Silent Forests: Why 70 Years of 1080 Have Failed NZ

A further comment by Andi Cockroft, chairman, CORANZ

For seventy years, New Zealand has run the largest aerial poisoning programme in the world. Helicopters sweep over the backcountry every two to three years, broadcasting 1080 pellets over mountains, valleys, waterways, and forests. The practice is so entrenched that many people no longer pause to ask whether it is working. It is simply what we do.

But when you step into the Aorangi Range days after a drop, the official narrative dissolves. The forest is silent. Not calmer—silent. Birdsong vanishes. Insects disappear. Even the air feels empty, as though the whole ecosystem has inhaled and forgotten how to exhale. The same thing happens in the Akatarawa Forest. These places once teemed with life. Now, after decades of repeated drops, they feel hollow. The data may claim improvement, but the land itself suggests otherwise.

On paper, the story is neat. DOC publishes graphs showing “no long-term decline” in birdsong. OSPRI claims 1080 is “essential” for controlling TB vectors. Parliamentary reports announce that eradication is progressing well. But these metrics are built on aggregate averages, smoothed over space and time. The immediate ecological shock—the collapse of sound and movement after each drop—is not captured by the models. The local declines are lost in statistical noise. New Zealand’s conservation narrative has been built on data that cannot hear the silence.

Meanwhile, the pests remain. Despite seven decades of poisoning, possums, rats, and stoats are still widespread. In fact, after each drop, rat numbers often rebound to two, three, even four times their pre-poisoning levels. The survivors breed into a predator-free vacuum. Stoats flourish on the rodent boom. Possums recolonise edges. The forest enters a boom-bust cycle driven not by nature but by our interventions. DOC acknowledges this—but only deep in technical reports. In public, the message remains simple: “1080 saves birds.”

The truth is more complicated.

Possums have been portrayed as the central villains of New Zealand ecology and biosecurity. The narrative is familiar: possums strip the canopy, destroy habitat, and spread bovine tuberculosis. Therefore, aerial poisoning is necessary. But this framing obscures two important realities.

First, New Zealand is already close to, or within, the international threshold for being considered TB-free. A country does not need zero TB to qualify. It needs low herd prevalence and strong surveillance. New Zealand has both. The idea that the primary obstacle to TB freedom is possums is outdated. Yet the messaging persists, in part because the system built around 1080 needs the justification to continue.

Second, while possums can carry TB, the role of stock movements in spreading the disease is severely under-discussed. Official documents acknowledge that infected cattle transported—sometimes without proper documentation—have seeded outbreaks in supposedly possum-free regions. But blaming possums is easier than confronting failures in farm management and enforcement.

Then there is the Remutaka incident—a detail so strange that many assume it is myth. In 2016, Landcare Research deliberately infected possums with TB and released them into the Remutaka Forest Park as part of a transmission study. They were later recaptured and euthanised. Whatever the scientific rationale, the optics are extraordinary: the same Crown-funded system that warns of the dangers of TB-infected possums also released TB-infected possums into the wild. Did those released possums ever infect others that were not euthanised?

Small wonder that public trust is low.

Independent hunters and trappers have conducted hundreds of necropsies in areas labelled “TB hotspots,” finding no infected possums. This does not disprove the existence of wildlife TB reservoirs—it simply underscores how patchy and limited those reservoirs now are. The possum TB crisis of the 1970s and 1980s is not the reality of today. But policy has not kept pace with change.

Possums are also framed as major predators of native birds. This too is overstated. Possums are primarily browsers. They will take an egg occasionally, but they are not specialist nest raiders. Rats and stoats do far more damage to nests, yet they rarely appear in public communications. The possum persists in the role of symbolic villain because it is large, photogenic, and easy to hate.

Meanwhile, people living closest to the land bear the heaviest consequences. For many rural families, the bush was once a reliable source of supplementary food: venison, goat, pig, hare, rabbit, possum. After 1080 operations, those same families stay away. Dogs die from eating poisoned carcasses. Hunters fear contamination. In a cost-of-living crisis, the government continues to undermine a vital source of wild protein without acknowledging the impact.

Behind all this lies a machinery that has grown too large to stop. Helicopter firms depend on regular contracts. Bait manufacturers rely on volume demand. Scientific teams depend on ongoing monitoring programmes. Whole departments within DOC and OSPRI are structured around repeat 1080 operations. No individual is corrupt; the system itself is simply unable to choose a different path.

The tragedy is that while New Zealand spends tens of millions on aerial poison, the forests continue to decline. Kea remain endangered, and some die in 1080 drops. Many insects and small mammals vanish for extended periods. Forest soundscapes collapse repeatedly. And pest populations return like clockwork.

New Zealand needs pest control. No reasonable person denies that. But we also need honesty. We need to admit when a tool has reached the limits of its usefulness. Seventy years is long enough to judge the results.

We need investment in targeted trapping, genetic technologies, biological controls, fenced sanctuaries, community-led operations, and new approaches that stabilise ecosystems instead of shocking them. We need independent ecological auditing, not self-confirming internal reports. And we need to listen to the people who walk the forests, not only those who model them from afar.

If we continue as we are, the next seventy years will look exactly like the last: poison, rebound, decline, repeat.

The forests have already told us the truth. They are falling silent. The question is whether we are willing to hear them.