Bird extinction risk is low
NT Field and Game
I WILL respond to Mr Tony Russell’s letter (NT News, July 3). It is filled with emotive rhetoric of nieces and nephews’ concerns for the planet and anecdotes of episodes in Africa and southern Australia.
Let’s get to the original claims of hunting could be the demise of skeins of geese around the Darwin skyline and the sustainability of waterfowl hunting. Waterfowl hunting is sustainable purely by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of threatened species definition and assessment of the game and nongame waterfowl present in the NT.
Of these magpie geese, black duck, whistle duck are all listed as of Least Concern. The very bottom of the spectrum of concern that starts at extinct.
Even non-game waterfowl that inhabit the same wetlands, like the Burdekin duck and green pygmy goose are listed of least concern. In other words, there is no threat at all to these populations, least of all from hunting. Sir David Attenborough obviously reveres this list when he says: “The IUCN Red List tells us where we ought to be concerned and where the urgent needs are to do something to prevent the despoliation of this world. It is a great agenda for the work of conservationists.” Mr Russell then went on to say that nine birds have become extinct in Australia since European colonisation.
He doesn’t say that of the nine, none were duck, geese or quail. None of these birds were hunted to extinction by humans. Eight of the nine extinctions occurred on offshore and oceanic islands. Most were likely ground nesting birds driven to extinction by rats and cats. The only mainland bird to become extinct in the 250 years since Captain Cook first landed in Botany Bay is the paradise parrot. This bird was not hunted.
I am surprised Mr Russell isn’t concerned with the commercial hunting and trapping of magpie geese in the Top End. This program could remove up to 30,000 geese annually for the profit of a very few, mostly in southern butcher shops and restaurants.
Mr Russell’s claims that hundreds of geese were left to rot at Lambells Lagoon during the 2018 season is another exaggeration. True many hundreds of carcasses littered the ground, but this was done as instructed in the regulations for taking magpie geese. The birds had been processed with the meat and giblets removed and dispersed so kites, hawks and crows could clean up the remains. There were only five carcasses discovered that had not been cleaned by hunters.