Photo by Hayden Wood

Taken in the photographer’s shed.

The Morepork seems to be caught in the middle of battle between man and rat. NZ wants to poison the Pacific Rat (kiore), and there have been air drops of massive amounts of poison. The poison does kill huge amounts of the rats, but about 95% of owl pellets have the rats in them, so owls consume the poison rats and die.

On the other hand, NZ had no native terrestrial mammals, since New Zealand was already far off in the ocean before any mammals existed. Due to this, the owls never evolved a defense against rats, so the rats eat a number of baby owls or owl eggs.

The government argues this is still a net benefit for the native wildlife, but as these poisoning efforts seem to not work completely, letting the rat populations bounce back, it seems local animals are killed by the poison and the rats.

The Maori people also do not seem to want the rats killed off. They have cultural importance to them, and it seems they purposely brought them to New Zealand in their boats.

Conservation in New Zealand sounds like a difficult job!

If any locals can add some insight, that would be great. It seems there are many conflicting perspectives on this matter. I know in the US poisoning can be a big issue to our raptors. Even bald eagles succumb to the collected poison in their systems. New Zealand seems extra vulnerable though, due to animals not having a natural defense to these types of animals.

This got a little more intense than I intended, so I’ll add some more pics of cute owls in the comments!