Halloween hare

I'm not usually frightened of herbivores. But every now and then when sitting in the dawn gloom with a gun, I wonder if a 10-foot hare will suddenly appear behind me to extract revenge. It’s my private Halloween dread.

So far I have shot 78 hares at Tūmai. It's a gruesome task, made worse by my absolute love for those majestic creatures. Hares and rabbits block establishment of native forests at Tūmai farm park.  The hares are particularly aggravating in their habit of nipping the leading shoots out of newly planted shrubs … they don't even have a proper lunch from our hard work of propagating and planting the natives - instead they simply nip off the growing shoot and walk along to damage the next plant.

My “Mud pie” blip from two days ago described restoration of South Arm estuary of Te Hakapupu (Pleasant River). A much bigger challenge of our farm park restoration plan is to plant approximately 18 hectares of native forests on the peninsula flanking South Arm. It's going to be a real mission to propagate and plant approximately 90,000 seedlings over the next 10 to 20 years, to prevent them from being smothered by fast-growing introduced grasses, and to stop them being eaten by hares and rabbits when young.

Ecosystem restoration in New Zealand is often like this – we must weed out some species so that others can establish, grow, and eventually look after themselves. It has been a sadness to have spent much of a 40 year career researching how to kill as many animals as cheaply and humanely as possible. Many of the introduced species are beautiful in their own right, but they shouldn’t be in our corner of the planet where they are squeezing the life out of our ecosystems. Hares were introduced from Britain to New Zealand sometime between 1865 and 1876 for sport (shooting) and sustenance of the European settlers. Nowadays,  New Zealand conservationist kill them out of love, not anger, or pleasure. We exercise a moral imperative to kill some lifeforms to allow other life to thrive. To not do so would be profoundly unethical in my opinion.

At Tūmai we bury the hares and rabbits under newly planted seedlings, so their nutrients help push up a new native forest. That’s my personal revenge.

PS. No hares were harmed in the taking of this photograph. My Halloween hare is a plastic statuette sitting on a bench top, surrounded by candles, and ‘shot’ against the “Splash-back” of our kitchen wall in the dead of night.