New Zealand’s invasive predator problems are bad enough. But we can at least thank our lucky stars that the mongooses introduced into New Zealand in the 1880s never took off.
In 2018, when New Zealand pest-trapping company Goodnature announced it had developed a device to help control the mongoose plague in Hawai’i, the company described the rapacious little carnivores as “stoats on steroids”.
That is really saying something. The stoat – tireless, vicious, relentlessly multiplying – is one of nature’s finest predators. They, along with the rest of New Zealand’s rogues’gallery of cats, rats, and possums, have brought our native birds to their feathered little knees. And not just by hunting for food. Stoats are notorious enthusiasts of “surplus killing”, or hunting for fun.
But it could also, so easily, have been so much worse. In the 1880s, when the rabbit plague was destroying pasture nationwide, Aotearoa debated introducing all sorts of mammals to take the place of absent natural predators: mustelids, pine martens, foxes, badgers, the Tasmanian native cat, Scottish wildcat, the burrowing owl, mongooses. All are documented in a 2017 paper for the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand by international mustelid expert Dr Carolyn King, an emeritus professor at the University of Waikato.
Mustelids, of course, were imported to control rabbits, and did establish here very well. Between 1883 and 1892, King writes in one of her books, a minimum of 7838 British stoats and weasels were landed in New Zealand. (The problem with introducing stoats was foreseen; scientists and ornithologists warned about their deleterious impact on native birdlife, but were ignored, in much the same way as the people who’d warned about the rabbits).
King writes that there were two actual liberations of small hordes of mongooses in New Zealand, but they died out. And thank goodness they did. Plagued by rabbits as well, Australia released 1,000 mongooses in the 1880s, and although they were ultimately doomed too, a trawl through the arguments for and against them in PapersPast is enough to send a shiver down the spine of beleaguered New Zealand bird-lovers.
Take this, from the December 1882 St James Gazette, of London. Upon hearing the Australian news, a correspondent wrote: “I hope the colonists know what they are bringing upon themselves” and told the story of a young mongoose brought aboard a steamer to control rats.
Described as a “lively little urchin” with “a snaky body, vicious-looking claws, a sharp nose, a villainous eye”, he was like “murder incarnate” and killed thus:
“He crawled sinuously up to his victim until he was within easy distance for a rush and then struck with unerring aim, nipping the rat just at the base of the brain. The animals rarely had time to squeak, so suddenly and deadly the onslaught. In a single watch the mongoose would leave his traces from the companion to the engine-room, and sometimes the slain were found in hundreds by the forehatches. He never began to dine until his sport was over, and then he would tear and rend with extreme emphasis and enjoyment…”
In her paper, King traces the New Zealand mongoose releases to Winton, inland of Invercargill, and Kaikõura. The Winton release apparently happened because a pensioner from India living in the southern town had vouched for the mongoose’s suitability as a rabbit hunter. The club wrote to India asking for more information and the local paper printed some enthusiastic replies in May 1877. Fewer than six months later, 15 mongooses arrived on board the Ringarooma, “imported as rabbit destroyers” and bound for Dunrobin, a farm owned by the Basstian brothers that was close to where the first rabbits were freed, and thus among the first to suffer from rabbit damage. The following February, a wild mongoose was caught in a rabbit trap at Otaitai Bush and the Basstians were blamed; the settlers were very concerned about mongooses attacking their chickens.
Over the following years arguments for and against mongooses trickled through the newspapers, well after mustelids were established, including reports from “successful introductions” in other islands, such as Jamaica. George Bullen imported nine or 10 mongooses from India and released them near Kaikōura. One was killed in a neighbour’s trap, which Bullen lamented, for “a mongoose costs a good bit of money”, as King reports.
Later, King writes, an unknown number of mongooses were brought in as part of a retired Indian Army officer’s menagerie in the Wangapeka-Tadmor area of Tasman, adjacent to Kahurangi National Park and today’s remote and beautiful Wangapeka Track. Although there were reported sightings in the wild for years afterward, up until 1920, the pet mongooses thankfully never established there, either.
New Zealand has a higher proportion of introduced species than any other country, but other island nations have also suffered terribly when introduced predators quickly became invasive outside their homelands. The sugarcane industry introduced Indian mongooses to Hawai’i in 1883, hoping to control rats on their plantations. But mongooses quickly set about killing native birds, insects, reptiles, and sea turtles as well. They’ve since been directly implicated in the extinction of six native Hawaiian species, and also caused havoc in other biodiversity hotspots, such as the Caribbean.
Throughout 1888, the New Zealand government became convinced the mongoose would do more harm than good and chose not to import them in populations big enough to establish, even though some correspondents urged they’d have more destructive power than the already-released mustelids. The officials apparently believed those such as English botanist Daniel Morris, the assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, who advised them that “the animal everywhere now has become an unmitigated nuisance in the Colony”.
And although there is much to be frustrated about today when it comes to the environmental problems we’ve inherited from our nineteenth-century government, we can at least be grateful for that.
