As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Tuesday 29 December 2015

Indian myna bird eradication program claims success in far north Queensland


Mark Rigby
Posted 1 Dec 2015, 1:59am

A far north Queensland community alliance is waging war against the Indian myna bird and believes it may have trapped and euthanased nearly 40,000 birds since 2011.

Earlier in 2015 the Cairns Remove Indian Mynas (RIM) group, in conjunction with the Cairns Men's Shed, set about collecting information on the numbers of myna birds captured by the owners of bird traps in far north Queensland.

RIM president, Peter Goulding said the group had contacted less than half of the people on their database of trap owners, but the number of birds euthanased already exceeded 23,000.

"We're saying if it's 23,000 for that group, we're probably quite reasonable in saying that we've caught somewhere near 40,000 since we started," Mr Goulding said.

The man who designed the bulk of the traps being used in far north Queensland, Ron Moon, said the program's success in far north Queensland was largely thanks to the amount of support it had received from the community.

"People just got behind it and it's really taken off," he said.

"Over 1,500 traps have been built and they're out there in the community."

The design of Mr Moon's trap tricks the birds into moving away from the bait and into a separate compartment of the trap — the collection box.

"I reverted back to how I used to make crab pots years ago," Mr Moon said.

"They get in there, they find out they're caught, and then they find the entrance to the collection box and think they're getting out."



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