Thread: Eugenie Sage

Originally Posted by chainsaw

oh shit, that Stuff link makes scary reading.
So Sage has gone quiet to try and duck the media/public spotlight, saying "she/DOC will consult" yeah,, right ?! ..... but meanwhile they're plowing ahead with the cull ??? FFS !!
There's 100,000's of HA of alpine country with out tahr where her precious daizies can grow.

The dumb thing is that there isnt a shred of science done that even shows the effects that thar have on alpine flowers. The only studies done are those on tussock health and even those show only minimal deterioration of the health of tussock even with the supposed 'explosion' of thar numbers. Below are several of the recommendations in the latest report. Rather illuminating

Changes in condition, such as cover, of other common species on these plots (e.g. Aciphylla spp.) might be analysed to supplement this report, but if DOC wishes to monitor tahr impacts on rare or vulnerable species (such as Ranunculus) it would be best to design a system specifically aimed at them, e.g. monitor survival along transects
or at sites where they occur.
•
The current aerial methods to estimate tahr densities by counting tahr across the whole study catchments may have practical uses for managers wanting to confirm over abundance, but these estimates are not reliable enough to meet the specific prescriptions for intervention in the tahr plan let alone the purposes of this study. We recommend using estimates of ungulate activity derived from the pellet plots around the vegetation plots in future analyses, but also recommend that the census count method as described by Challies (1992) be used in the year the vegetation and pellet plots are remeasured to allow better linking of the ungulate activity to catchment level measures of tahr density,and thus to the tahr-plan intervention densities.

Its all there in writing, in the latest study presented by doc. That's why she has stuck so vehemently to the tahr control plan rhetoric as she knows the latest science is not comprehensive enough.

I have also in my reading of the 3 studies done in 1996, 2004, and 2014 noted that there in no correlation nor supporting evidence that the indicative numbers specified in the htcp represent the minimum number at which we can achieve recuperation of our alpine environments. In fact that given the negligible difference in tussock health recorded in the despite the increasing numbers I would hypothesize that the number of tahr capable of being sustainably supported by our alpine environments is much higher than that specified.

These are not plants that evolved devoid of grazing pressure.