"Earnscleugh," Plains Folk #472 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

Some of this may seem hard to believe. It shouldn't, though. People of the North American plains, who have seen clouds of grasshoppers, walls of dust, and yes, jack rabbit drives, should be able to imagine something like the rabbit plagues of Earnscleugh Station.

Earnscleugh is among the most famous sheep stations of New Zealand, for two reasons. The first is the castle--not really a castle, but a red-brick, white-column mansion which inspired the title of a memoir by a woman who grew up there--Castle on the Run. Quail scattered from the driveway as we drove up to interview the present owner, Alistair Campbell. In my slide of the house, he looks like a sparrow perched on the porch.

The other reason for the fame of Earnscleugh is the rabbits. The earliest owners, like other homesick English folk, released European gray rabbits on the place. By 1895 they were so thick that the station was abandoned, given up to the rabbits.

Subsequent owners rehabilitated the run by bringing in professional trappers, who at one point were taking more than half a million rabbit skins per year. The checkered history of the Earnscleugh continued through the decades, so that it was hard to tell whether the owners were raising sheep or rabbits.

Alistair Campbell bought the station in 1981 and thought he had a good deal. He was an experienced manager who had bought other run-down runs, developed them, and made good money reselling them.

He saw great potential in this 62,000-acre property. It lies in Central Otago, where the country is rugged and various. The lower country is semiarid, but good for wintering sheep. The higher country is wetter, and good for summer pasture. Extending across a low basin and up over the top of the Old Man Range, Earnscleugh, Campbell says, is "a very well balanced property," wonderful country for fine-wool Merinos.

Or it would be, except for the rabbits. When he arrived there were only patches of infestation, but soon they took over all the lower range, and then they crept up the slopes. By 1989 Campbell had ten rabbits to the acre even at 4500 feet. His carrying capacity was down from 21,000 units (ewes) to 13,000, despite heavy sowing and fertilization.

Two things were making this happen. First, the government withdrew funding for pest control. Second, poison campaigns became ineffective, because the rabbits had become neophobic.

Now this is interesting. By the 1980s the standard method of rabbit control was poisoning with 1080, a pesticide that is supposed to be utterly odorless and tasteless. For years it worked wonderfully, but then kill rates declined. Zoologists now agree that what happened was a sort of high-speed evolution. Every year the unwary rabbits were killed out, leaving those that were not necessarily more intelligent, but more shy. Some people say the rabbits are bait-shy, but that's only part of it. They're shy of anything unfamiliar to them, which is what "neophobia" means. The zoologists studying this put golf balls out in the pastures, and the rabbits were shy of them.

So the rabbit problem at Earnscleugh, as Campbell puts it, "came unstuck." The station is eligible for assistance under the current Rabbit Land Management Program, and its five-year plan calls for spending $2.1 million to control rabbits. Millions already have been spent on rabbit-proof fencing and on killing by night shooting from ATVs, burrow gassing, trapping, and dogging. They even tried shooting from helicopters, but that may have been just showing off.

All of which makes Earnscleugh famous for a third reason: as a money pit.

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