March 2018

Kiwi Acoustic Recorders

In late March DOC staff and FOR volunteers placed nine acoustic recorders in the Rotoiti Nature Recovery Park. The data from the recorders will increase our knowledge of the Great Spotted Kiwi population and distribution.  The recorders were collected on 26 March and we move on to analysing the data. If you would like to help with this please contact us.

We had a smooth ride up the lake in the water taxi - an upgrade from the DOC boat due to rough water.  

Trap Line Checking - Russell Chilton  

I cleared the Rainbow line over the last two days (26,27 March) but forgot the defence boys were playing war games at Dip Flat. They were on full alert, barb wire, machine guns mounted, the full nine yards, so I thought I'd better make a tactical retreat, hence I missed DF 2 & 3. Catches were 1 stoat, 5 hedgehogs, 2 possums, 15 rats  

Stoat Trapping - preliminary results. Peter Hale

The graph shows results from the first year of our unofficial trial on the Rainbow Rd. This second trial is comparing the efficiency of the un-baited run-through trap tunnels with the DOC 250 trap boxes baited with Erayz for killing stoats. 

The trial was not started until our mouse excluders (see www.friendsofrotoiti.co.nz) were fitted to the 76  DOC 250 trap boxes in the trial as bait integrity is critical, our thanks go to Russell Chilton for this huge task. We are progressively fitting the excluders to all our trap boxes and DOC staff are doing the same to their 600+ boxes.

The positions of the traps were swapped in November 2017 to rule out that variable