Wallaby colony on doorstep of Tauranga thought to have been eradicated

A colony of dama wallabies in rural Welcome Bay have been knocked back.

Poisoning has knocked back and possibly eliminated a colony of wallabies breeding on the doorstep of Tauranga.

Dama wallabies, little nocturnal marsupials introduced into New Zealand for sport and the value of their skins, arrived about 14 years ago at Rocky Cutting Rd at the back of Welcome Bay.

An eradication campaign by the Bay of Plenty Regional Council has stopped them from spreading to become a major pest in the city's southern hills.

Council biosecurity manager Greg Corbett said cyanide poisoning appeared to have brought the numbers right down. Bait stations killed at least 30 in the first hit and they were now about to start another round of monitoring to see if there were any stragglers.

Contractor Phil Commins said his feeling was that they may have eliminated them completely but could not be sure until he had completed a grid survey using infra-red motion detector cameras.

He said the original wallabies could not have arrived under their own steam and would have had to been released or escaped.

They were in quite rough pine country between Rocky Cutting Rd and Reid Rd.

It took a lot of trial and error before Mr Commins and the council hit on a successful poisoning and monitoring method because they were extremely shy animals and hard to detect.

Neale Blaymires of TrapWorks said wallabies killed trees by chewing off the bark around the base. "They will kill a trees more quickly than a possum."

He said rumours surrounding the Rocky Cutting Rd colony was that it was started by someone who had brought wallabies across to Tauranga to cash in on the live export market to Japan for pets. Instead they were released back into the wild.

Mr Blaymires' wife saw her first wallaby on Kaiate Falls Rd about nine years ago, not far from Rocky Cutting Rd. "It took a while for the population to breed up," he said.

Mr Commins estimated he had poisoned about 60 wallabies in the area of Rocky Cutting Rd. The Kaituna River and Lake Rotorua were natural barriers to their spread towards Tauranga from the large established population around Lake Tarawera.

The council had not found a breeding population in the Mamaku Ranges, probably because conditions were too tough for wallabies.

''They have been on the fringes for a while but have not built up to any sort of numbers,'' Mr Commins said.

The regional council did not know of any other breeding populations of wallabies in the Western Bay, although it wanted to hear from anyone who had sighted the pests.
The odd sighting of wallabies within Tauranga was attributed to an escaped pet.

Rocky Cutting Rd resident and truck driver Alan Cossey said he had not seen a wallaby since he bowled one in his truck near the bottom of the road about four years ago. He used the carcass as proof to convince disbelieving residents that a population had established in the area.

The last time he saw quite a few wallabies was early last year when he picked them up in his truck headlights arriving at a logging site near Te Puke at the top of No. 3 Rd around Harray Rd.

"It's not that far for them to bounce through from Rotorua."

The regional council was putting its money into trying to prevent the spread of wallabies beyond the 200,000ha centred on Rotorua's Lake Tarawera where they were well established.

"We are not focusing our efforts in the middle, but on the edges to stop the spread outwards," Mr Corbett said.

Much of the council's work went into detecting wallabies and then determining whether it was a breeding population. It usually involved interviewing landowners who would know if wallabies had arrived in any numbers.

They also used a dog trained to find wallabies or wallaby signs.

"We have had some success with that."