Hopeful signs

Paul Stenning, noted waterfowler and Southland F&G Councilor is a worried man. His worry stems from the lack of research into NZ's Greylard/Mallard population, and how little we know of the population dynamics. His immediate concern (refreshingly) is not for his region's birds right now; but should the population markedly decline as is inferred it has done in other regions - what would an adequate management response be? How would we know what to do - is there an emergency plan? Here's where I digress....(again! Yay!) In our business we plan for a range of business outages from widespread mass interuptions (earthquake, acts of God) to global events such as break out of various strains of influenza derivatives to localised events such as power blackouts. Techinically everyone in the business (yeah there's always a dumbass) knows what the appropriate response should be in order to allow business continuity depending on the scale and severity of the event or outage. We know how to do this because in our knowledge banks we have the information gathered from when we've suffered power blackouts, had staff down in droves with various illnesses and even had terrorist threats on our building (given we're housed in one of Auckland's transport hubs, that's not too surprising). The point is that we know what to do. And it sort of works. A bit closer to home, that whole PSA gig in the kiwifruit industry exposed a clear lack of continuity planning... ok so resources were brought to bear but it took so long, and was so disjointed...

So, back to waterfowl, what happens if in Eastern there's a mass botulism outbreak in say Tauranga Harbour (unlikely example), or if some egg denaturing disease takes hold in Northern and wipes out all the nesting effort; or.. the list could go on. How would we know what's happening? How do we know our breeding success rates? Or the effect of crippling? Or whether our birds are nesting more than once? Or where?

Paul is worried, so he's pushing for a nationalised approach to researching our waterfowl populations. Its not a new idea, but its one that has merit. It needs to be nationalised and coordinated and run scientifically in order that planning can be put in place to allow for population management that has a fact base. Paul's taliking with councilors from various reagions, as it is expected that Southland F&G will put forward a remit to national; and if it isn't to die an agonising death it will need support from all regions. It will need buy-in, funding, coordination, but we have the staff power and appropriate job titles to do this! I can't see a single negative to be found. Someone may of course, that's the nature of committees.

Paul's been on the phone to a few people, Tim Allen, Guy, Craig, me.. to name a few shady dudes. Or leading lights. Naturally he wants our support, which will be granted and the support of our managers, which will take some work.

Watch this space.