Sound Lures: Domestic/Feral Cats: Weekly review DS1

 As New Zealand enters stage two of the lockdown due to Corona Virus/Covid 19 it is allows us to push forward with external deployment of sound lures to locations that vary significantly from the deployment areas from the last six months.    We have some consistents from the limited deployments to this point.   We have been able with the use of tracking cameras to identify and track and produce evidence of a number of species. 

The original sound profile and project was directed towards Stoats, however since its inception and limited deployment it has become obvious that Possums and certainly Cats are interacting specifically with the lure itself.   Recent evidence would also suggest that this is the case with Rats/Mice.

A week of deployment at the deployment site one location has resulted in during the course of six nights 136 animal activations (one nights activity had to be disreguarded due to technical errors in recording).   Currently 42% of these activations (58/136) have been produced by domestic cats.     The other 58% (78/136) have been produced by rats/mice.   During the first four nights of lure deployment there was no cat activity and to that point, the sixth and seven nights were dominated by cat activity as the cats were responsible for 58 out of the 72 activations, representing a figure of 81%.   It is intended that the sound lure and camera will now be maintained at this location moving forward, with only slight subtle changes to allow a greater understanding of potential data and information being collected.

There have been no possum interactions with the sound lure in the past seven days.    There is currently a local trapping program in place immediate across the river from the lure location and there has been active shooting by a local farmer.  He has reported low number of possums (in general) at this present time.    There is also little evidence of possum activity in the vicinity (as this is near a property where the owner has had a baited live capture trap [with fruit].   This set up, without sound lure has been present for three years and resulted in the live capture of fifteen possums.   Thirteen were caught in the first six months, then there was a break of over a calendar year and two further possums were caught in February of this year (2020) within a three day time span.   The propery concerned is relatively small but has about a dozen or so mature trees.

Feral Cats are a target animal in pest removal and the sound lure would appear to show evidence of attracting cats and having interaction with them.   It should be pointed out for the domestic cats that the lure is still working on them after six months and still causing them to have direct interaction with it.   This could be explained by its random selecting of nightime tracks and loop in waiting for a track to play so that the cats are not familiar with the lure itself and continue to interact with it. 

Once we start expanding the test area for the lure, including deployment at areas throughout the Taranaki Region we can start to measure and test the effectiveness of the unit.   We are continuing to see evidence that the unit is working, drawing successfully on the battery so that is running constantly and has remained water tight since the move detailed on this blog towards the commercial box.