A Pukerua Bay community group has received a timely financial boost to help with its efforts in trying to get rid of predators such as rats and mice.
Predator Free Pukerua Bay has received $4000 from Predator Free NZ Trust’s Backyard Communities Programme fund.
“We’re very excited to receive thefunding and feel quite honoured,” co-ordinator Nick Vincent said.
“It was great news. There are a lot of community groups out there so this is very generous of Predator Free NZ Trust and will help us to relaunch and continue to do some good work.”
The trust runs two funding rounds every year to help support neighbourhoods to control predators in their backyards.
“We’re hoping it would enable us to get 100 more traps out into the community.
“We’re going to organise a flyer drop throughout Pukerua Bay to get people’s awareness and have a meeting at Pukerua Bay School or the RSA to invite people to come along and tell them what we’ve done.”
A backyard rat trap. Photo / Supplied
And more tunnels would be built if people used a pay-it-forward approach.
“A tunnel costs about $20 to $25 because the cost of materials has gone up.
“It [pay-it-forward] lets us build another tunnel with traps in it.
“If people can’t afford it, though, we don’t make them pay.
“But with pay-it-forward it means we can get more traps out there before we run out of funding.”
So far there are about 160 backyard traps in the Pukerua Bay community, which has about 780 properties.
The long-term aim was to get a trap in every second or third house and create “a fairly tight trapping grid”.
Vincent said the traps issued to the community are “a child and pet-resistant tunnel with a rat and a mouse trap in it for them to put in the backyard”.
People were encouraged to advise the group or Trap.NZ of catches.
“We’ve had just under 2000 catches reported since we started.
“I’m sure there would have been more than that because not everybody reports.”
Rat traps and tunnels. Photo / Supplied
People who have a backyard trap could often get a free jar of peanut butter to use as bait too.
“Fix & Fogg, in Wellington, make peanut butter, but whenever they have a batch which is burnt or something, they donate it to the wider Predator Free group, and every now and again we get a 15kg pail.”
The group also looks after stoat traps for Porirua City Council, has possum traps, and partners with DoC to look after a scientific reserve that is home to Whitaker’s skinks.
“We do a range of things.”
The hit list includes rats, mice, possums, hedgehogs, stoats, and weasels.
The trapping aims to strengthen birdlife and lizard populations such as forest geckos, common skinks, or the occasional barking gecko.
“People report a lot more birdlife.
The trapping aims to strengthen birdlife such kaka. Photo / Supplied
“We’ve got a garden with various trees in it and we get grey warbler, bellbird, tui and have even had a tomtit which was quite cool.
