With around 18% of last year’s baits taken or over 2800 baits (The Mercury, 22 April), (Victims of fox 1080 target) the question remains, what’s eating them?
If even a fraction of these 2800 baits are really being taken by foxes then it is possible we might have shut the door after the fox has bolted and bred!
And if the majority are being eaten by our native animals like the threatened spotted tail quolls, the diseased devil, potoroos or bandicoots then there is a need for wildlife monitoring before and after these 1080 baits are laid.
Burying 1080 meat baits under 5 cm of soil, that’s around 2 inches and that’s nothing. Maybe that also explains this high take rate, even curious birds would find baits buried at such a shallow depth.
Currently Fox Eradication Program effort is being justified on the presence of a rainforest-dwelling mouse in the stomach of a fox allegedly shot in the northern Midlands, one positive fox scat found along a suburban road in Burnie and some paw prints.
And then there’s the dead fox found by the roadside at Burnie in September 2003. Its discovery just a few hundred metres from the Bass Strait container depot, the site of the 1998 fox escape is telling.
Finally there’s the fox sightings. Even the Fox Taskforce states that without hard physical evidence sightings remain ‘soft evidence’.
Keep foxes out of Tasmania by all means but we do need independent verification of all ‘the hard evidence’.
With additional millions of dollars requested for future fox activities we run the risk of having a serious imminent threat that might be a used as a Weapon of Mass Deception.
Sandra John
April 25, 2005 at 13:10
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this article. 40 how many? I haven’t been here long, but long enough to conclude that there is something seriously wrong with Tasmanians. Where is the public outcry? How many of these baits could possibly be taken by foxes? Even if there is a fox or two introduced it is no more than that. The other 39,998 baits will be taken by native wildlife.
As to the nature of this supposed menace – how real is it?
I lived next to a national park in the highlands of NSW for eighteen years, and raised sheep, and in all that time saw maybe a dozen foxes – we lost some chickens – once; and that was our own fault because we didn’t lock them up secure enough.
What about lambs? Well, what about them? Foxes might take a very new, very weak, lamb once in a while but we never lost any; basically they like rabbits (and chickens).
And what if they do take an occassional lamb? Eagles might take a lamb once in a while too, if it’s small enough and weak enough and unprotected enough; so might dingos; so would have thylocenes of course, hence their extermination.
Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. Potential, minor and preventable economic loss to farmers (or foresters?) does not justify the extermination of wildlife; certainly not the indiscriminate poisoning of native wildlife and certainly not by the use of slow acting agonising poisons such as 1080.
All the stuff and nonsense spoken about the devastating attacks of wildlife on livestock is just that, hysterical stuff and nonsense put out by people who cannot tolerate the idea of sharing the world with other forms of life and won’t make the effort required to protect what they have by humane and non-violent means.
Life on the land isn’t as hard as all that. No-one and no group has a right to further their private economic interests at the expense of the natural balance of nature and our future generations. Wrong is wrong and there is no excuse for lazy, immoral and incompetant solutions to perceived problems.
As to that,I don’t perceive much evidence of fox infestation. What little there is certainly does not jusify the laying of 40,000 1080 baits. This looks like a hoax to me and a very convenient one too for certain parties.
Dr Kevin Bonham
April 25, 2005 at 16:01
Dr Obendorf’s claim that the long-tailed mouse is a “rainforest-dwelling mouse” would, in context, give the impression that the species only occurs in rainforest and is therefore extremely unlikely to have been eaten by a northern midlands fox. In fact the species’ habitat preferences are nowhere near so restrictive, for instance http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/wildlife/mammals/rodents.html comments: “The species occurs in rainforest and wet and dry sclerophyll forest. It is particularly common in sub-alpine scree …” Sure, it was a very convenient diet item from the point of view of verifying that the fox had eaten Tasmanian wildlife, but there is nothing impossible or even implausible about a fox in the area in question eating one somewhere in its feeding range.
In casting insufficiently justified doubt, by use of the word “allegedly”, on whether this fox was shot, Dr Obendorf is needlessly harming the reputation of the farmer who shot the fox, who has had to put up with enough of that sort of nonsense already.
Of course, the one fox shot in the Northern Midlands does not prove the existence of a significant population of foxes, let alone a breeding population, or even that there are any in the state at all at the moment.
Frank Strie
April 25, 2005 at 16:55
Thank you Sandra John, 10/10
You’d asked, “Where is the public outcry?”
Here, for the public record a copy of my outcry from mid June 2003, and the response I got from a TCT-Representative on the Fox Free Taskforce:
Saturday, 14 June 2003
The nation’s worst joke this century from Tasmania:
An independent report: 1080-laced meat should be dropped from planes. …, Mr Kinnear said the collateral damage should be accepted…
“There is a lot of wildlife here that does not exist on the mainland and if these native species take the baits then they won’t be there for the foxes.”
Friends,
I really feel it’s now time for the environment groups and the general community to realise and call out that “the King has no clothes on”. It turnes into another “children overboard” story and dark consequences will be repeated, don’t be a part of it.
Wake up fellow Tasmanians and stop this nonsense!
Frank
——————————————————————————–
http://www.themercury.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6593074%255E921,00.html
1080 push in fox war
By DANNY ROSE
14jun03
TASMANIA’S fox taskforce yesterday called for more money to step up its baiting program using controversial 1080 poison.
But it drew the line at a recommendation in an independent report that 1080-laced meat should be dropped from planes…
———————————————-
From: Tasmanian Conservation Trust
To: Frank Strie ; Doctors For Forests
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: An independent report: 1080-laced meat should be dropped from planes. …, Mr Kinnear said the collateral damage should be accepted…
Dear Frank
I think that you have missed the point. The FFT Taskforce has quite rightly rejected the suggestion to surface bait for foxes as is done on the mainland. As such, they are showing a surprising amount of restraint. This is one of the reasons that the TCT has supported the fox-baiting program and will continue to do so while this restraint is exhibited.
The fox threat is one of the most important conservation issues in Tasmania at this time, and for once there is the opportunity to all work together.
Give me a call if you want to discuss this.
Regards
Craig Woodfield
FFT Steering Committee
editor
April 30, 2005 at 07:22
Dr. David Obendorf’s article on Fox Baits was timely; what on earth is going on out there in the â€Clean,Green,Tasmanian bushâ€?
I have personally opposed this baiting campaign from day one, not the Fox Free Task Force as such.When the Fox Task Force was formed I actually welcomed it as an opportunity with its infrastructure in place to rid the Island of some of the millions (that’s right millions) of Feral Cats decimating our Wildlife.
This baiting program is a disgrace, badly thought out, no thought at all to the long term ramifications to our wildlife. In the early days the spin doctors told us it would take 16 fox baits (at 3mg 1080 per bait )to kill a Tasmanian Devil, and 8 baits to kill a Quoll.
At the Lethal dose for Tiger Quolls being 1.85 mg 1080 to 1kg bodyweight I will let everyone do the arithmetic for themselves.
The ridiculous garbage about not all these baits being being taken by foxes is an insult to even the the “average apathetic, could-not-care-less-about-the-wildlife†Tasmanian’s intelligence.
Likewise the FFTF map of “Fox†sightings; foxes the length and width of Tasmania;this is a biological impossibility it would have taken a mass introduction for foxes to have dispersed this far, speaks loudly for the lurid public imagination on this issue.
But like UFOs Tasmanian Tigers and foxes we still have yet to have one in the hand. I will be happy the day this stupid baiting campaign stops and there is a public apology from the people that spread and persisted with the rumours that Tasmanians (refered to as environmental vandals) brought in fox cubs, reared them and released them into the Tasmanian bush.
This saga should have been put to bed after the Tasmania Police Task force found NO EVIDENCE of these allegations back in July 2001.
But no, some seeking attention and the possibility of $5,000 reward produce a skin and later a rotting carcass and keep it going, so much so we go on to form a Fox Task Force which procedes to spend approx. to date $6 million of taxpayers money on a fruitless search.
Come on Tasmanians enough is enough.
Ian C. Rist
Ben Lomond
David Obendorf
May 5, 2005 at 17:42
The difficulty with the finding of a long-tailed mouse in the stomach of a maggot-ridden decomposed fox at Symmons Plains are numerous. Remember, by all account this fox had been allegedly shot 2 weeks prior to the examination of its entrails!
Firstly, it seems the hair of the long-tailled mouse may not all that uniquely diagnostic. Rob Taylor couldn’t tell the fur of the long-tailed mouse from that of broad-toothed rat. Hans Brunners doesn’t cover it in his Hair ID updates. Without a molar tooth as well as the hair sample it seems it would be difficult to say for sure that the fur was from a long-tail mouse.
The difficulty with that extra information is that broad-toothed rats occur on the mainland and that would negate the argument that this fox had eaten a Tasmanian endemic species.
Secondly, there’s the confusion in the written documentation. Chris Emms says he collected the ‘skin of a small mammal’ from the fox’s stomach. How he knew at the time it was from a small mammal is a moot point. But Hans Brunner, the mammal expert asked to examine the sample and determine the species it came from states he received ‘hair, tooth and bones’.
Yes, as suggested above, having all those body items would help in determining whether it was from a long-tail mouse or a broad-toothed rat, but there’s distinct discrepancy between the accounts.
Thirdly, there is the matter of there being only that a piece of skin recorded in the decomposed fox stomach and not the feet or tail or bones or a teeth of a small small mammal, much less a rodent. Maybe this was inadvertantly left out of the record of examination, but to me, it just further confuses the confidence in the finding.
Fourthly, I’d really like to see the grid references of long-tail mouse trappings in or around the Symmons Plains area. Michael Driessen’s 1999 review publication on long-tail mouse doesn’t show the Midlands as a preferred habitat location for the long-tailed mouse. Maybe it could occur here but would it be common enough to be eaten by a fox?
With the Government placing such importance on this single finding in this one fox, it seems important that these matters are cleared up.
Dr Kevin Bonham
May 15, 2005 at 10:45
Dr Obendorf still provides no evidence concerning whether the fox in question was shot in the northern midlands or not, so perhaps his scepticism should be confined to the issue of whether the diet of that fox included a long-tailed mouse or not.
On that issue, I don’t find the claimed inconsistency between the term “the skin of a small mammal” (a term that could easily be used in a loose context meaning something more like “shredded carcass”) and the reference to “hair, teeth and bones” compelling – at least not without further information. I certainly would not interpret “the skin of a small mammal” as a reference only to a piece of body skin lacking any teeth, bones, feet, tail or other features that would establish the size of the animal. Indeed if only a piece of skin was found I would expect a reference to “a piece of skin” not to “the skin”.
It would indeed be useful to see mammal trapping records from the area, but even if there are none, I would be surprised if the level of trapping had been sufficient to strongly rule out a significant presence of the species within the foraging range of the fox in question.