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.