Forums

Posted: 07-05-2011 13:02 Post subject:

I think we should give them the ideal conditions to continue surviving, and we need to remove all human threats as well.
If we do this and they still die out as a species, then there is really not a lot more that we can (or should) do.

Posted: 07-05-2011 15:57 Post subject:

Posted: 22-05-2011 15:29 Post subject:

Animals have come back from much lower numbers than 120. The southern white rhino was once down to 15 individuals in a remote valley in Natal. Now there are something like 14,000 of them.

Posted: 22-05-2011 15:52 Post subject:

The biggest problem for the kakapo does seem to be, mammalian predators introduced by humans, to NZ. "Hindsight is 20/20", and all that -- and "in a perfect world"... Kakapos' only hope for future that I can see: offshore islands kept mammal-free, by human intervention. May it be so !

Posted: 09-10-2013 21:54 Post subject:

Bumping the kakapo thread which I started, because of having recently read a very interesting book, “Rat Island” by William Stolzenburg, published 2011.

The book is devoted to chronicling efforts by conservationists in recent decades, on islands spanning a huge swathe basically of the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand to the Aleutians, to rid those islands of mammalian species introduced by human agency, which have been detrimental – often to the point of exterminating, or threatening extinction -- to the assorted rare species endemic to those islands. The “villains” of the piece come across as (1) the rat, in its various kinds; (2) the cat -- plus a varied supporting cast.

I found the book – though written in irritating American tabloidese – highly informative, and fascinating. It points up the paradox of how very many (seldom in themselves immensely numerous) different species of above all, birds – also reptiles and insects – evolved on oceanic islands, their forbears often having wound up going there in search of refuge from mammalian predators; finding that refuge; and evolving, in the relative scarcity of predators to flee, to lose the power of (highly energy-and-nutrition-demanding) flight. Fine, until man came on the scene, bringing mammals with him – sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident. Flightless birds became extremely easy prey for unfamiliar four-legged predators, and for humans themselves. A very great proportion of the species exterminated over the past few centuries, have been (hitherto)-isolated-island ones – New Zealand by far the biggest-in-physical-scale, for this scenario.

In the course of recounting this mostly sad story (going on to modern-day, introduced-predator-eliminating campaigns), the author recounts the story of the decline, and hairsbreadth rescue – so far -- of New Zealand’s kakapo, in (highly interesting) greater detail than I had previously seen. He tells, concerning the nineteenth century, of a particularly amazing piece of stupidity. I had been aware before reading the book, that European stoats and weasels had been introduced to New Zealand, and had thus become a threat to native wildlife, including the kakapo (both killing the birds, and taking their eggs). Had imagined that this introduction had been the work of foolish private individuals just wishing to make NZ feel more like home.

Stolzenburg tells that it was otherwise. In the 1860s, private folks introduced the rabbit to NZ, “as a game animal and for fun”. To quote the author, “the rabbits did what rabbits do” – over the next couple of decades, they multiplied and multiplied, and came to pose a grave threat to grazing for sheep. In the early 1880s, NZ’s governing authorities undertook a programme of introducing European mustelids – weasels, stoats, polecat / ferrets – thinking that they would cut down the rabbit population. Surprise, surprise – the mustelids found easier prey, the largely flightless native birds and their eggs: there ensued, from then to now, a holocaust of same at the hands of the mustelids. As I mentioned in my last post, “hindsight is 20/20”; nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine that at the time nobody saw, and brought to the notice of those in charge, that mass-importation of mustelids was not a good idea, and liable to miss the designated target.

The book gives grounds for some hope, re eradication of predatory mammals from islands which can then become once more, havens for rare species (greatest dream in this line, and unrealised so far, is extermination of rats on the 100-square-mile Kiska Island in the Aleutians, thus giving the chance to burgeon, the island’s still large population of auklets which nest there). However; reading it has to a considerable extent ruined for me – even trying to make allowances for bad-journalistic hyperbole – New Zealand. Will never again be able to think of NZ as a relatively-unharmed-by-mankind Eden. So many mentions in the book, of the New Zealand bush being mostly silent and deprived of bird-sounds, with the alien predators having moved in and made a clean sweep. It’s made clear that all this began some seven or eight hundred years ago, when the Maoris showed up and exterminated the moas within a hundred years or so – in a fair few respects, this book (for all its essentially “upbeat” tone) is for me what is sometimes described as a “wrist-slitter”.

Posted: 10-10-2013 09:04 Post subject:

A similar sort of thing happened here. We got rabbits, and foxes, primarily for game, and they are now responsible for a lot of ecological damage, including killing or competing with native species.