Are some government departments to blame for the explosion in the rabbit population beyond Crown lands in Central Otago and Southland? Their neighbours, like Te Anau Golf Club, aren't happy.
It’s a catchcry all over the rabbit-infested regions of Otago and Southland - that public spaces are to blame for the recent explosion in numbers.
Individual landowners are responsible for keeping their rabbit populations down, but Crown-owned areas are being accused of letting their numbers spiral out of control.
Parks, gardens, lakefronts, bike tracks: they’re all overrun, and provide the ideal breeding ground for rabbits, who then hop and dig their way onto neighbouring private properties and businesses, destroying the landscape with holes, eating all the vegetation, leaving their urine and droppings everywhere, and attracting predators.
Jono Rout is the greenkeeper at the Te Anau golf course, a picturesque spot on the shores of Lake Te Anau in Southland. It’s an uphill battle trying to keep the golf green from looking like Swiss cheese, and he says the biggest culprit is the Department of Conservation.
“There’s shit on the greens first thing in the morning. It interferes with the roll of the ball and the look on the greens. It doesn’t look good when we’ve got repair marks all over greens.”
Across the road from the golf course is DoC land, a swathe of unkempt landscape bordering the lake. Rout describes it as “unmaintained”.
“Full of bracken and long grass, and the rabbits live in there. And they come across. Quite often we’ll see them on the road, dead squashed from cars going by, and it’s just never ending.”
He says it’s impossible to get on top of them – they can’t poison, they can’t trap. They can shoot, but it’s an arduous process that requires a lot of money for ammunition, planning and box ticking to ensure the dozens of neighbours are notified.
“We’ve got to be careful where we are and what we use because there’s a walking track down by the lake front. So we can’t use high-powered rifles. It’s all got to be shotgun or 22 with a silencer and shooting into the hill.”
But Rout reckons they wouldn’t have such a huge problem if DoC spent more time keeping their bits of land under control.
“DoC owns right around the waterfront. And the track. There’s just rabbits everywhere. It’s just going round and round. We can shoot up to 80 rabbits on a good night for shooting. It diminishes the population for a wee while, but they’re back in force and in numbers again very, very quickly.”
He adds rabbits have been spotted by the weir to the entrance of the Kepler Track, up and down the Waiau river, “and almost all the way to Hollyford.” And it affects more than just the golf course.
“It’s also all the farmlets, all the little lifestyle blocks. And even in town, the public parks in town have rabbits running around them, eating people’s gardens. It is a disaster. I can’t touch them, that’s the council’s job. I can only do what I can do on the course.”
Homes being invaded
When Ross Middlemass’ property was invaded – 20 to 30 rabbits holes appearing every week during his house build – he quickly realised the rabbits were winning the war. He and three neighbours combined resources, splitting the $10,000 bill to erect a rabbit-netted perimeter fencing around all their properties. It didn’t end there however, he says, as the persistent pests would continue to dig under, break wires and come on in, if the fence was not regularly patrolled and repaired.
He says Lake Wanaka’s edge and the public reserves and walking tracks are being saturated with rabbits, and describes how the pests are constantly breaching the residents’ netted fence as well as trying their patience.
“It’s disappointing because you’re looking after the property and we’ve got such a beautiful area through here. It’s a nice walkway, hundreds of people walk that track every day. (The council) are responsible as a neighbour to take some responsibility towards that.”
He says there’s “no control whatsoever” but the regional council don’t want to know.
“What can you do about it unless they come to the party and act on it? I’ve got some quite strong thoughts on how to fix the problem, but who listens?”
Southland containment
Meanwhile further south, rabbits seemed to be increasingly enjoying town life rather than bothering farmers.
Matthew Tayler of Lorne Peak Station near Kingston says there are far fewer rabbits around than 20 years ago and numbers are staying low. The RCD virus strain was still killing rabbits as it spread naturally through the population, a change in farming practices resulting in longer grass cover wasn’t to their liking and good kills were being achieved through winter night shooting.
The flipside was the arrival of rabbit’s lanky, long-grass-loving cousin the hare, whose numbers were “exploding”, Tayler says.
Overall, the southern region’s rural rabbit population remained “low and stable” according to Environment Southland’s (ES) biosecurity team leader Dave Burgess.
Despite the normal round of inspections by ES’s five pest control staff not carried out due to Covid-19, he remains confident rabbits are still only a problem within traditional hot-spot areas. These include the Oreti River banks, Hokonui Hills and parts of Northern Southland.
“With the dairy boom we don’t have the same problem. Rabbits don’t like the cold, they don’t like wet lush grass. We can have up to an 80 percent mortality rate in autumn and winter here and there’s also predators like stoats and ferrets.”
While pneumonia and dairying were keeping the pests off farms, the lure of a manicured lawn was causing headaches similar to those at Lake Hayes, even in cooler corners of the region like Te Anau, Burgess says.
“Rabbits like short grass…golf courses, cemeteries, lifestyle blocks with large lawns mown short every week and in those areas they can’t shoot, poison or trap.”
Lack of enforcement
The regional council is responsible for ensuring landowners keep their rabbit numbers within the acceptable limit. This is defined using something called the Modified McLean Scale.
The Otago Regional Council has a pest plan which sets the scale at a maximum of level 3.
Their website says: “As a rule of thumb, if you see groups of rabbit droppings less than 10 metres apart, there’s a problem and you need to take action.”
Yet the regional council has never taken a prosecution.
So why aren’t the hot spots being monitored or enforced, particularly when it comes to Crown-owned land?
Richard Lord is biosecurity team leader for the regional council. He’s been around rabbits since he left school, when he joined the East Otago Pest Destruction Board, and stayed on when it became a council function.
Lord has seen the havoc they’ve caused over the past couple of decades. He says the “hot spots” have lately been getting worse as it appears the 1997 virus has worn off, and that the council could be doing more.
“We, as a council, haven’t been forceful enough for a number of years with landowners, whether they be council, Crown-owned agencies or private. In all fairness, we haven’t been resourced particularly well for a period of time, but we are turning that around and we are looking to get more staff out on the ground for rabbit inspection, compliance, enforcement. And certainly there’ll be a major focus on urban areas as well. And that’s something we haven’t done in the past.”
A new regional pest plan adopted by the council in November 2019 also means they now have more teeth.
But what about the Crown-owned pieces of land, often accused of being the worst offenders at ignoring their rabbit problems?
“We take the stance they’ll be treated as any other landowner. They can’t be singled out and not be treated.”
LINZ land crawling
Professional rabbit controller Stephen Dickson took Newsroom to the head of Lake Dunstan to show us public-owned land under the control of Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand. It’s crawling with rabbits.
“The government do nothing with the bit below the fence. And the people above the fence have to spend a fortune. Because everything’s coming through. They repair fences, they shoot, they do everything. And the government does nothing.”
His business Kill That Rabbit travels around Central Otago killing rabbits for private landowners and says it’s getting worse.
“The user pays system has failed. Because who’s the biggest user in New Zealand? The government. Who does the least out of anyone? The government. Whether it’s local or national. DoC, LINZ, regional council, local council. They do nothing.”
The Crown responds
Megan Reid, biosecurity and biodiversity group manager for LINZ, told Newsroom it complies with the regional pest management plan.
“We work with neighbouring landowners and partners including MPI, DOC and regional councils to ensure control works are coordinated where possible. In Otago we are engaging with Otago Regional Council about opportunities to take a more coordinated approach to rabbit control on public land.”
Reid said LINZ was also in discussions with “partners” in South Canterbury regarding a range of new biosecurity projects in the region, including rabbit control.
“We expect to be able to report on those projects in the near future.”
The response from DoC head office was similar. DoC operations director for the southern South Island Aaron Fleming also said it complied with regional pest strategies and worked with “partners” such as landowners and councils to manage rabbit numbers. The pest wasn’t generally an issue in the large land areas they manage, such as Fiordland National Park and Mt Aspiring National Park, “and places like Wakatipu don’t currently have an active rabbit control programme.”
However management in places identified as “high rabbit” areas, such as Lake Hayes, was currently being reviewed.
“Wherever possible we work with partners and neighbours to manage them where their densities threaten to become too high. In Central Otago for example we do rabbit control on a number of public conservation land sites every year to comply with pest management plans and protect conservation values. This year we have more than 1000ha of control planned at sites in the Upper Clutha, Cromwell, Alexandra and Macraes areas, using a range of techniques.”
* Made with the support of NZ on Air *
