So sad to see our beautiful country poisoned like this. And the apparent carelessness with which it is dropped and left for humans to touch. Little ones could easily run ahead, pick up those pretty looking baits & taste them before you even had time to stop them. Getting difficult isn’t it to be able to walk the wild places safely any more?
EnvirowatchRangitikei

From Carol Sawyer

“One third to to one half of a cinammon-flavoured 1080 bait, comprised of cereal and 25% sugar, and as you can see an attractive ‘lolly-green’ can KILL a preschooler. A nibble, or even a lick of a bait could make a child very ill.”

It’s the school holidays and this is the Corner Peak Route, in the Timaru Creek 1080 drop zone area… late this afternoon.

Ten tonnes 1080 baits were aerially dropped here on 20 June, 2018. We have had an enormous amount of rain since then and yet, nearly 4 weeks later, here are baits looking as intact as when they were dropped from the sky

One third to to one half of a cinammon-flavoured 1080 bait, comprised of cereal and 25% sugar, and as you can see an attractive ‘lolly-green’ can KILL a preschooler. A nibble, or even a lick of a bait could make a child very ill.

This photo of children with 1080 baits in the Timaru Creek aerial 1080 drop zone, on the Corner Peak Route, shocked many people when it was posted online yesterday. (The photo was taken late yesterday afternoon, 15 July, 2018)

So Kirstin Dana and I decided to go and have a look for ourselves this afternoon. We climbed the Upper Timaru Creek Track to the Corner Peak Route, which is the red dotted line on the map.

We didn’t have to go far on the Corner Peak Route before there seemed to be baits everywhere. One had been crushed by a boot…. I hope that person cleaned his footwear when he got home. I poked one bait open with a stick and as you can see it was still vivid green inside.

The photos of the 1080 baits I here are just two of 13 baits that I photographed on just one 75 metre stretch of the track’

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Bear in mind this is exactly 25 days since the drop. These 12 gram baits look as though they have just come out of the manufacturer’s bags ! You can see the ice on the track in the photo below.

A lot of 1080 must have been eaten though, as in two hours of walking we heard ONE bird… a Grey warbler on the other side of the valley. Apart from that, not a sound.

We came across sheep, including a dead one, and three donkeys, at the junction of the Upper Timaru Creek Track and the Corner Peak Route. They appeared to be in the drop zone – the closest baits we found on the track were approximately 100 metres up the hill from them.

It’s not really good enough this sort of thing, is it?

These baits are 0.15% pure 1080 poison and for anyone who doesn’t believe my calculations and wants to work it out for themselves… the LD50 of pure 1080 (sodium monofluoroacetate) is 0.7 to 2 mgs per kg of bodyweight, according to the govt-owned 1080 bait manufacturer, Animal Control Products, in Whanganui . The baits at Timaru Creek are standard 12 gm baits.

The average weight of a two-year old is between 12 kgs ( girl ) and 12.7 kgs ( boy ). One third to one half of a bait can kill a two-year-old ( boy or girl ).
A 3-year-old ( average weight 14 kgs ) could be killed by just over 1/2 bait ( 9.8mgs ).

And remember, this is NOT an exact science… they haven’t exactly experimented to come up with those figures. Nor are they likely to have exaggerated!