Wallabies prove tough to tackle
New Zealand’s wallaby problem could become a full-blown plague unless efforts to control them are ramped up and ‘shortsighted’ hunters start playing by the rules.
Forest and Bird says the pests could spread to cover a third of the country unless the Government steps in to fund a beefed-up control programme.
Central North Island regional manager Rebecca Stirnemann said wallabies were like giant rabbits, eating their way through native bush, damaging tussock grasslands and devouring pasture and young pine trees.
‘‘They pose an enormous threat, economically and environmentally,’’ Stirnemann said.
Introduced from Australia in the 1870s, wallabies are common in parts of South Canterbury, Otago and Bay of Plenty but their reach is growing.
They have been seen in fresh territories in Auckland, Northland, Hawke’s Bay, Waikato, Gisborne, Wellington, Marlborough, Southland, and the West Coast.
Federated Farmers South Canterbury
president Jason Grant said wallabies generally stuck to a 10 or 12-hectare patch unless forced to move on.
‘‘That’s where shooting [to control them] can be a problem because you never get them all and it spreads them out,’’ he said.
Often their appearance in a new area made sense, with an obvious link to a nearby population, but they had also turned up in far-flung places with no natural explanation, Grant said.
‘‘I have heard of people moving them to hunt. When they turn up in North Canterbury or way down in Hawea, somewhere where there’s no obvious link to wallabies, that’s suspicious,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s very shortsighted and irresponsible to introduce a pest just to hunt it.’’
Government funding was provided for wallaby control in South Canterbury until 1992, when the responsibility shifted to farmers in a containment area bordered by the Waitaki River, Lake Tekapo and the Rangitata River.
Since then, wallaby numbers in the south have escalated, with hundreds of thousands believed to live within the containment area.
Environment Canterbury runs a wallaby management programme aimed at preventing breeding populations of Bennett’s wallabies establishing outside that area.
Occasional sightings of isolated wallabies further afield, including on the Banks Peninsula and west of Christchurch at Mt Oxford, suggested they were being illegally released, the council said.
Under the Biosecurity Act, it is an offence to move live wallabies out of the containment area, with penalties including a fine of up to $50,000 and/or a year in prison.
Stirnemann said effective wallaby control would cost about $7.4 million a year for 10 years but less than $1.4 million was spent by local and central government and private landowners in 2017 and 2018. ‘‘It’s shocking that we’re not putting more funding into dealing with this plague of wallabies,’’ she said.