Farmers Complain Of Swan Damage

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31725, 8 July 1968, Page 10

Farmers Complain Of Swan Damage

Some of the farmers occupying land adjacent to the shores of Lake Ellesmere are annoyed about the damage swans are doing to pastures on their properties, according to statements made at a meeting of the Ellesmere branch of Federated Farmers at Leeston.

Several speakers said that the swans were not only eating the grass but were fouling considerable areas, making the feed unpalatable to stock.

It was agreed to bring the matter to the notice of the provincial executive, with a suggestion that the swan should be declared a pest controllable by the pest destruction authority. Its numbers, they said, had increased far beyond reasonable proportions.

Mr G. E. Rennie, who farms a large area near the Selwyn River, said, when interviewed yesterday, that he had experienced trouble from swans for years, but the position this year was much worse, because of a large increase in breeding allowed last spring and summer. As a result of complaints he had made to the North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, men with “bangers” had been sent out and they had done a very good job in driving the birds away, until a member of the society had ordered them to cease. Another farmer, Mr E. L. F. Donald, who has land on the lake shore at Irwell, said that there had been much damage by swans on his land and it had been his opinion for a long time that the swan population on the lake was at least 50 per cent too high. Mr Donald, who is president of the Springs-Ellesmere Sportsmen’s Association, said that last spring, on hearing that there was a proposal to allow the breeding of 30,000 additional swans, he made a vigorous protest to the Acclimatisation Society. He believed that subsequently the society had agreed to reduce the breeding to 20,000. The association had said

that any substantial increase would lead to trouble, as had been the case a few years earlier. This had occurred. The feed supplies had been inadequate, resulting in large numbers of half-starved birds perishing during the April storm. Lack of sufficient feed at the lake was the reason why the swans were at present raiding farmers’ grass paddocks. Mr Donald said that the view held by sportsmen and farmers was that the increased breeding had been allowed to provide birds for a recent swan drive when 2000 had been shot in an hour or so.