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Rotting animals left in traps; claims of pest control neglect in former National Park
Tony Wall
February 15, 2025 •08:00am
https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.686.0_debug_en.html#fid=goog_166491714Play Video
02:20
Fear kōkako population diminishing in Te Urewera (Video first published 2022)
VIDEO CREDIT: CHRISTEL YARDLEY/STUFF
It was once the site of a “mainland island” conservation project to protect rare species such as the kōkako. But visitors to northern Te Urewera have been shocked by what they’ve seen: rotting animals hanging from abandoned traps; brand new pest control equipment lying in the burnt-out remains of old huts and possums everywhere. What’s going on? Tony Wall investigates.
The creature hanging from the trap looks like something out of vampire flick Nosferatu, its innards exposed and its clawed hands wrapped around a tree trunk.
The fossilised animal, believed to be a possum, though it’s hard to tell, was photographed on the Otamatuna Ridge Track in northern Te Urewera by tramper Dan Lodge in January.
He posted the image, and others showing the burnt-out remains of a former Department of Conservation hut at Otamatuna, on the Save Our Te Urewera Huts Facebook page.
“It was pretty sad to see so many traps unchecked or not reset for the last two years, and the old, locked DOC hut built for conservation staff full of brand new traps … burnt down,” Lodge wrote.
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“This area was once trapped extensively as part of a mainland island project, to protect the kōkako and other birds, so it was sad to see all this effort go to waste.”
Dozens of people have left comments such as “shameful”, “tragic” and “disgusting”.
Te Urewera is recognised in law as a living person and is governed by a board with Crown and Tūhoe representatives.
Day-to-day operations are handled by Te Uru Taumatua (TUT), Tūhoe’s tribal authority, with support from DOC, which gives TUT about $2m a year to help manage the forest.
In 2022, TUT controversially burnt down 29 huts, including DOC biodiversity huts, as part of its plan to decommission DOC infrastructure and replace it with new buildings.
A High Court injunction stopped the destruction, and it was later found to be unlawful.
While the injunction was in place, several huts, including the Otamatuna hut containing DOC biodiversity equipment, were burnt down, in what were believed to be acts of arson unconnected to TUT.
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More than two years later, the remains of the Otamatuna hut lie in situ, dozens of gas canisters and brand new traps amongst the debris.
Lodge used to visit Te Urewera as a child but now lives in the South Island. He and his family went camping in the Waimana Valley over the Christmas holiday period and were shocked by the state of the place.
“There were obvious signs of no maintenance whatsoever,” he told Stuff. “There’s traps everywhere that haven’t been checked, they’re all covered in moss, clear signs they haven’t been checked in years – dead things hanging out of traps, things not re-set.
“It’s sad to see the state of it … with the conservation efforts that had been going on in the past.”
His family did hear a couple of kōkako, however.
Prior to management of Te Urewera changing hands in 2014, the area around Otamatuna was extensively trapped as part of a DOC “Mainland Island” project that brought the threatened kōkako back from the brink of disappearing.
Stuff first drew attention to concerns about a lack of predator control in the forest in 2022.
At that point, TUT said it was doing things differently than before, focusing on a wider area of the forest than DOC did.
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Now, it’s refusing to engage on the issue at all, failing to respond to a list of questions about predator control in Te Urewera sent through a public relations firm that it has worked with in the past.
Stuff asked DOC whether it was concerned about the message that images of neglected traps and the burnt remains of the hut sent to visitors.
It said in a statement: “DOC doesn’t see these images as reflecting the experience that Te Urewera Board and Te Uru Taumatua, as the lead in operational and management of Te Urewera, aim to share with manuhiri (guests).”
But it emphasized that it only had a support role, and questions were best put to TUT as the lead entity.
Kirsti Luke, TUT’s chief executive, told Stuff in 2022 that pest control involved trade-offs.
For example, she said, the biggest increase in kōkako numbers in Waimana Valley came in the early 2000s, using toxins now banned on the New Zealand mainland because of their impact on the ecosystem.
Luke said Tūhoe had access to “high levels of expertise” in pest control, including kaimahi (workers) who’d worked with DOC on the Mainland Island project, as well as experts in local bushcraft and ecosystems.
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The organisation had permanent staff teams, bush crews and contractors working on pest control in Te Urewera, Luke said, and was in discussions with Predator Free 2050 and other experts on “cutting edge technology and methodology”.
Tāmati Kruger, chair of TUT as well as the Te Urewera Board, said in a press release last year that the organisation accepted the initial burning of the DOC huts was unlawful, as there was no annual operating plan in place as required under the Te Urewera Act.
That had been rectified, and TUT would continue decommissioning the huts in a “safe and responsible way”, he said at the time.
New, fit-for-purpose facilities within Te Urewera were part of that conversation, Kruger said.
“There is now a suite of knowledge to help us provide for Tūhoe members and kaimahi [workers], to support pest control and biodiversity work, and to make Te Urewera accessible and hospitable to manuhiri.”
But conservationist Pete Shaw, who used to manage DOC’s Mainland Island project in the Waimana Valley, is damning of TUT’s efforts, saying it has “switched off” pest control entirely.
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He believes kōkako numbers will be “crashing” without intensive trapping.
“They switched off 20,000 hectares of possum control. They just stopped doing it.
“From what I can gather from people who’ve been up there, there’s possums everywhere.
“Possums prey directly upon kōkako – they kill the nesting females, they kill the chicks and they eat the eggs.
“Signing the Te Urewera Act signed the death warrant on kōkako in northern Te Urewera, it’s as simple as that.”
And it’s not just the kōkako under threat, Shaw says – pest control in a kiwi sanctuary at Lake Waikaremoana in the southern Te Urewera has also lapsed.
Stuff asked DOC if it’s concerned by pest numbers in Te Urewera.
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In a statement, Huia Forbes, responsible for Treaty relationships advice and oversight for DOC, said the department supported TUT to lead pest management “in a way that benefits Te Urewera and is in accordance with [guiding document] Te Kawa o Te Urewera”.
She confirmed DOC gave an annual grant of $2m to TUT each year to help with operational management of Te Urewera, but couldn’t say how much of that was spent on pest control.
“The Department does not oversee how this grant is spent, other than at a high level.”
Forbes said DOC was also unable to provide information about the state of kōkako in the forest, as it hadn’t monitored them since 2014.
As for what ongoing role DOC had in Te Urewera around pest management, Forbes said it provided support at TUT’s request and was currently involved in goat control work on the eastern and southern borders of the forest.
It’s understood private conservation groups who want to do pest control work in Te Urewera need a permit from TUT, but none have been issued.
Sam Gibson, a trapper and conservationist involved in a project to protect the whio, or blue duck, in the upper Waioeka Gorge, which borders Te Urewera, says he’d love to work with TUT on a trapping programme in the forest.
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“Some of the rivers in Te Urewera flow into the upper Waioeka … [and] the birds we are supporting to breed are spilling over into those rivers.
“We see great potential in a relationship with TUT to support, if it was wanted, with predator control.”
Gibson is an ardent supporter of mana whenua taking over management of their land.
“It’s not for anyone who isn’t Tūhoe to comment on what should be done.
“[But] it would really be a shame for us to lose kōkako out of Te Urewera, it would be a shame for us to see the slow degradation of the whio population and the kiwi populations.
“I do share concerns that if action is not taken shortly, we run the risk of losing species out of Te Urewera.”
– Stuff
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Experts sound the alarm as Ohio farmworker’s bird flu sparks fear it’s the next pandemic
February 13, 2025 at 11:00 AM PST
Bird flu has now spread to humans in a dozen states after public health officials confirmed on Feb. 12, 2025, that an Ohio man had contracted the disease.
Hispanolistic/Getty Images
Bird flu has now spread to humans in a dozen states after public health officials confirmed an Ohio man had contracted the disease.
The Mercer County farmworker had come into contact with deceased commercial poultry, the Ohio Department of Health announced Feb. 12. Prior to this latest case, 68 people in 11 states had been infected with an H5 strain of avian influenza, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One person in Louisiana who had been exposed to wild birds and a noncommercial backyard flock has died, a loss the CDC called “tragic” but “not unexpected because of the known potential for infection with these viruses to cause severe illness and death.”
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Most human infections in the U.S., 36, have been among people in California exposed to dairy cattle herds. Since March 2024, nearly 1,000 cattle in 16 states have tested positive for bird flu, primarily in California, according to the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). And since February 2022, nearly 159 million birds in more than 1,500 commercial and backyard flocks have been infected, with the plurality of flocks in Minnesota.
In the past 30 days, however, Ohio has been a hotspot of poultry infections. The Buckeye State has reported more than 10.3 million sick birds, nearly half of the 24.3 million infections reported nationwide in that time frame. Such numbers were alarming to state leaders even before bird flu had spread to one of their own. U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, brought her concerns to the House floor.
“My state of Ohio is the second-largest egg-producing state in our nation, and nationwide over 14 million egg-laying birds have been killed since December of last year due to the growing bird flu outbreak,” Kaptur said in a congressional recording posted to X on Feb. 7. “That is why the cost of eggs [is] skyrocketing, and this is why we must get this outbreak under control as human infection rates rise.”https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5ySOh/5/
Should I be worried about bird flu?
Yes and no. People most at risk of contracting the illness are those who work with or are otherwise likely to come into close contact with infected animals. No person-to-person spread has been detected to date, and the CDC maintains that the risk to public health is low. Consuming only pasteurized dairy products and steering clear of raw meat and poultry can help mitigate disease spread.
Still, the rapidly evolving situation calls for vigilance, says Meghan Frost Davis, DVM, PhD, an associate professor in the environmental health and engineering department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This is especially true now that in addition to H5N1 bird flu, which has been at the center of the current outbreak, H5N9 has been detected.
“Consumers should be on alert. Public health practitioners should be very concerned,” Davis, who is also a former dairy veterinarian, tells Fortune. “Anytime you get an additional strain of a zoonotic virus that has pandemic potential, [it] should garner caution.”
Influenza viruses are malleable such that different strains can mix and match, so to speak, Davis explains. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a resulting recombinant bird flu virus could lead to person-to-person spread. Pigs, which can catch both bird and human flu viruses, not to mention swine flu, pose a particular threat.
“We’re always concerned about pigs getting an avian influenza,” Davis says. “That could lead to a new virus that we’ve never seen.”
As fears of mutated avian influenza spiral, H5N1 continues to surprise. In January, APHIS confirmed that an H5N1 variant not previously seen in cows had been detected in dairy cattle in Nevada.
“We have never been closer to a pandemic from this virus,” Rick Bright, an immunologist and former federal health official, previously told Fortune’s Carolyn Barber. “And we still are not doing everything possible to prevent it or reduce the impact if it hits.”
Is there a bird flu vaccine?
No, but it’s in the works. Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services granted Moderna $590 million to help accelerate bird flu vaccine development. In addition, the CDC has already prepared what it calls candidate vaccine viruses for bird flu that other pharmaceutical companies can use to develop immunizations.
In the meantime, the CDC encourages everyone 6 months and older to get their 2024–25 seasonal flu shot. This vaccine won’t protect you from bird flu, but the more people who are vaccinated, the lower the odds that a mutated bird flu virus capable of person-to-person spread will form.
For more on bird flu:
- Can you get bird flu from eating eggs? What you need to know about staying safe
- As bird flu becomes a growing threat, Moderna is awarded $590M to develop mRNA pandemic influenza vaccines
- Bird flu FAQ: Everything you need to know about the latest H5N1 outbreak
- Bird flu could merge with seasonal flu to make mutated virus that could spread among humans, CDC warns
- What are the symptoms of bird flu, and how does it spread?
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For Immediate Release, February 12, 2025
| Contact: | Stephanie Kurose, (202) 849-8395, skurose@biologicaldiversity.org |
‘
WASHINGTON— President Trump today nominated Brian Nesvik to be the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Nesvik, the former director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, has an extreme record on wildlife issues.
Nesvik faced major national blowback in 2024 after his agency failed to take strong action against a man who captured a juvenile wolf by running her down with a snowmobile. A published photo showed the man posing with the injured animal, who had her muzzle taped shut. The man, who ultimately killed the wolf, received a $250 fine.
“Trump is declaring war on wolves, grizzly bears and imperiled wildlife across America by picking Nesvik to run the Fish and Wildlife Service,” said Stephanie Kurose, the Center for Biological Diversity’s deputy director of government affairs. “In Wyoming Nesvik led one of the most anti-conservation wildlife agencies in the country, and it’s glaringly obvious that he wants to destroy the Endangered Species Act and with it our best chance of fighting the extinction crisis. You only put a guy like this in charge of protecting endangered animals if you want them wiped out.”
In 2020 Nesvik joined the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in stating that the Endangered Species Act “must be pruned.” The Stock Growers Association is a trade organization that represents the interests of cattle ranchers in Wyoming and has long opposed protections for endangered species, as well as some of the nation’s most prized public lands like Grand Teton National Park.
During the Obama administration, Nesvik supported former Wyoming Governor Mead’s efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act, which called for weaker protections for all species listed as “threatened,” ignoring climate change’s threats to endangered species, prematurely ending the Act’s protections for wildlife and transferring management to states, and increasing “regulatory flexibility” for extractive industries to harm endangered species.
More recently, Nesvik vocally opposed efforts to protect and conserve sage grouse populations from threats to their habitat from the oil and gas industry, as well as grazing, after the first Trump administration weakened protections for the bird.
“Nesvik’s lackadaisical response to the tormenting of that young Wyoming wolf speaks volumes about his lack of care for wildlife,” Kurose said. “But his larger record truly underscores how deeply he despises the Fish and Wildlife Service’s fundamental mission. Most Americans want our imperiled wildlife protected, but we can’t count on Nesvik to lift a finger to prevent extinction.”
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
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