a 318-page book called Protecting Paradise: 1080 and the Fight to Save New Zealand's Wildlife that dissects anti-1080 sentiment and answers sentence by sentence virtually every anti claim ever made about the pesticide. |
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