Invasive Predators in New Zealand by Carolyn M. King

Author:Carolyn M. King
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030321383
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The original poem, first published in 1922, has three more verses, the last recommending that nations aiming to attain global leadership should do the same.

Many critics at the time and since have blamed the early runholders for altering the natural environment of the southern pastoral grasslands in favour of rabbits, by overstocking, repeated burning and inadvertently creating refuge areas in railway embankments, sod walls and under rampant gorse hedges, and for the holding by absentee landlords of huge high country runs where labour-intensive rabbit control was impossible. In reassessing this argument, the environmental historian Robert Peden suggests that uninhabited island ecosystems could also be wrecked by rabbits; Peden and Holland found that burning did not destroy native vegetation wholesale; and Holland and Figgins emphasised that local variation in soil and climate strongly modified the impact of rabbit damage. Without denying these points, there remains ample evidence that repeated burning and overstocking does destroy native vegetation and change its character, and the species composition of vegetation, largely controlled by rainfall and soil type, is as important as total volume.

Arguments about the proper management of rabbits on leasehold land in the semi-arid, rabbit-prone high country have continued to the present. Fortunately, in most of the rest of the country where damper habitats are less favourable to rabbits, predation by cats and ferrets is now counted as among the reasons rabbits are no longer the pest they once were. But eradication was impossible, and at present it still is.

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