6 days ago
Dedication to pest control recognised
Proud to receive the Forest & Bird Old Blue award are (from left) Ian (Mo) Turnbull, of Hāwea, Calvin Lloyd, of Dunedin, Jim Young and Jane Young, of the Catlins. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
A Hāwea man, alongside a mighty team of volunteers, is continuing the fight for predator control in Makarora despite difficulties.
Ian (Mo) Turnbull recently won the Forest & Bird Old Blue award for his dedication to protecting the region's native species, but he did not want to welcome this victory alone.
He made it clear this was not an award for himself but one for a team of over 70 volunteers equally committed to the same goal.
"Anything that I do that they thought was worth giving me a gong for is not done by one person, it's a whole team," he said.
"There's hundreds of people out there doing the same sort of thing that I do."
He had followed in the footsteps of his father who had built a home in Makarora during the 1950s and was also involved in predator control.
Before moving to Hāwea in 2013, Mr Turnbull started his journey by possum trapping on a block of land on the Otago Peninsula in 1993.
His more recent work had been mainly with the Central Otago branch of Forest & Bird and Southern Lakes Sanctuary, working with a large team of volunteers on a predator control programme in Makarora.
"It's a very long-standing predator control programme at Makarora, and it's been getting bigger over the last few years, mainly because of the support that it gets."
This has included setting up trap lines between the bushes or safely laying down poison to catch predators such as rats and stoats to protect native species including the mohua or yellowhead bird.
The project is not an easy undertaking, with the growing team of volunteers having to cover large areas across Mt Aspiring National Park.
"There's a lot of land out there that we can't get at," Mr Turnbull said.
"But in areas where the team have been doing a lot of very intensive work with trap grids and poison bait station grids, we are seeing very good results."
Although the use of poisons such as 1080 was not preferable, it was necessary to cover mass amounts of land.
Scale was a recurring issue, which was not easy to tackle with limited funding and manpower, but Mr Turnbull was not ready to give up.
"We're just getting more and more stuck in and doing more and more work," he said.
