McKenzie Country: Sound Lure Results August 2020

We've recently had our first results from our first external deployment of the Sound Lure, which has taken place in the McKenzie Country, in the South Island of New Zealand.   

This unit has been deployed as part of a trap line with a DOC 250 trap, and the sound lure placed inside of the trap.    

The lure has been monitored with a camera to record what animals have interacted with the lure.   

We would like to thank Peter Doyle from the University of Otago who has been responsible for this deployment.

The target animal for this deployment was rats or mustelids, with a sound profile that we have been experimenting with to target these animals.  We have used the daily profile with a single sound every five minutes, switching to a night time profile playing every minute.  The sounds were a mix of stoat noise, chick and distressed rabbit.   

During the three week deployment there were interactions with hares (as shown in the photographs) a feral cats and numerous interactions with mice.    There were a total of 190 activations of the camera focussed on the sound lure trap.   

There have been no activations by either of the key target species that we were targetting with the sound lure during the time that it was deployed.   We are continually working with partners around New Zealand to test the lures, test the effectiveness and look at ways to improve the effectiveness of the lure.

Our current score that we can attribute to the lure remains the stoat that was caught within forty eight hours of the first New Plymouth Airport deployment.   We have recently added to our trap deployments nationally by having units in the West Coast of the South Island, Mt Taranaki on the DOC Stoat network as well as our Airport Deployment.   

Our first intent is to ensure that the technology is able to last in the environment and follow this up be experimenting with sounds and bait.

We are pleased that the unit has managed to spend three week in an environment that has tested it to the limits of its capabilities and while we are a little dissapointed not to have had activations from our target animals we are continue to move forward with the project and refine its deployment.