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.
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Over the past decade hundreds of tons 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.
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The result of the major operation that started in April was very satisfying, according to head ranger Adam Willetts.