1080
Original post
There seems to be a lot of news going around about 1080 at the moment. Most of it sensationalised and uninformed.
I'm not keen to get into any of that. But the backcountry and more specifically our flora and fauna is something I am very passionate about.
What I really want to know, is 1080 really worth it and what is the ultimate goal of doc?
I have been involved in conservation for quite awhile. I have run many traplines involved in kiwi conservation. I am passionate about the endemic bird life of aotearoa. It is something I feel intimately spiritually connected to. So am all for conservation, but.
What is the real value of 1080?
I am sure it wipes out mammalian life forms. I'm sure it helps birds re establish themselves in the bush as I have first hand experience of this. But how much and how long do doc I tend to use 1080. Forever?
So they dump 1080 in the bush and it kills predators but how long before they reestablish themselves? How do doc think that they can totally eradicate pests?
How I see it as long as there are human environments there will be rats, stoats, weasels and hedgehogs. They will go where ever they need to go to find food. As long as there are berries and eggs in the bush they will go there. Why did they go there in the first place?
So I would love to know from doc what they really intend from they're assault on our back country with 1080. Do they naively think they can eradicate all threats to endemic bird life from 1080 alone.
I personally believe the time of our endemic bird life may be over. This makes me sad but i am realistic about this. There are factors that don't involve predators that are far more detrimental to endemic birds.
1.Habitat. Birds had domain over these motu. Forest covered the land and where it didn't there was swamp land and grassland and no mammalian predation. Now there are minor islands of endemic flora surrounded by an ocean of rural pasture and urban centres. They are isolated to tiny patches.
2. The presence of introduced bird life far more adapted to human interaction and resource competitors . Sparrows, chaffinch, pigeons, blackbirds etc compete with food and habitat just as much as possums and cats. They keep our endemic birds stuck in they're islands of safety as much as anything else.
Why are we blindly pushing ahead with this 1080 assault? What do we think it will really achieve. Should we start to deal with the fact that our fauna has changed and will never be what it was, what shall we do for our endemic bird life. Will they be nothing more than specimens confined to sanctuaries like mt Bruce and zealandia for us to study.
What kind of studies have doc done on 1080 to our endemic bird life. Have they fed this stuff to kaka, kea and tui?
1080 is a cruel and horrible poison. It really is a horrible way to kill an animal. Is it really worth it. I don't think it is. I don't think it will have any impact on helping us protect our endemic bird life. And if it doesn't I think we should stop it so we don't needlessly put any animals be it deer, pig, possum or stoat through any needless suffering for no point.
All these conservation departments have had negative impacts on our back country. They helped introduce these pests. They planted contorta. They do a lot of things that are incredible stupid and I believe 1080 is another chapter in that history.
1080 is a control tool, it is not and has never been an eradication tool. Seeing as you don’t even understand that then all I can say is thank god there are 1000s of folks out there doing the job of trying to save our endemic species while you give up.
Have you first hand knowledge of the studies done on endemic bird life with 1080? Have you seen a handful of 1080 thrown into a pen of takahe? Like I'm being serious. I really think doc need to front up and shut down any misgivings about this poison.
So we are at a stage where this poison is dumped endlessly over of forests to control pests? And your happy for this to happen yarmoss? You have said it is only able to control and not eradicate pests, so therefore it must be used from here in out till some better option comes along?
It's seems like all your interested in is having an assault on me for posting something I am genuinely passionate about. Cool guy. Where did it say I have given up? What do you do to help mate? I'm so passionate about the bush that dumping huge quantities of serious poison over the forest of this country genuinely concerns me. I didn't say I'm anti 1080 at all. I just think there are some very simple questions doc don't want to answer.
I feel there are mindless zombies on both sides of the fence when it comes to 1080 and you seem like one.
Your response to my post is 1080 is great you dumby thank god for 1080.
Maybe you should look in the mirror and ask yourself what you really know about the subject.
Is it actually working, what are the timeframes and goals, is it safe on all endemic species, is it the most humane option, and more importantly is it the smartest option to help protect our endemic bird life should we be taking a hard look in the mirror and realising that as long as we inhabit these islands the plight of our endemic bird life is terminal, and that ignorantly dumping 1080 and closing our eyes only makes us feel better and may not be doing what we want it too?
Let me ask you a question... if you mowed 5-10% of your lawn at a time, would you get mad and blame your lawn mower and say it’s not working and you should just stop using it when your lawn turns into a jungle?
Because currently, 5-7% of the NZ conservation estate, rising to 10% during beech mast years, receive annual 1080 drops. That’s it. 10% tops. The conservation estate makes up 30% of NZs total area, so really we are only talking about 1-3% of NZ.
1080 is a poison. No one is denying that. There have been numerous studies that show birdlife increase after drops. Giving a couple of seasons breathing room to breed and fledge chicks is what it gives the birds, before the pests reinvade. You seem to briefly acknowledge that in your OP, but like I said above, it’s a control tool. Yes, like your lawn mower, you have to keep using it. Until you concrete your lawn.
1080 is never going to remove mammalian predators from NZ when we only use it on 5% of 30%. It’s going to take something like gene drives and genetic modification to release sterile females into the populations of rats and stoats and possums to eventually get them unable to reproduce. That’s something PF2050 is taking baby steps towards. Of coarse that has its own potential problems to work around, especially when you throw out scary sounding words like GE to the scientific illiterate in this post-trueth world. 1080 is bad enough already.
Re-read your own post. You said you were giving up. You can straw-man what I said as much as you like. If you want to give up go ahead, there are plenty of other folks still willing to do the mahi to try and keep our species alive. I’ll take birds over rats stoats possums deer goats and tahr any day of the week. Personally I couldn’t give a frak about their “suffering”. There’s plenty more of them outside of NZ who are doing just fine. The suffering of our endemic wildlife, found nowhere else on earth and ripped to shreds in their nests night after night, is if far greater importance to me.
1
I dont think anyone can say 1080 is the best thing since sliced bread. It is a horrible poison and it is barely achieving what it set out to achieve so can only be considered a stop gap measure until a real answer comes along. Currently there is no alternative that is as effective. Trapping is great close to people but once you are more than a couple of hours from where people live it becomes impossible as a long term solution. The answer is bio controls but these are still decades away.
There has been a lot of work done to make the baits unattractive to native animals. Far from perfect I know but it helps.
All I can say on the subject is that the only time Ive seen a morepork in the wild was 2 months after a poison drop in that area. We saw 2 that day
1
Hi @Gaiters. If you haven't yet read Dave Hansford's Protecting Paradise book then I'd definitely recommend it.
IMHO it's one of the clearest and most readable explanations of NZ's current pest control strategy between 1080 and everything else. It's backed up by a combination of candid interviews with those doing the research and work about what they've learned and why, and endless references if you ever feel the need to trace the background behind what's being said.
1
Thanks izogi I’ll check it out.
Yarmoss I never said I’ve given up. I said I think it’s a lost cause in my heart of hearts. No matter what we do. They will end up as small token populations.
I tell you mate I’ve trapped hundreds of kms rebaiting thousands of traps. I cleaned out hundreds and hundreds of bloated maggot filled rats, stoats, weasels, possums and hedgehog carcasses. I’ve stumbled around in the bush chasing kiwi to help with the annual counts are retags. Don’t tell me I’ve given up.
What have you personally done mate.
This is something I care very greatly about.
My question has bypassed you a little. Do our birds really stand a chance 1080 or not. This is not quite the 1080 debate you think it is. It’s really about what really needs to be done so they can not just hang on for dear life but to thrive as they once did.
As long as we are here they have no chance we are the mammalian predators not the rats and stoats. They came in our pockets.
Island sanctuaries are really the only real chance they have in my opinion.
What do tuatara think about 1080. Or native skinks or snails. This is stuff I don’t know and was looking for some clarity.
Have I given up. Not at all.
Depends on the species as to what sort of chance they have. Inwouldnt say all species dont have a chance, but some are in a prettty dire state with numbers and how badly they are hit by predators. I ddont pretend to know the odds for each species. Take an adult kiwi, it has a chance against some predators, it can fend for itself against some of them, some birds stand littlenchands against most or all predators.
2 deleted posts from
waynowski
My view is that it can be misleading to look at what's happening and presume it's been this way for ages. The state of things is constantly changing, and in future it's also unlikely to remain static.
Even within the last few decades, immense amounts have been learned about what's happening in NZ's back yard, and how different factors relate. There's a much greater understanding of things like mast years and how they impact various kinds of pests and other species. There's also an increasingly clearer understanding of what's in trouble, where and why, which helps to make cases for why pest control and other measures are important where previously the problems would have gone unnoticed or been ignored. It's become much more obvious that when people often assumed the environment's in some kind of happy equilibrium, it's really been approaching more of a freefall situation.
Pest control has changed. Traps are getting better and more efficient in some circumstances, becoming able to dial gone when they need attention and so on.
1080's use has also changed hugely. Baits are different. Concentrations are different. Methods of spreading are different. Monitoring and auditing and understanding what happens is different.
Should 1080 go forever? Hell I hope not, but everything we've learned in the past few decades tells us that 1080's current use is what's keeping many species hanging on, instead of being in freefall, so there's something left to save in future years.
I think it'll be around for a while, but the next big thing in pest control in NZ will be about creating increasingly bigger areas
for native species which don't need such intensive pest control, whether that's 1080 or anything else.
This started with island sanctuaries and then fenced sanctuaries, but groups like ZIP have lately been doing some awesome research for better understanding better pest behaviour. Eg. Knowing what rats are likely to do if they're released in a place by themselves for several weeks to make it easier to track down individuals.
ZIP's also had tentative success with alternative ways of using 1080 to completely eradicate instead of just control. This would have been useless a few years back but combined with other
newly discovered knowledge and methods for protecting the edges of areas from incursion, it effectively makes it possible to designate an area with a wall of traps and eradicate pests inside it, without needing to worry so much about them returning over time..... And incursions become even less likely when areas outside the boundary also have control.
These are all reasons why I don't feel so pessimistic, in any case, and that's before even considering how populated areas like cities are increasingly starting to get their pest populations under control (eg back yard trapping programs) in a way that's engaging people with more interest and support for the whole thing.
1
Gaiters, look at the Kokako, from at risk to recovering. I don't want to give up on the Kokako. How I see it is that 1080 allows us to keep our birds while we improve our techniques to eradicate pests.
You have to know that in the 1960s we didn't even know post eradication was possible! Maria Island was an accident. Only by the 90s we knew it was rats and possums that killed Kokako, not really humans or habitat loss.
I can't find the article but a few years there was a great article on how we have scaled up pretty eradication from tiny islands to increasingly larger, and it is an exponential curve.
We probably can eradicate possums right now, with a single country wide 1080 drop, that's how good we've gotten.
PS: thanks for all your post control, you're the extremely rare breed who actually does pay control.
1 deleted post from
Gaiters
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| Forum | The campfire |
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| Started by | Gaiters |
| On | 5 October 2018 |
| Replies | 27 |
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