Rabbits: ‘It’s as bad as it’s ever been’
Watch Part 1: Rabbits are once again over-running parts of New Zealand. This week, in a series of short videos, Newsroom Investigates lays out the remarkable impacts in the south.
Farmers are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on rabbit control, with some employing full time shooters. But what if you control the rabbits at your place, and next door they don’t?
For Phillip Bunn, a third generation farmer on 149 hectares of Central Otago family land, there are a lot of things that make farming in the Queenstown Wakatipu Basin tough.
But dealing with rabbits is by far the hardest part.
“There are no rabbit hot spots,” he says. “They’re simply everywhere.”
Bunn’s grandparents moved to this land in the early 1950s, and now he farms deer here with his sister, Debbie. The rabbits drive him nuts.
“Rabbits are the one thing that actually does my head in more than anything else. Because you’re never gonna win.”
The pests have always been a problem in this area, situated above the iconic Kawarau River, famous for its bungy bridge. The region is known as a ‘rabbit reservoir’.
“You learn to live with it and we’ve lived with them all our lives. You try and control it and you get the rabbit numbers down and you might have them down for a season, but then they come back. The rabbits always win.”
But Bunn says they’re as bad as ever this year. And it’s not just because it’s been a nice, dry season for bunny breeding.
“There’s no cohesive plan and it’s a massive problem. Everybody does their own thing. The Otago Regional Council come and tell us that we need to do something, but that’s all they do. And they really have no idea. If you go round our neighbours here, there’s people that do a lot. There’s people that do absolutely nothing. You can clear a space and the rabbits will just move straight back in within a year.”
On Newsroom’s visit to Bunn’s farm, the infestation is obvious. Dozens of rabbits hop about on the dirt. And it is just dirt. Some paddocks are somewhat protected, others are dustbowls riddled with burrows, forfeited entirely to the pests.
And this extends throughout many parts of Central Otago. Where in years gone by the problem was confined to mostly farms, rabbits are becoming increasingly visible in populated areas.
Down the road they’re saturating Lake Hayes and popular Queenstown subdivisions like Jacks Point.
Surrounded by subdivisions
The Otago Regional Council, responsible for making sure landowners keep their rabbit populations under a certain level, has historically worked with big landholdings – namely farms. But in the last decade, subdivisions have exploded.
Now Bunn’s farm is surrounded by 80 blocks of around 10 acres each. And without coordination, the rabbits are the only winners.
“Everybody does their own thing essentially. And some people do a lot. Some people do absolutely nothing and some people do something. We’ve got a block here, which we poisoned last July, August. We had it pretty much down to zero rabbits. And it is rabbit fenced. But if you go over there now it’s just covered in rabbits. There’s rabbits everywhere.”
“We’ve got lots of lifestylers around here with two acres, five acres, ten acres who, the rabbits annoy them, but they don’t do anything. They might rabbit proof their fence, but beyond that there’s nothing and the rabbits will still move in.”
Bunn says he’s tried everything. At one point he even had an entire paddock plowed, ripping up the burrows so the rabbits couldn’t move back in to breed. It made no difference – within five years they’d taken over again.
“It’s costing the country massive amounts in lost production. And then in rabbit control time, money, effort. You poison the rabbits, and you can get a good kill, but they will come back pretty quickly. And while you’re poisoning them, you’re looking at it going, what are we doing here? We’re spreading a toxin all over the farm, which is just wrong every level, but what else do you do?”
He’s employed shooters, but found it inefficient and impossible to keep on top of the numbers that way. Bunn says he’s having more luck with a drop trap system.
“We’ve taken 3000 rabbits off the hill in the last three months. There’s still a lot of rabbits there but there’s no way you would ever shoot 3000 rabbits.”
Major ecological disaster
Professional rabbit controller Robert Andrews has been in the game for 30 years. He says some farmers are spending huge sums keeping the rabbits out, with one he knows spending close to a $100k.
“He’s got a full-time shooter there for 20 odd years. And that’s all he does at his place. And it costs what it costs. His farm wouldn’t survive without it.”
Once you’ve lost control of the rabbit numbers on your land, it’s very hard to bring it back, he says.
“Because it’s a dry arid climate and which is conducive to rabbits breeding, once they take off, they can take off almost within months, going from hardly any to being just thousands of rabbits. They’re very, very adaptable. And you’ve got to be one step ahead of them, which is very, very difficult.”
“If you can get the rabbits below that exponential curve and keep them there in a maintenance type thing, you can keep the rabbit numbers low without them blowing out.”
Fencing, aerial poisoning, full time rabbiters. It all costs the farmer tens of thousands of dollars, and not everyone can afford it.
“Aerial 1080 is really effective. But you’re talking possibly $150 a hectare. So you get a thousand hectares, which is not hard to get to poison, there’s $150k. If a guy can only spend $50,000 a year controlling it…And when the rabbit numbers get that high, and they denude the landscape, you’ve got the cost of lost production on top of that as well.”
Andrews has seen the changing bureaucracy that follows the rabbits around, from the Pest Destruction Board days to the current users pays system. But one thing never changes: “You never turn your back on the rabbit, especially in Central Otago.”
ORC dropped the ball
Has the Otago Regional Council turned its back on the rabbits?
Its biosecurity team leader Richard Lord admits they may have taken their eye off the ball when it comes to the increase in ‘lifestyle’ rabbits around subdivisions.
Lord also concedes the council hasn’t undertaken a single prosecution against those not meeting their rabbit population obligations, but with a new council plan introduced in 2019, he says they now intend to be “a lot more active”.
“We’ve got to be a lot more serious in our approach and our enforcement. And so we’ve got that new plan in place. The rules are easily applied. There’s no excuse for the regional council not to start enforcing and undertaking a lot more inspection work.”