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The Bush and the Birds.

During the opossum-hunting season, which closed recently, some fifty thousand skins were taken in the Wellington district alone. Some people are disposed to applaud this sort of thing from a commercial point of view; but that is not the most important consideration. The welfare of our forests and our native birds is of infinitely more concern to New Zealand than the opossum-trapping business. It cannot be too strongly emphasised, the enormous amount of harm this fostering of foreign animals is doing to the indigenous forest life. Every acclimatised creature that feeds on bush leaves and berries deprives the birds of so much food.

Much has been written of the ravages caused by deer in the forest. The opossum is a far greater peril and nuisance, because its ways are more furtive, its bush-spoiling less obvious to the casual eye. Experienced bushmen know all about it; one veteran sawmilling man tells me that he considers the opossum is the greatest enemy the birds have. Not only does it feed on the very things on which the bush birds are accustomed to subsist, but it molests the birds in their nests, especially at breeding time, and eats nestlings and eggs. The ancient balance of nature in the forest is seriously disturbed; and the struggle of native life for existence is all but hopeless.

In my belief the issue has come to this point now, that New Zealanders must decide which they prefer as habitants of the forest, the tui and the bellbird, the pigeon and the kaka and their kin, or the predatory opossum. There is no hope for the birds unless protection is completely removed from the opossums and free trapping permitted everywhere.