Thread: Whataroa kea

Originally Posted by gimp

Again, I'm not going engage with the mindless hateful posts, but there are a couple of things worth noting:

1: If this operation is successful, possums will be eradicated from that block. ZIP have successfully eradicated possums entirely from a smaller area last year down near Haast, there is a good chance that they will succeed here. The Whataroa/Perth only receives 1080 for possum control (every so often when monitoring shows high numbers). If possums are eradicated, it will never be 1080'd again. That's a win for everyone, surely.

2: Kea already eat dead tahr, and there is no shortage of dead tahr in the Whataroa/Perth tops. A few more carcasses dropped up there will not train them to do anything new.

2 exactly so why the fuck bother suggesting it? It’s PR for brain dead Chardonnay conservationists so they know 1080 isn’t killing any kea, everything is fine.

Originally Posted by ethos

2 exactly so why the fuck bother suggesting it? It’s PR for brain dead Chardonnay conservationists so they know 1080 isn’t killing any kea, everything is fine.

It depends on what bias you bring and project onto their decision making. It could be what you say, or it could be that they legitimately don't want to kill kea, and are trying to mitigate the risk.

Either way they're monitoring kea with radio collars through the operation, and have publicly reported the bykill from their last operation (a handful of birds and something like 3 deer I think) so there's no indication that they won't report it this time: If they find that these baiting methods kill too many kea then they don't want to use them. No-one in conservation wants to kill native birds.

Originally Posted by gimp

It depends on what bias you bring and project onto their decision making. It could be what you say, or it could be that they legitimately don't want to kill kea, and are trying to mitigate the risk.

Either way they're monitoring kea with radio collars through the operation, and have publicly reported the bykill from their last operation (a handful of birds and something like 3 deer I think) so there's no indication that they won't report it this time: If they find that these baiting methods kill too many kea then they don't want to use them. No-one in conservation wants to kill native birds.

We had best park it there gimp, there are realities of DOC management and there are good ground staff working hard for not much.
Fingers crossed for the local kea that this isn’t one of the high mortality drops.