Rangers Report - July 2014

a24 trap and infra red camera
Winter arrived with a real thump early in July with those very high winds and rain. This made it really unsafe and difficult for the ranger team to get out on the hill for five days and created more track maintenance work than usual. Pest numbers have really dropped off over July with only 1 weasel, 4 Possums and 3 rats being caught. This really becomes an amazing result when you consider that there are in effect 9570 trap nights in the month (319 traps in the reserve at 30 nights in the month) 9570 trap nights and only 1 weasel, 4 Possums and 3 rats.

The team has now secured 10 x A24 self-resetting rodent and stoat traps on loan from NRC. These lightweight traps can make up to 24 kills on one CO2 powered canister. We will also be installing our newly purchased infra-red camera to capture footage of how rodents and stoats interact with these traps and what percentage of pests in the area are getting caught. Look out for the photos and footage on the website in the next few months.

Read the July 2014 Rangers Report (800kB pdf) for more details on this and other stories.

Rangers Report - June 2014

planting day at bream headIt’s been a great month for the ranger team with three important tasks getting the big tick. Firstly we had the pleasure of being involved in the very well attended planting days on the 8th and 15th of June. We thoroughly enjoyed working alongside the wonderful volunteers who attended the two days and it was awesome to get the support for this part of the restoration.

Another success for the month has been the completion of the all-important new bait station, trap and tracking tunnel lines in the valley up behind the Newbold property at the Ocean Beach end of the reserve. We will run tracking tunnels for the first time in this area in July and let you know what rodent numbers return, thus giving us a baseline to compare pre and
post control.

Finally, we were able to contribute a few hours to the fencing off of some of the riparian areas in the grazed farmland at between Urquharts Bay and Smugglers Cove. I really enjoyed working with Murray Jagger on this project, I learnt some neat fencing tricks but most importantly got to understand some of the history of the area and was pleased to hear his
balanced approach to farming and the environment (wish I could have spent more time with this kind and knowledgeable guy)!

Read the June 2014 Rangers Report (1MB pdf) for more details on this and other stories.