Tāne Davis: So yeah, now’s the time to open up for any questions. I’ll be the roving mic man. So, anybody for any questions? Here we go...
Dale from Rakiura, based on the island here. Darius, you were just talking about your plan. What’s next? Have we got a sort of a timeline on what you’re thinking there? Just ‘cause I’m just, just sort of wondering, are we going to be heading towards Predator Free Rakiura, or are we likely to see another poison op carried out for the pukunui as an interim measure to ensure that the pukunui going to keep going? Just wondering how we’re going to… how that money’s going to be invested really?
Darius Fagan: We don’t have an operation planned at this stage, so what we want to do is understand all of these things really well as well as we can. So we know which tools have been effective, what adjustments we might need to make in the future. So that’s really important to do that work before we take another step. I think the, like I said, it’s roughly in this order. We think that the rat monitoring, the deer camera monitoring we will have this year. The pukunui nesting, you’ve already heard a little bit about that, but the population monitoring or flock counts, we won’t know until next year, until that’s done in April. We’ll also know a bit more about the bait and carcass degradation. We actually started that as soon as we finished the operation. I didn’t really talk about that, but essentially we put carcasses in the environment and monitor their decomposition to understand how that’s gone since the operation.
Salt water testing would be pretty close, I’d say. The detailed rat monitoring will take a bit of time to identify the different species of rat within that camera imagery we have. Tristan, can you add to that?
Tristan Rawlence: That’s a really good question. I showed you what the cat situation looks like right now. If that looks the same in two years, we are not planning an operation. If it looks like cats are entirely back into the block in a much shorter timeframe, we might be considering another one. But then you’ve also gotta add in the pukunui flock count. I’m sure this is impossible, but if we made a hundred birds this year, that buys us time as well. So it really depends on that combination of when we start seeing cats coming back into that central area, and the results of the flock count.
We will have a pretty good idea of what the next season will be looking like when we give the results from March from the cat grids. So we would have another two runs of cameras by then, so the November and March, and then we’ll also have that count straight after that. So yeah, that hopefully answers your question, but I don’t know, ‘cause I dunno what the results are going to be and I’m really interested to find out.
Furhana Ahmad: Good evening everyone. Thanks very much for the presentation. Again I would’ve liked to have gone into a bit more information on the monitoring and understanding how you make your decisions. I was good to have the information prior about what, what you did. However, there’s been very limited time to get behind the information. I have a whole bunch of questions. I know I’m not going to be able to ask them all. But a few things that interest me for I’d like to know if I could ask a couple of questions here, please. On the dotterels, could you please tell me what work has been done on the genetic diversity of the dotterel population at the moment and how many males and females there are?
Jen Ross: We’ll we have a count of males and females, because pretty much every bird is banded now, barring maybe a few adults, so the team can tell the males from females...
FA: Can you tell me the numbers please?
JR: 26 males of last year’s count.
FA: So I’ll put something in writing. I’d like to know what the trend is at the moment. And in terms of the genetic diversity you’ve taken blood samples. Have you guys analysed the genetic diversity? Because my understanding is a smaller gene pool is more vulnerable compared to a group of a population that has a diverse gene pool. It’s something I can put into a letter later, but those are important questions because no matter what you do out there, if you’re going to have low genetic diversity, it’s going to what, what does the future hold for these, these birds?
Okay. The next thing I need to ask and then I’ll pass on to someone else, but I have a few more questions where there’s been something that’s been pretty big at the moment for all of us after the second toxic drop. September turned into custard, and nearly every single day we’ve had either high winds, rain and cold temperatures, shocking weather. I do a lot of kiwi spotting out there, and I know that these birds tend to be a little bit more reluctant sometimes when temperatures are low and they’re breeding. I’m sometimes really concerned about monitoring data, and how you factor in other considerations like weather, like rainfall, like temperatures on the incidents of different animals and what’s out there, what’s moving before and after. I don’t see that in any of the information you’re giving us. Why not? I think that’s a question for me.
TR: They’re all things you might add to a more detailed analysis. That’s reasonable. I guess the whole point of having a non-treatment site is to deal with that. A non-treatment is subject to all the same conditions that the treatment site is subject to. So when you see a change in your treatment area, and you don’t see it in your non-treatment, you can have more certainty that that’s a result of your management, rather than some other external factor. So that’s the power of showing the non-treatment data against the treatment data— to deal with those sorts of things.
The kiwi one’s really interesting. I said in the talk earlier that I expected to see a dip in kiwi prior to the operation because they were starting to nest. And you know, when you’ve got one bird incubating all the time, I would’ve expected to see a drop-off in their activity. But we didn’t see that. So I found that quite interesting.
FA: Well, they take about [unclear] days to form their eggs, so there may not be incubating eggs in July and August, early August. It just depends year on year and what’s happening out there.
TR: Yeah, but those results go through to two weeks ago.
FA: There are pockets out there on your maps that concern me as well. The other thing that I really want to point out, and this is, you know, why are you choosing coastal areas where, in all the years that I’ve been out there guiding, I know that there is a higher density of animal life around marginal areas or coastal areas than there are inland. So by using coastal areas, you’re going to increase the incidence of pests, predators or whatever.
TR: Well, I would refute that. We’ve got cameras running from the coast all the way to the middle of the island. And one of the reasons I think that the number of kiwi in the treatment area is lower than the non-treatment is because that the non-treatment area is more coastal. It’s more productive habitat. So it is like what you said. But yeah, that’s once again the power of the treatment versus the controls. You can see the trend over time.
You shouldn’t be looking at the number of animals on those charts. You want to look at the trend of it across that period before and after the operation. You do your best to match your treatment and your controls and, and that was our best guess from talking to people on the island about what was most likely to be similar. It is a little bit more productive, but you know, the fact that there’s no animals afterwards for the pest species, that’s nothing to do with weather or anything else.
FA: But there’s changes in behaviour as well week on week as this season progresses. And breeding as well.
TR: So when you’re out there birdwatching, you’re going to see fewer birds out there when they’re nesting compared to when they’re not breeding. And that’s that treatment control thing, ‘cause it’s the same cycles in both sites. So that’s why you always do that. We are trying really hard to find things. We want to determine whether things are still there or not, if it was a target species. So we are looking for them. We’re not hiding from that. We are trying to find out if there are still cats in our treatment area. We’re looking really hard for rats. We need to understand how effective things are, and that’s the only way we can really do it.
When we started this work people were very concerned about kiwi and there were a lot of people who asked us, will the Kiwi be okay? And we thought it would be important to show people that kiwi are fine after the work that we’ve done, and the operations that we’ve done.
FA: We’ve talked about monitoring of various non-target species. So you’ve talked a little bit about deer monitoring, you’ve talked about the kiwi monitoring and I found it quite heartening to see the kiwi numbers even, even if it’s counting encounters rather than an individual birds, that’s still a lot of, too many encounters across the area for it to be the same kiwi. That’s still a healthy number of kiwi to me, I would estimate based on monitoring work that I’ve done with little blue penguins. I also think that agree that it is a concern about the weather, but it’s also that it is a time of year. September/August is a time of year kiwi are starting to emerge less if they’re on eggs, if they’re incubating eggs, presumably somebody has to be sitting on the egg. Although I wonder if the parent, the parent who’s out foraging is increasing their activity in a sort of a compensatory measure. But my question actually is what is happening with the lizard monitoring?
TR: A guy on my team doing the lizard monitoring James Reardon— he didn’t brief me on that question, so I hope I get this right. They’ve started looking at the diet of rats around the Harlequin Gecko populations to see what it is before any management happens and they want to compare that to what might happen afterwards. So they’ve set up not in the footprint of the pukunui op for one of these sites. And then the other one’s at 511, which is in the footprint of the pukunui op.
FA: Are they monitoring the Geckos as well or is it just the rat diets? Yeah, yeah. They’re monitoring both. Okay. And they’re also doing mark Recapture I believe as well. So photo IDs of the skinks. And from that you can work out their survival and that over time, but that data for the survival rates, you’ll need at least three seasons of data or three capture periods to get your survival rates. So probably year five of the work, they’ll get better results than in year three because the data gets better as time goes on. So previously with that sort of work, like if Otago Skinks and the Grand Skinks up at Macrae’s Flat, they should could show the survival rates across the adults and increased recruitment as well. So it’s, it’s really great data, but it’s really a labor intensive as well. ‘cause you’ve manually gotta go through all the photos to do the IDs and the, all the skinks and Geckos their patterns. They’re like a fingerprint, so you can tell them apart.
Mary Malloy: Rakiura and also South Westland. I’ve got hundreds of questions which I won’t ask you tonight, but one confuses me. On the one hand you are saying this is a suppression operation. On the other side of the room, it’s eradication. So there’s a difference between the two. Eradications being practiced or trying to be practiced in South Westland and there’s few little things come unstuck there. So is it a suppression or an eradication operation that’s underway and what’s the long term intention?
T R: Good question. I can see how that confusion has arisen. So that two-phase part that Darius talked about? That was an eradication trial. And that trial is to see whether we can eradicate the three species of rats. Arguably, we’ll know 1080 in my opinion, is a lighter touch than brodifacoum, which is the established island eradication tool. Which is way less palatable for all of us here to use. It’s a cumulative toxin. So they wanted to test that. That’s a trial to see if the method will work. So from South Westland, they’ve tried it on ship rats and as we’ve talked about, we’ve got different species of rats here. So that’s a test. It’s not like we are going to eradicate it and defend it. It’s just to test the method. I guess it’s an experiment for want of a better term. The larger 40,000-hectare operation, the pukunui one, that’s a suppression operation. So that’s us giving pukunui a lifeline from cats. There’s no intention to defend it. It’s worth pointing out the massive cost difference between a suppression operation and an eradication.
It costs you a heck of a lot to get that last 5% of animals when you’re trying to eradicate. And it doesn’t cost you that much to get to the 95%. And so for DOC across the country, where we can’t defend our barriers, we do suppression operations ‘cause we’re not chasing those last animals. But we are chasing the easy wins to get things to last as long as possible. So that’s the difference. We are waiting on the results from the eradication trial, and those results will guide where we head to next. So I’d say it’s all up in the air really, isn’t it? Until we see what the results are. ‘cause we dunno.
MM: So you’re likely to carry on and eradicate like they have in South or like they’re trying in South Westland?
TR: It depends on the results.
DF: We did the eradication trial and just to explain that because I think it’s good to get this out there for, for everyone. So the first application—and we’ll just talk about the toxic application and not worry about the pre-feeds for now—was four kilos per hectare in that smaller hectare area of the Rakeahua Valley roughly. That’s a hard number for people to really understand, but what that means when you walk through that is you’re probably encountering a bait on the ground every two meters, would be my rough estimate if you walked in a straight line. It’s quite a lot of bait on the ground. And then because that was inside the bigger pukunui area, we went across with a second application over the top of the same area of another two kilos per hectare. Two kilos hectare is a bit less: you’re probably encountering about every three to four meters when you walk in a straight line. So that area has been treated twice, which is something that we would do if we were attempting eradication anywhere else.
The issue we’ve got with this particular area is that we probably won’t get all the animals in there. There’ll probably be some survivors and that’s why we want to understand which survivors are still there. And also we want to understand what other methods we would have to do if we were going to go back and get those survivors. And we won’t be doing that in that trial area because we can’t defend it. There’s no boundary, there’s no river, there’s not on the coast. So it really is about learning what an eradication method does in this environment, and what we might need to do or change for the future.
MM: So your long-term plan is probably to eradicate, is that correct or not?
DF: Correct. Yeah, we’re trying to get Rakiura predator-free. That’s the goal.
MM: So suppression is not really the word to use. Suppression is only part of your operation. Eradicate is what you’re aiming at, is that correct?
DF: Yeah, the suppression was to buy us some time in the pukunui breeding habitat, so we didn’t lose the pukunui.
FA: I have one other question. The geckos that were discussed: well done that it’s going to take several years to get a proper population idea. Why are we going into this, these operations in the July/August time without getting an idea of what the population was on the island, particularly in view of the fact that really you are going for eradication long term, if you can get away with it? Do you want me to make that clearer?
TR: No, it’s a good question. It’s quite clear. I’m just trying to think how to answer it. All good questions are hard to answer carefully. That’ll take me longer to answer. Okay, so I guess the suppression operation, the pukunui one that we’re talking about—we do have a good idea of the number of pukunui. And we are not marching forward with an eradication anytime soon. So we have got time to build that that knowledge around Geckos, so I’m not too concerned about that.
MM: Why can’t we do that for all the species? Because you might be surprised... like I know there’s still mohua on this island, and they’re still nesting and they’ve got themselves quite, quite well established.
TR: Can you tell me where they are?
MM: I don’t know. ‘cause you guys don’t have a great reputation. My experience is that destruction follows information, so I would have to be very careful about that. I don’t think that there’s been enough work done before poisoning and like, for god’s sake, don’t call it a treatment. It sounds like something benign. It’s a poison.
TR: Yeah, totally. It is.
MM: No antidote. No taste. I guess no color.
TR: My reflection on that is I’ve spent a lot of time in areas that have received a lot of pest control over the years and in areas that haven’t. And I’ve watched populations of birds go extinct in the name of science when we are doing these non-treatment studies. You go, righto, this is where we’re going to do the 1080. This is where we’re not, this is where we’re going to monitor the birds. Then we have a mast come and your non-treatment goes extinct. It’s pretty crap to watch.
MM: It’s pretty crap to watch what happens after a drop followed by another drop followed by another drop.
TR: So my experience in those situations is that we’re maintaining those birds, and we’re actually seeing increased population. So I guess we’ve got quite different experiences.
MM: I’m prepared to share them with you. I’ll invite you to a place where there are good birds where there hasn’t been 1080. And I’ll show you next door where there has, and it’s not the same, but the, the distance by bird’s wings are not very far.
TR: I guess my experience from running around doing all those camera grids is that the bird life, with the exception of kiwi, is it’s pretty poor on that western side and the Doughboy catchment. I was pretty shocked about what’s not there anymore.
MM: Do you know what was there before you came, before the drop?
TR: Yeah. ‘cause I put all the cameras in.
MM: How long ago? when did they go in?
TR: It was in the beginning of May.
MM: That’s only a matter of months. Like you need several breeding seasons in order to get any idea of what’s in an area and established and doing well. Mm-hmm. That hasn’t even established for the pukunui. Why did they pick such disgusting places to have their children? They don’t in other parts of New Zealand do they?
TR: It’s worth pointing out that pukunui used to be all over the Southern Alps of New Zealand and they’re not any more. So they’ve been pushed here.
MM: The question is still, why are they here? Why did they leave the Southern Alps?
FA: And that’s not established. It’s assumed. I don’t want you guys to assume anything. I want you to spend several years establishing actually how things are, what the benchmark is. I really feel that you’ve, I know you’ve done a lot of work. I can tell you’ve done a lot of work. It’s going to be very hard to question you because there’s so many of them. But there’s just so much detail that has not been gathered before. Everyone’s gone in and said, we know what we’re going to find out.
‘cause a while back you didn’t know how it was going to be you’ll use too, because you’ve stuffed up with it. I mean, loosely your organisation, not you specifically. So for me it is really a very poor situation from a science point of view to just come in, drop stuff or throw some cameras out, drop stuff, and and then say how it is.
Like if I caught a young female cat and I wanted to get rid of cats, I’d go looking for kittens, because there’ll be some there and, and a percentage of them will survive. if that’s an issue. There’s, there’s just so many things that concern me. you stated that you use rabbit bait to lure cats in, so the bait is poison?
TR: No. It’s just a lure.
MM: You’re just using it as a lure. It’s very hard when people use the term bait because it can be poisoned or it can be used as a lure. If it can be used as a lure. go that extra five seconds and catch it. But cats are relatively easy to catch, relatively easy. I can get cats without stepping very far away from my house. No problem.
TR: We need you on the pukunui team, Mary.
MM: I don’t like bad weather and I wouldn’t disturb their nest. I couldn’t stand it.
FA: Does anyone else need to ask a question?
Unknown: Yep.
FA: Can I just ask mine before I ask yours? Deeply concerned about the lack of monitoring and the lack of timeframe in which the monitoring has been done. You can’t call yourself a scientist. Scientists take years to actually look at things, ask multiple questions, look at all the variables. So it’s really important. There’s a lot of people in this room that may not ask questions, may not think of the questions to ask. And it sounds like a one great big experiment and lots of assumptions and lots of information. So we know that poisoning is taking place in other parts of New Zealand, but we’re still an experiment. We know that poisoning is taking place in other places and we still need to find out how the cats are going to behave. So lots of concerning information being given out.
What I need to ask you is this: a couple of questions. How often is the rabbit bait or lure replaced? It’s one of my questions. How often was the rabbit lure and the rabbit scent replaced?
TR: So I talked about that: when the cameras go out, and then two weeks later we come back and re replace it. So we refresh the rabbit lures and refresh the bait every two weeks for one month. So it’s deployed, it’s changed, and then we leave it through to that next baiting period, which is three months later.
FA: So only for one month?
TR: It’s one month and then the cameras run effectively unbaited or formally baited through to when you get to the next round, which is three months later. So we’ve done the pre stuff, we’ve done a post survey, which is the one month we went back and picked it up at the end so we could tell you the story and then we’ll be back at the beginning of December to redo it. And so another month cameras run again over Christmas and then we’ll be back at the beginning of March to do it again.
FA: Alright. You need to slow down because I’m not as quick as you. So you put down the cameras…
TA: Yep. At the start and then two weeks later for a month. Then two weeks later we changed it. So we ran each two weeks for a month. Yeah. Well, so you put it out, you change it, and then we assume that the bait’s gone two weeks later. So we are saying that we refresh it for two weeks. So it’s a month of the same amount of baiting. And then we don’t pull it in, we just leave the cameras going. So no more lures, no more re-baits. And then we’ve, we come back three months later and we’ll do it again.
FA: Yeah. I’m just trying to understand your monitoring information and the, the chats you had about the, when you started doing your monitoring mm-hmm. And, and the changes that took place from after the poisoning. So are we saying that the cameras were still working through that time?
TR: Yeah, that’s how I had a line on the chart that said this was the day of the operation. They were still working and they hadn’t been emptied after a month. The lure from the last survey was still there. And then one week post-op we came in, we rebated two weeks after that we rebated again.
FA: Alright. I’ll put something in writing. I want to get a bit more specific information about that, if you don’t mind.
TR: Sure.
FA: Okay. Can I just ask one more question? You mentioned something about it’s going to be a mast year for rimu. How do you arrive at that?
TR: Just go and look at a female tree and you’ll see all the tips have turned up and there’s little seeds starting to develop.
FA: I’ve seen that over many years. And I’ve been guiding here for a long time. And I think in all that time, there’s only been a few years where there’s been mast years. There was one a few years ago and that’s why we had an explosion in the rat population. That’s why brodifacoum was dropped on Ulva Island twice a couple of years ago.
So you don’t have masts years usually a couple of years after a previous mast year. So mast years are an excuse to drop poison again and again.
TR: Okay. Well, let’s have a chat after the summer, and you can tell me if you’re right or not.
FA: I will.
No name given: I’ll keep it pretty quick. I realise that the aquaculture industry on Stewart Island gotten behind this and hence that’s why there was the buffer zone put out there. Was there any monitoring done around that coastline to see if there was any effects from that? From the poison drop or was it not required?
TR: I guess it wasn’t required ‘cause we did the buffer from the coast that Darius explained. So, but there was, was there freshwater sampling in some of the rivers?
DF: So we did do water sampling from Doughboy River and Rakeahua River. As we know 1080 dissipates very quickly in water. We did put those results out to the community here. So we did get a little detection in the pukunui operation on both the Doughboy and the Rakeahua.
But within hours it was well below the detectable levels. I just wanna touch a little bit on pre-monitoring as well just because we do have years and years of information about Rakiura from lots of other sources so, and most of it’s pretty bad news. So Kakapo got to very low numbers and had to be evacuated to Whenua Hou. Saddlebacks were almost gone and they’re now present, fortunately on some tītī islands because they were rescued from other offshore islands.
There is lots of information that points to predation being a major contributor to species decline here on Rakiura. And this work is starting to reverse that. because we think there is an opportunity to save species from going extinct and there might be an opportunity to bring back some of the species that can’t presently survive on this main island. We want to bring those things back so they’ve got habitat to live in. That’s the goal. you know, that’s the information that we have that things have been in decline for a long time and if we don’t do something about it, it’ll continue to decline until they’re all gone.
No name given: Just one other question just before I gotta go. I’m not sure if you’re going to put out there the total cost of the operation, but I’m just keen to know, is there a significant cost difference between using the deer repellent bait compared to just using bait?
DF: So to give you a rough guide is about 30% more expensive. It depends on how much you’re using, where you are using it.
No name given: I just, two questions that I’ve got and one is around contamination sites of independently monitored... five different sites in South Westland, whereas it been gross contamination where the bait is loaded into the choppers. And I’m talking about 25 mm thick. How did you get around that problem on Island Hill?
And the other one is I’m extremely concerned about the monitoring. I can understand you’ve monitored some stuff in South Westland, as you probably know, DOC, consider that probably up to 20% of the kea get affected by 1080. Now, kaka is not that dissimilar. The kea, you’re going to say, well, one’s an Alpine parrot, the other’s not. In North Okarito, In they monitored nine kea and they killed seven of them. And that was in lowland Forest. In that first operation you did there was 500 black backed gulls were killed in river bed. And when the question was asked, they said, we didn’t know they were there. Now I’m talking facts here Darius, aren’t I? Yeah.
DF: I’ll let Tristan talk about the kea and kaka. but yeah, we’ve talked about the black backed gulls before in South Westland. But just to talk about the load site, good question. So after the operation is completed we sluice everything down because we know that we dilute and remove with water and we put a perimeter around that load site to tell people not to go there until we’ve certain we’ve had enough rainfall to wash it away. The load site, without a doubt is where you get the most concentration of bait because we’ve been loading and unloading from there. we do do a very significant slicing down of that area, but we do need it to rain quite a lot to make sure that there is no toxin left in that area. and I think as it’s been pointed out already, it’s rained a lot which is a, is a good thing and it, and it’s actually good for the toxin out in the environment as well. We want it to rain after the operation so that that those pellets are safe, and they break down in the wet conditions.
TR: You’re right about the kea. That’s been a really difficult thing to figure out how we can mitigate those risks for kea. so yeah, it’s a, a big body of work that’s ongoing about how we can protect kea from not only cats and stoats, which are driving them to extinction, but also from the effects of operations. So it’s really variable. And like you said in North Okarito, that was a poor result. So that’s a work in progress and yeah, it’s not a comfortable conversation. But again, when you look at populations of kea in some places where there’s no management, it’s really grim. And then like you guys have probably observed in some parts of South Westland, they’re doing just fine with no management. South Westland’s a really interesting place in the beech gap. Up high, there’s no masting species, so you don’t get these big pulses of predators. So the bird life up in there is actually pretty cool.
When we talk about kaka we did a kaka study around Lake Paringa in South Westland. There’s a published paper on it, I can send it to you. I can’t remember how many kaka we monitored with radio transmitters... anyway, we monitored a bunch. There’s been a bunch of studies, there’s studies from Pureora looking at kaka, there’s a few others kicking around. They don’t eat the bait, they don’t die. We’ve never had a kaka die from a drop. So even though they look the same, they’ve still got a big can opener on the front of them. They don’t touch it, so Yeah,
MM: (Unclear)
TR: I don’t know what to say about that other than we’ve put transmitters on a bunch of birds and they’re fine. So yeah, maybe it’s bad luck. But that’s, that’s what I go on. I’ve, I’ve caught them. I’ve put the transmitters on, I’ve checked them around before and after the ops. I’ve watched what happens in the non-treatment when you have possums and stoats nailing their nests. And I’ve watched what happens afterwards when you go, oh great, we’ve raised some chicks and they fledged. So I’ve seen it firsthand. I’ve climbed the trees, I’ve looked in, I’ve seen the chicks I’ve banded them. As far as kaka go, it’s a great story so you’re not going to convince me.
I’ve put a lot of time into those birds. I guess it’s the difference between anecdotal accounts and like actually like properly looking at things and, and doing same effort, same methods and, and telling that story. And it’s always the battle we have in these things is because unless you’re in my position, you can’t do that. You know, like it’s really hard.
MM: (Unclear)
TR: I’ll send you some videos.
FA: Just a couple of observations.
TR: Remember though, keep it respectful in the comments at the start, please.
FA: Have I said something disrespectful so far?
TR: Not sure.
FA: Yeah, it’s a joke. Are you going to write a security thing about me? I spent 13 minutes waiting for people to eat before starting a 7.00pm meeting, so don’t get at me please, and we will be recording this. So couple of observations here.... Information is being given out in Kiwis for Kiwi, that was provided by the Department of Conservation about the kiwi population on Stewart Island, portraying a really dire picture of kiwi declining from 25,000 to13,000 by 2030. You guys haven’t got a clue. You’re just showing us what we know already. We’ve got lots of kiwi on Stewart Island, you don’t know the number. So DOC are very good at making up numbers and, and making assumptions.
If you guys have said things that are not correct and not accurate, not true and misleading, what is the repercussion for you in statements you’ve made over the last number of community meetings? Because they have been questioned by some of our technical advisors. You know, what is the repercussion for you guys for giving us false information?
TR: Well, that’s a hard one to answer. All I can say is we give you the information to the best of our knowledge at the time. I can’t talk to those numbers ‘cause I wasn’t involved in the research.
FA: It’s not just about kiwi. What I’m trying to put through is the fact that we don’t know a lot about what’s out there in nature. You know, two new species of wētā were found before we started dropping poison around the place. Do we really care? And yes, wētā do die from the poison drop, it’s been shown. We’ve got photographs of dead wētā next to pellets, for example. The Gollum Galaxiids found in our rivers and Southland only: do we really care? Someone likened it from DOC to takahe do we really care? And you say, okay, we’ve got lots of monitoring data, but there’s absolutely no long-term monitoring data across a wide spectrum of species. And we keep pushing and pushing for that.
You’re never ever going to convince us that you have monitored all our species across the broad spectrum because different animals will behave differently to the poison drop. So we want to know we do care as much as you guys do, and we are not convinced.
Tāne Davis: I’d like to really thank you all for attending this evening. You’ve all come from far and wide to participate in the Hui this evening. Safe travels home to Makaawhio. And I’d like to thank our speakers here this evening. You’ve done a really good job, guys. Thank you all.