While we squabble over fake facts, birds will die

Roll up. Roll up. It’s bird of the year time again. When I first saw the headline I wondered if I’d stepped back into the 1980s. Surely somebody got the memo that we don’t label women as birds — let alone have a competition judging the best one — anymore.

Luckily it was me that was old-fashioned, not the news media.

They were talking about New Zealand’s native birds — a group that, alongside our flora, represents what makes us unique.

It’s to do with when we broke off from Gondwanaland, I’m told.

Can you imagine how politically fraught it would be if we were separating from Gondwanaland today?

Whatever the politics of the split, the result was that we ended up with some pretty special birds, bugs and trees.

I’m a bird guy. I think it goes hand-in-hand with being a tramping guy.

Spend time in the bush in this country and you can’t help but be enamoured by the wildlife.

But recently, I had a sobering experience.

I was walking in the bush. The wind was dipping through the trees and the crickets were chirping but something was absent… Birdsong.

The sound of silence can sneak up on you.

It sent a chill down my spine.

You know what we need to do? We need to stop pandering to fringe groups and get serious about our predator problem. We need to ramp up the campaign to save the birds and make it rain like a high roller at a strip club.

Because if we don’t, we’re staring down the barrel of a mass extinction.

All hail the mighty 1080 — the best solution we currently have.

And don’t call it a ‘‘necessary evil’’ because that implies it’s evil.

But we live in an age when misinformation is king, fake news is rampant and he who sings the loudest is he who gets heard.

And sadly the silent majority, those who’d happily sing for the birds, are being drowned out by a fringe element hell-bent on proving that 1080 is some horrible poison sent out to kill those that wear tinfoil hats.

It’s not. It’s a good poison. It’s the best poison we’ve got.

And we need to really get going with the stuff if we’re going to make any impact on the pests decimating our birds.

The science will explain it all if you care to listen.

But we live in a world where scientists, degrees by the fistful, can be second-guessed by some conspiracy theorist with a video of a dying dog.

Climate change is happening, folks. Ask any scientist operating in that field. Mass vaccinations are necessary for humanity to operate as it does. Again, ask some bloke or sheila in a white coat – 1080 is the most effective form of pest control we have.

Yet, those who sit on the fringe, those whose main recourse used to be sitting outside Woolworths with some shabby old petition nobody signed, now have an avenue to swamp us with misinformation.

You’d think science hadn’t got us to the pinnacle on which we currently teeter.

And the result?

While we are squabbling over fake facts, the birds are dying – it’s happening right in front of our ears.

So I say drop more of the stuff. Drop 10 times more. Drop 100 times more.

Drop as much as those who crunch the data in a logical, scientific fashion tell us to drop.

Because if we can’t listen to science for long enough to save a couple of birds, how in the hell are we ever going to tackle climate change, which will be the defining issue of our time?

‘‘We need to ramp up the campaign to save the birds and make it rain like a high roller at a strip club. Because if we don’t, we’re staring down the barrel of a mass extinction.’’