An aerial 1080 drop in the Ruahine ranges appears to have obliterated the rat and possum population.

The Department of Conservation carried out the 'Northern Ruahine Battle for our Birds operation' on November 13-15.
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The date of the drop had been kept quiet as the department held fears staff could be threatened. Police had been notified about a DOC staff member being intimidated by a member of the public in Manawatū early last month after the operation had been announced.

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.

New Zealand First wants to ban 1080. What would that mean for our native wildlife? Dave Hansford writes
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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.

Kiwi, kakapo, Maui dolphin - and even the great White shark-feature on a list of 150 New Zealand species "prioritised" in an ambitious conservation strategy launched by the government this morning.
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The Department of Conservation's new Threatened Species Strategy hinges greatly on already-announced moves under the Predator Free New Zealand (PFNZ) plan to purge the country of pest predators by 2050.

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.
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"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 plague 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.
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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.

I ended up sitting next to him, quite by chance, on a flight to Wellington. Slender bloke, late 50s, elegantly rumpled - I liked the look of him immediately. He was David Hansford, an undercover boffin, traveling incognito without a white lab-coat.

We got talking because I'm a cowardly flier and it was windy, and conversation takes my mind off turbulence. And it transpired Hansford and I were blood brothers as yet unmet.

Rules changes will see a nationally-coordinated approach to dropping 1080 poison in conservation areas, Environment Minister Nick Smith has announced.
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The new regulations, approved under the Resource Management Act, would see a uniform set of rules applied for the use of the controversial poison.