Professional shooters are killing more than 1,000 feral rabbits each night as numbers of the pest dramatically increase after good rain.
Mark Hancock from vertebrate pest control company River to Range said numbers had been increasing after three years of regular rainfall.
“It’s not uncommon to drive past a paddock or a hill and you would swear that the ground was moving. There are just that many rabbits crawling across it,” he said.
“We’re shooting over a wide area. Some places [rabbits] are more dense than others, but it’s at least a couple of hundred per night and we might get upwards of 1,400 to 1,500 on a big night.”
Mr Hancock and his father-in-law, David Carter, spend up to eight hours a night shooting using high-tech gear, including thermal cameras and rifles with silencers.
“The equipment is so advanced that we get a really high percentage [of rabbits] because not only can we see all the rabbits that are there, but we can get them all,” he said.
“You can be worn out at the end of night, but I love it.”
Mr Carter said he was always pleased to find a handful of rabbits when returning to a farm for follow up control.
“That seems like an incredibly painful couple of hours to shoot 30 rabbits, but it’s very rewarding because we may have shot as many as 2,000 off that exact area in the season leading up to that point,” he said.
Costly problem for farmers
Each night the brown line across Berry Jerry farmer Ben Cassidy’s newly sown canola crop in southern New South Wales gets larger as rabbits eat more and more of the fresh green shoots.
“You can see 100 metres of red country where it should be green,” he said.
“These problems have been getting gradually worse over the past two or three years and, if we don’t do something about it, it’s going to be a big problem in this district.”
Mr Cassidy lost 15 hectares of canola in 2021 costing him up to $50,000 in lost production and since then he has been working to reduce the population.
“We’ve paid out somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 in the past year to try to get this problem under control,” he said.
“When you see the damage, it’s a good return on investment.”
Carrots a tasty but deadly treat
More than 28 tonnes of carrots have also been used to lure then poison rabbits on Riverina farms this year.
Riverina Local Land Services biosecurity officer Tara Craig said it was an effective strategy, particularly when landholders worked together and incorporated other control methods.
“We use the baiting as a primary control method to reduce numbers to a more manageable number,” she said.
“Warrens are where the rabbits breed, so you need to destroy those as well as reducing numbers by shooting.”
Erinvale farmer Bernard Hart praised the coordinated effort to contain what he described as an explosion of rabbit numbers after summer rainfall.
“[Local Land Services] have been able to get a lot of growers together and bait a huge area and that really pulls the numbers down because they’re not coming from the neighbour or coming from the roadside,” Mr Hart said.
Making the most of biological control
Biological control, in the form of Myxoma virus and calicivirus, are considered the best landscape tools for suppressing rabbit numbers.
But senior principal research scientist at the CSIRO Tanja Strive said effectiveness waned over time as the virus and rabbit host evolved.
“One puts selection pressure on the other and quite often that can lead to the development of genetic resistance in the rabbit and increased survival rates,” Dr Strive said.
Scientists, industry, and government have developed a national rabbit biocontrol strategy to keep ahead.
“It’s critically important that we keep researching new tools and strategies that we can roll out and apply every 10 to 15 years,” Dr Strive said.
“Without biocontrol, the rabbit situation in Australia would be so much worse and we cannot afford to lose all the gains that we’ve made over the past 70 years.”
CSIRO research is focused on a cell culture system to make it faster and easier to find new variants of the calicivirus and genetic biocontrol to prevent rabbits breeding.
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