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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