Wagner Nicky: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionWagner Nicky: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 29 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2977. Text is subject to correction.]Hon NICKY WAGNER (Associate Minister of Conservation):First of all I would like to thank Scott Simpson and his Local Government and Environment Committee for their report on conservation. He is absolutely correct: the Department of Conservation is working hand in hand with iwi with conservation boards with community conservation groups and with the public to deliver successful conservation outcomes right across the country. I have listened carefully to the member Clayton Mitchell and I do not recognise the Department of Conservation he described at all. I certainly will mention the Battle for our Birds and what we have been doing with 1080 and the very successful results and the fact that we have found the rock wren.I was very delighted to read recently in The New Yorker that the author considers that New Zealand may be the most nature-loving nation on the planet with some 4000 conservation groups. One of the interesting comments she made was that whereas an amateur naturalist in Oregon or Oklahoma might track butterflies or band birds in Ōtorohanga he will poison possums and crush the heads of hedgehogs. She also noted that a coordinator of a volunteer group said: “We always say that for us conservation [in New Zealand] is all about killing things.” I think that is absolutely true. New Zealanders love to get out in our national parks to enjoy our conservation land to visit our lakes and rivers and to spend time on our beaches but they also volunteer with the Department of Conservation. They volunteer more than 35000 days a year to work with the Department of Conservation and so often that work is to do with managing pests because our plants our animals and our birds are totally unique and we have to protect them.To be a conservationist we have to be able to kill because the biggest threats to our birds and our forests are pests—rats possums and mustelids such as stoats and wild cats. It is estimated that 25 million—25 million—birds are killed every year by these pests. We cannot afford to continue with that sort of death rate. Many of our birds are particularly vulnerable because they are flightless but these predators are efficient killers. They climb trees. They steal eggs. They kill chicks. They attack adult birds sitting on their nests. The Committee will hear later from Minister Barry about the Battle for our Birds which was the Department of Conservation’s response to the particularly heavy beechmast last season and about how effective it has been in protecting our bird populations.The key fact that I like to reflect on is that wherever we have used 1080 protection we have had the same results. If we go back to 2006 and the mōhua in the Dart Valley where we had protection 80 percent of those birds survived. Where we had no protection it was only 10 percent that survived. In 2005 and 2006 70 percent of the brown kiwi in Tongariro survived with protection; only 22 percent survived without. The Battle for our Birds has delivered a similar result this year. With the rock wren 85 percent of them have survived where there was protection; 30 percent without. Again there is the mōhua. It had 100 percent that survived with protection this time whereas it was more than 50 percent that survived without. Also we often forget about our long-tailed bats. The protection has helped them too. We would often lose between 30 and 40 percent of them during a beechmast but we have had unprecedented numbers surviving this time.As I work really closely with environment community groups I am always impressed by the energy and the ingenious ways they have to kill predators. The Community Conservation Fund supports many of these groups and many of their volunteers are expert killers. They set and maintain trap lines. They monitor pests and eradication programmes. They support predator-proofed areas. And high numbers of volunteers do this work week after week year after year. It is a fantastic and wonderful commitment. The Department of Conservation will be supporting them over the next 4 years with an escalated anti-predator campaign.Recently I visited the goodnature company in Wellington. This is a company that has invented automatic resetting traps for possums stoats and rats which is a fantastic step forward.