PROTECTING NATIVE BIRDS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 20075, 12 October 1928, Page 12

PROTECTING NATIVE BIRDS.

There is good ground for the request of tho Wellington Acclimatisation Society that the protection of stoats, weasels, ferrets and polecats should be removed in the forest areas of districts under the society's jurisdiction. Other societies of the kind should make a like request applicable to their districts. It is concern for the native bird life of the Dominion that prompts such a request. The animals named have been rightly protected in regions infested by rabbits, for they do something toward keeping down the rabbits ; but it is known that in forest areas they tako heavy toll of bird life and that they show a marked preference for such prey. The least that can be asked is that they should have no legal protection there; and the Agricultural Department, charged with administrative authority in this matter, should have no hesitation in giving effect to the recommendation. Rats, whose liking for eggs makes them a ruthless enemy of birds, enjoy no immunity under the law, but the operation of the legal protection given to stoats and weasels is favourable to the multiplication of this enemy. Wekas are natural enemies of vats, which stoats seem to leave alone though they are very destructive of wekas: it follows that to protect stoats is to encourage the multiplication of rats and so to add to the agencies destructive of bird life. There is ample proof that, where the wekas have been destroyed by stoats, the rats have increased enormously. A distinction should therefore be made that will reduce, if not remove, the menace of vermin to bird life, and this can be done by excepting forest areas from the application of the law protecting vermin. This, however, is but a negative procedure. It ought to be accompanied by definite encouragement of the trapping of vermin in these areas. New Zealand bird life is too interesting in itself, and too essential to the preservation of a salutary balance of nature in the bush areas, to be so foolishly exposed to extinction.