The History of Poisoning Part 5
The call of the morepork
I played in a music group in Colville every Thursday night, and on my way, I would stop the car on the top of the last hill before home, get out, and listen. Morepork. Their calls could be heard coming from both sides of the road and from some considerable distance, at that time of night when all else is quiet. The calls go on and I wonder what they are saying. Are they sharing food, bragging about the ease of the night’s hunt? Different calls, sometimes more, sometimes less depending on the weather but always calls from the morepork, no matter what time of year.
Until that night in 1991 when I stepped out into the quiet of the night and listened. And listened. And listened.
The week before the poisoning I had counted 12 individual calls in the space of 10 minutes. Two weeks later, in the same spot, at the same time I was out listening … and hearing no morepork calls.
Here’s me today having put it all together, but back then I couldn’t believe it. What could have happened? Oh! Was that a call I heard? Very distant but it didn’t keep calling or else I would have been sure.
My listening post was positioned between the poisoned area to the south and a similar sized valley to the north. If that call had been a morepork, it came from way up the valley, a long way outside the poisoned area. Otherwise, there was nothing. Surely, they can’t all have disappeared?
I could not believe that 12 healthy birds had been reduced to practically nothing. What kind of poisoning was this? A dead pig lay in the stream beside the road at the bottom of the hill. Two neighbours lost their dogs to this poison. When I went to view the hawks nesting in the swamp behind the house, their nests were empty. The hawks had disappeared just like the moreporks. Maybe the hawk numbers had been more depleted than the morepork.
It took some time to realise that such devastation had been caused by the poisoning alone.
As a result of this “possum control” operation in Kennedy Bay, every creature in the locale found its food poisoned. A poison put out to poison one creature, the possum, had made its way into the food of every other creature in the place.
The poison in ICI’s Talon is Brodifacoum, called ‘Brodi’ in the trade. The victim slowly bleeds internally until death, finally, brings relief. This excruciating process might take a week or more. In order to poison you must become inured to the sight of such a cruel death.
The Talon first poisons the creature that eats the bait; then it poisons the creature that eats the creature that ate the bait, and then the creature that eats the previous creature be it a bird, a rat, or a pig, or the insect that ate and laid its eggs on the toxic carcass.
Those scavenging further down this poison food chain may get a non-fatal dose of Brodi, not enough to kill them this time. The poison will remain in the body for the rest of that creature’s life.
A second non-fatal dose may add up with the first non-fatal dose and make a fatal dose.
Today many of the surviving creatures in our Coromandel wildlife are carrying some Brodi inside them. If poisoning were stopped today it would be decades before our wildlife could be said to be rid of all of DoC’s poisons.
I continued to listen out for moreporks for a few years after that, but their numbers never returned, and they never will, so long as poison continues to be spread nearby.
Eric Spurr’s idea that the birds would bounce back after such slaughter did not hold true for those Kennedy Bay morepork and hawks.
