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.

The Dunedin City Council will be taking a "highly cautious" approach during a 1080 drop in an area used as a back-up treated water supply.

The Council announced yesterday it had approved a request from Ospri to undertake pest control on council land in the Silverstream catchment next month.
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The council said its cautious approach to the drop included not taking water from the catchment while 1080 was present, closing tracks for 15 days, and not allowing dogs in the area for up to a year.

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.

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.

About 90 anti-1080 protesters thronged the pavement outside the Federated Farmers' building in downtown Wellington in early December but they may have been chanting slogans mainly to themselves.

​ There was no media coverage at all. The group marched on Parliament waving banners calling on New Zealanders to "wake up to what's going on".

​ An aerial application of non-toxic baits has begun ahead of an aerial 1080 operation in the Kahurangi National Park.

Department of Conservation communications advisor Trish Grant said non-toxic baits had been distributed across 74,600 hectares of Kahurangi National Park in the Parapara and Gouland Downs operational blocks on Wednesday. ​

​A group of South Island fishermen claim to have come into contact with aerially distributed 1080 bait pellets in early December while guiding a fishing party in the Mokihinui River valley.

​An aerial 1080 operation on that day was being flown by helicopter contractors completing pest control work for the Department of Conservation's Battle for our Birds programme and Ospri's TBfree programme.

The government's use of 1080 poison has long drawn angry protest from opponents, who push a range of scientific claims about its efficiency and danger. In his new book, Protecting Paradise , Science writer Dave Hansford scrutinises each of the claims - and concludes 1080 isn't the evil it's so often painted as. He talked to herald science reporter Jamie Morton.