DoC on track of Norwegian kereru killers

The five Norwegian tourists posted clips of their shooting spree on YouTube.

Wildlife enforcement officials have identified the Norwegians suspected of having been involved in slaughtering protected native kereru in New Zealand.

"We have the full names and return travel details of all five persons related to the video clips," said Department of Conservation senior communications adviser Reuben Williams.

DoC is pursuing the five through an international treaty, but has not said what action it might try to take against them.

The five, who are understood to all have lived or worked at some point in the Arctic Norwegian town of Tromso, posted a clip on YouTube last week of them shooting New Zealand wildlife over five weeks during summer.

But their clip of a rifleman shooting at a kereru, the bird falling from a tree, and film of one of the tourists holding two dead, bloody birds took only three days to attract more than 400 scathing comments.

The kereru is an absolutely protected species under the Wildlife Act and Mr Williams said yesterday that the department was "outraged at the content of the video".

The maximum penalty for killing such protected wildlife is a $100,000 fine and up to a year in jail.

The video also showed the tourists shooting a paradise shelduck with a rifle. Paradise ducks can be legally hunted only with a licence and a shotgun during the shooting season starting in May. Illegal hunting can bring a fine of up to $5000.

But the Norwegian penal code is harsher. It provides for up to six years' jail for people convicted of wilfully or through gross negligence reducing a natural population of protected wildlife, in Norway or overseas.

DoC will be initially pursuing the Norwegians through an international treaty Cites (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) to which both countries are signatories.

"We will be in contact with the Norwegian authorities," said Mr Williams.

"No formal decisions have been made at this time as to what form the impending legal action will take."

Hans Tore Hoviskeland, a senior public prosecutor at the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (Okokrim), told the nation's largest newspaper, Aftenposten, that if the men had shot protected animals in New Zealand, "it is very regrettable".

"The way I see it, they can also be prosecuted in criminal proceedings in Norway," he said. "We will do further research to see what has happened."

But another prosecutor at Okokrim, Aud Slettemoen, said the agency had not yet had any request from the authorities in New Zealand, or any advice that the kereru were an endangered or protected species.

An angling website, Fluefiske.net, reported the group of fly fishermen visited the North and South Islands and said one of them told it: "I have been completely bitten by this country." The man said he and his friends were planning to return for another, longer trip.

- NZPA