FALSE FRIENDS

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 109, 4 November 1925, Page 7

FALSE FRIENDS

A PROPHECY OF 1896

Almost thirty years ago the damage likely to be done by stoats, weas-. els, and similar -animals was recognised, but attempts then made to check hasty introduction of enemies in the guise of friends were unsuccessful. The following extract from Alfred Newton's "Dictionary of Birds," published in 1896, has now a prophetic sound: — "In respect of extermination leading immediately .to extinction, the present condition of the New-Zealand fauna is one that must grieve to the utmost every ornithologist who cares for more than the stuffed skin of a bird on a shelf. In the fauna of that region the class ayes holds the highest rank, and 'though its mightiest members haft passed away before the settlement of white men, what was left of its avifauna had features of interest unsurpassed by any others. It' was indeed long before those features were appreciated, and then by but few ornithologists. Yet no sooner was their value recognised than it was found that'nearly all of their possessors were rapidly expiring, and the destruction of the original avifauna of this important colony, so thriving and intellectual, is being attended by circumstances of extraordinary atrocity. Under the evil influence of what was some thirty years ago called ' acclimatisation,' not only were all sorts of birds introduced, which, being of strong species, speedily established themselves with the usual effect on tHe weak aboriginals, but> in an evil day, rabbits were liberated. These, as was anticipated by zoologists, soon became numerous beyond measure and devoured the pasture destined for the sheep, on which so much of the prosperity of the country depended. Allowing for a considerable amount of exaggeration on the part of the sheepowners, no one can doubt that the*rabbit plague has inflicted.a seri : . ous loss on; the colony. ; "•■ '';- ■

: "Yet-a remedy mai r be worse than a disease; and the so-called remedy; ap; plied in- this base has been of a kind that every true naturalist knew to be most foolish, namely, the importation from England and elsewhere and liberation of divers carnivorous mammals — polecats, ferrets, stoats, and weasels! Two /wrongs do not make a right even at the Antipodes,- and from the most authentic reports it seems, as any zoologist of commonsense would have expected, that the bloodthirsty beasts make no greater impression upon the stock of rabbits in New Zealand than they do in the Mother Country, while they find an easy prey in the heedless and harmless members of the aboriginal fauna, many of them incapable of flight, so that their days are assuredly numbered. Were these indigenous forms of an ordinary kind, their extirpation might be regarded, with some degree of indifference; but, i unfortunately, many of them are of extraordinary forms—the relics of perhaps the^oldest fauna now living. Opportunities for learning the lesson they taught have been but scant, and they are vanishing before our eyes ere that lesson can be learnt. Assuredly the scientific naturalist of another generation, especially if he be of New Zealand birth, will brand with infamy the short-sighted folly, begotten of greed, which will have deprived him in interpreting some of the great secrets of Nature, while utterly failing to put an end to the nuisance—admittedly a great one."