By JAMES WOODFORD

Andrew Glover’s clandestine raid on Centennial Park would have left Elmer Fudd wide-eyed with awe.

Glover is the managing ranger with the Moss Vale Rural Lands Protection Board, and is used to complex and controversial shooting tasks. In the past he has shot wild pigs at Hurstville and deer in the Royal National park.

But the secret mission, little more than two kilometres from the CBD, that he is revealing now even though it was completed over a year ago, reads more like an underworld hit than feral animal control.

Over 13 nights accompanied by a second shooter, Steve Parker, and a driver, using subsonic .22 rifles they shot all 380 rabbits in the 186 hectare reserve without a single Sydneysider raising the alarm.

No silencers were used during the operation and the entire program was incident free. Given that the park has an annual visitation of five million people it was an extraordinary success, says Glover.

“I have made it a personal career goal to do something about the rabbits in Centennial Park,” Glover says.

At the 14th Australasian Vertebrate Pest Conference to be held in Darwin in a little over a week’s time Glover will officially announce that the area covered by the Centennial Park and Moore Park Trust is now officially free of wild rabbits.

The removal of the pests was critical because they were regarded as a major threat to the regeneration of an endangered plant community – the Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub.

It is an exceedingly rare achievement, probably unprecedented on the mainland of NSW and certainly in Sydney, to remove rabbits from such a large area.

Glover says it was possible because, ecologically, Centennial Park is effectively an island.

“There’s no adjoining land or nearby land that has a rabbit population that could re-establish itself in Centennial Park,” Glover says.

The population of rabbits in the park has been there for at least decades and possibly since colonial times. During the eradication program the team also collected a number of domesticated rabbits that had been dumped.

While domestic rabbits are still periodically left in the park, they are usually quickly collected by rangers or taken by local predators such as owls, foxes, cats and dogs.

Police were notified about the shooting program and ministerial approval obtained, but a decision was made to proceed with the project without creating panic amongst residents of the Centennial’s neighbouring suburbs.

The park was divided into four sectors and on the day before shooting took place careful reconnaissance was undertaken. No shooting was to take place outside the hours of 9.30 pm and 3am – Centennial Park’s quietest hours.

Three security guards were employed to monitor the movement of anybody within the reserve after dark and everyone involved in the program was in constant radio contact.

As many as 80 rabbits were killed in a single evening and the last rabbit was shot in January 2007.

Authorities have waited until now to announce the success of the eradication in order, Glover says, to allow people to get used to the idea of Centennial Park without rabbits.

By using sub sonic weapons the team reduced the risk of a bullet travelling too far and hitting an unintended target. The ideal range for a bullet fired from Glover’s rifle is around 50 metres – beyond that the velocity drops off dramatically. The shooters used red or amber filtered spotlights – because those two colours are known to reduce the risk of rabbits ducking for cover.

While the shooting was being undertaken at night, during the day Centennial’s rangers and then ecologist John Martin were engaged in the destruction and fumigation of warrens.

So successful was Martin’s warren removal work that by the time shooting began most of the park’s rabbits were living on the surface outside burrows.

A preliminary shooting trial was used to kill rabbits to determine the prevalence of calicivirus revealed that over 80 per cent were immune.

Initially the plan had been to use the poison pindone to kill the park’s rabbits but possible legal action from animal rights groups forced Glover and his team to look at other methods.

Detailed protocols were even developed for whether the rabbits were to be shot in the head or the body.

To determine whether the park really was rabbit free a special squad of highly trained springer spaniels was brought to the reserve.

The dogs were all working dogs, whose job was to track down rabbits, says Glover.

“They will ‘set’ at any sign of a rabbit. We hunted those dogs over all the areas that we thought could hold even a single rabbit and while those dogs uncovered a couple of burrows and warrens that we didn’t know about, they didn’t detect any signs of live rabbits.”