Sad if true

[GrahameNZ]

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1501/S ... l-park.htm

No idea on how valid the source is.

[Ian Southey]

Yes, very. I presume before saying this they have looked very hard.

It also looks to me as if the possibility of direct or secondary poisoning should be checked. Other species like Fernbirds seem to be unexpectedly vulnerable to poison so there could be a harsh but valuable lesson here.

Ian

[Byrd]

that article is from Jan 2015 and comes directly from the anti-1080 brigade, using the usual inflammatory statements (including stating a 100% kill rate of the birds). A slightly later article on Stuff (Feb 2015) - http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news ... ds-on-1080 - says:

Just prior to Christmas, DOC said 25 monitored rock wren could not be found after the 1080 drop over the Grange Range.

DOC Westport conservation services manager Bob Dickson later clarified the statement saying of the 39 birds being monitored, 30 were sighted directly after the operation but only 14 have since been found.

However, Marian Milne said the birds would not survive without 1080. "Before 2000 there were around 12 pairs of rock wren we were monitoring in the Henderson Basin. Every year we went up there were fewer birds."

Bird numbers continued to drop, despite stoat trapping.

The number of wren in Henderson Basin dropped to two pairs before last year's 1080 drop.

"These birds will be history if nothing is done," she said. "It's not 1080 that's killing them - the stoats are cleaning them out."

Milne said the final two pairs in the Henderson Basin survived the 1080 drop. "We identified five birds before the drop - there are about seven there now."

Anything coming from the "Ban 1080" lot needs to be taken with a massive dose of salt, and the actual story looked at more closely.

[Davidthomas]

I have some more info on this drop from the New Zealand Ecologucal society conference where a member from DoC spoke about aerial 1080 and the battle for our birds campaign. While initially they failed to resight a single rock wren two weeks later they observed the vast majority of the tagged birds. And at the end of the season they found something like 51 odd birds where there were initially around fourty. So the claim that the aerial 1080 drop decimated the rock wren population is strictly not true.

Not to mention they found that in areas where they did aerial 1080 nest success was dramatically increased, I can't remember the percentage now off hand but it was certainly over 80% compared to less than 30% in areas with no pest control at all. Not to mention there was no significant relationship between aerial 1080 and death of birds as there was a very large snowfall the week after the drop went ahead.

So all in all while it initially looked like a major error has occurred it turned out pretty positive.

[Ian Southey]

Thanks for setting me straight. It sounds like a much better outcome and presumably there were some qualifiers that got left out when this was reported. I did not read that line about the Ban 1080 which I can now easily see. I suspect most people won't give it much more scrutiny than I did which is sad.

Rock Wrens would be in my short list for best birds ever and should be looked after.

Ian

[zarkov]

...

[Davidthomas]

No worries Ian, ill look up my notes from the conference and see if there was anything important i missed. I think they got something like 60cm of snow, which likely resulted in the birds going under the snowpack making it impossible to re-sight them.

Furthermore without any stoat trapping/predator control in areas they had something like 15-20% nest survival rate vs areas with high predator control were high 70%+ and actually making increases in the population over time so there is still hope for them assuming we continue to control pests in the areas in which they live. It also sounds like the birds on Secretary Island in doubtful sound are doing well with last i heard 60 birds sighted of which only 2 had bands so they're clearly breeding prolifically on the island.

[GrahameNZ]

Reality sure sounds different to the spin in the article.

[David Riddell]

This topic got some air here when that press release first appeared - see http://www.birdingnz.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4145. Good to know there's more to the story, sometimes takes a while for these things to come out.

[Jake]

Yep, it's always groups coming together and being very outspoken to oppose something ie 1080 use, child inoculation, teaching evolution etc. It is a shame that they get the same air time as the scientists whose job it is to actually know the facts or at least understand the situation much better. There are a couple of small groups on FB that do support 1080 ('1080 Does the Job You Don't') and quite a few large groups that oppose its use. The opposition to 1080 is largely a conspiracy theory groups and thankfully a joint venture between Federated Farmers and Forest and Bird have created http://www.1080facts.co.nz to debunk the BS.

The initial reports from DoC in the case of these rock wren were enough for the sensationalists to run a mile with, but then they throw out further statements from DoC as 'not credible' because 'DoC cannot be trusted'.

Sorry, this thread was always going to be political for me... getting back to birds...