It's timely for Clayton Mitchell to highlight 1080 concerns (page 18, The Weekend Sun, July 27), with DoC eyeing up the Kaimai Range for poisoning.

Eye witness accounts of 1080 poisoning are heart-wrenching. A friend said "Our dawn chorus was so noisy with native birds that we couldn't sleep in. Four weeks after a 1080 drop, there was silence, no birds left, despite a 650m buffer to the drop-zone".

It appears 1080 is actually worse than doing nothing. It's time to scrap 1080 entirely and embrace alternatives. One ingenious idea that has been used to good effect by a possum trapper was to create a large trap with only entrances. A loud recorded possum message played all night, which translated as ‘come here, I've found the most delicious food' to all possums within earshot. Possum turn up from miles around, to be dispatched humanely in the morning.

Helicopters could be used for this type of trapping instead of dropping poison. The new Goodnature kill traps are a game changer, with 24 kills before requiring new gas canisters.

Species-specific methods have to be employed as there are unintended long-term consequences to poisoning an entire ecosystem. To understand what's at stake, please read The Quiet Forest by Dr McQueen.

T Livingston, Whakamarama (Abridged).