Ian Rist
So 140,000 baits and 4 years later, have the 1080-baits killed any elusive scarlet pimpernel foxes?
IN A letter 4th November 2007 in the Sunday Tasmanian Nick Mooney issues a challenge to a correspondent.
I would like to make a few observations in chronological order from documented facts to let readers decide for themselves.
On the 20th June 2001 a briefing took place and seven detectives were appointed to investigate allegations from this briefing that a number of foxes had been imported and released in Tasmania. On the 17th of July 2001 a Police Commander wrote to the Deputy Commissioner of Police stating that no evidence had been found to support these allegations. In fact the Police letters stated that these allegations were based on rumour, innuendo and gossip.
Just a few weeks later a photo appeared in Tasmanian newspapers of two anonymous men, their faces shielded, holding up a dead fox under the Longford turnoff road sign. Several weeks later a skin from the said fox was posted to the D.P.I.W. at Prospect.
In September 2001 a red fox was supposedly shot at Symmons Plains and was only discovered ten days later, however it was genetically linked through DNA to the Longford skin as both being siblings.
In 2004 it was publicly stated by Nick Mooney that the Longford skin/photo was a hoax. The problem was, originally the second sibling fox was supposed to contain a rare endemic Tasmanian mouse.
In 2003 funding for the Fox Task Force was to be wound up but a road kill fox turned up at Burnie and funding was reinstated.
It was later discovered this fox was killed on board a boat and dumped outside the port gates so as not to disrupt the port as in the May 1998 fiasco.
No more evidence until February 2006 when the remains of a fox cub were scraped out of the bitumen at Lillico . This was after a tip-off from an unknown Canberra cyclist that was supposed to have seen the cub freshly killed on Xmas day 2005.
On May 15th 2006 a chicken kill at Old Beach was reported to the FFTF and after five days blood was discovered at this site which was tested to contain fox DNA. Saliva tested from dead chickens at this site was proven to contain dog DNA.
Then on the 1st Of August 2006 the very day two branches of the Fox Free Taskforce were to close, it was reported a still warm roadkill fox was discovered on Glen Esk road. Later Govt. and independent pathology tests proved this fox had been killed much earlier than first claimed and could not have been killed at that time and location.
Three days after the fox was discovered at approx. 9.30 a.m. a Government wildlife officer issued a press release saying a driver had come forward to say he had run over the fox on Glen Esk road at 9.30 a.m. on the morning of the 1st of August 2006. How could the already dead fox run across the road and be struck by a vehicle?
This person that wanted to remain anonymous and was nominated as the driver was there and interviewed on the morning of August 1st 2006 and said nothing then about running over a live fox.
Earlier, in March 2003, a well regarded Professor of Zoology, Dr Geoff Sharman gave a bleak prospect on Tasmania’s biodiversity.
“The beginning of the 21st century will go down as probably the blackest chapter in Tasmania’s ecological history.” – Professor Geoff Sharman, March 2003
It followed the sensational political statements by the Minister for Police and Minister for Primary Industry & Water, David Llewellyn in June 2002 claiming there had been numerous fox sightings at Longford, Oatlands, Campania and St Helens and that they were consistent with what he believed was community intelligence that these were the exact locations where between 11 and 19 foxes deliberately released in the late 1990’s.
Notwithstanding the veracity of this Ministerial claim, Professor Sharman, like many others, believed that on the face of it foxes had established breeding populations in several locations across Tasmania. And if that was truly the case then Professor Sharman believed the chances of totally eradicating foxes from Tasmania in 2002 were ‘virtually nil’.
Dr Sharman explained that if a newly established fox population was confined to a limited area such as Maria or Bruny Island, there might be some hope for eradication, but in the 64,000 sq km area of the main island with its diversity of habitat and abundant native fauna for food resource, it was more likely that – as he put it – that ‘the fox was here for good’.
Commenting on fox control programs on the Australian mainland Professor Sharman instanced the successful resurgence of small mammals in Western Australia after the continuous use of 1080-meat baits: “……foxes could not and cannot be completely exterminated there [WA] or anywhere else because the animals killed are rapidly replaced by immigration of foxes from nearby uncontrolled areas. The Western Australian Department for Conservation and Land Management was able to define the area and undertook an extensive and costly programme of selective poisoning, trapping and shooting. Eventually they achieved fox control and the rock wallaby colony recovered, but the control programme in that small area is still ongoing because foxes continually migrate to the area from neighbouring uncontrolled areas.”
David Llewellyn’s explanation for the spate of fox sightings in 2002 while politically-convenient has never been proven either by Llewellyn’s own Police Taskforce investigation in 2001 nor in the discovery of convincing biological evidence confirming that foxes are established and breeding at these hotspot locations.
Why is this so?
In the early public relations literature from the Fox Free Taskforce, it was claimed that without the use of 1080 fox baits, there would be an unacceptable ‘a window of opportunity’ and foxes would successfully breed and increase in numbers.
So 140,000 baits and 4 years later, have the 1080-baits killed any elusive scarlet pimpernel foxes?
On Saturday 17 October 2007 The Mercury noted that the Fox Eradication Branch claim to have received 72 fox sightings in the last 4 months alone. This newly renamed fox program has received several million dollars in funding this year alone. The article reported four sightings at Oatlands, 3 at Burnie, 2 at Bridport, 2 at Westbury, and one each at Deloraine and Cressy as ‘excellent’.
If all these sightings correctly identified foxes from widely distributed locations and if the Fox Eradication Program still relies solely on buried 1080 baits as its frontline tool of fox eradication tool – and arbitrarily applied across the landscape – then logically Professor Sharman scepticism over the success of eradicating foxes in Tasmania might be justified.
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Of course if these ‘excellent’ sightings are not correct; if foxes haven’t successfully bred in these disparate locations and if there is no convincing location-specific corroboration of fox presence at any of these sites then Tasmania has truly created an ‘oxymoronic’ creature, perhaps as tantalising as lucrative as the extinct thylacine. Or is it extinct?
