Official Stoat Trial by Feral Control

 This week marks a significant step in the evoultion of the sound lure project, specifically our focus on stoats.   We have an external company, Feral Control, who are South Taranaki based who are running an official trial for us, focussing on stoats.    They have deployed four DOC 200/250 with our fully updated sound lure units, which are being placed in the field.

These units are being run and assessed independently of our project, where we will be concentrating on the results and comparing the results to the rest of the traps in the location.

We also have an additional trial being run for us by the Department of Conservation (DOC) as part of the trapping network on the local Mounga.

It has taken over two years for the project to reach this point where we are confident of the set up for the electronics, the weather proofing and the reliability of the units that we are producing, which we are looking now to deploy in a number of areas.   We will be updating the posts and information as the results come hand on this blog.

You can follow the trial by using trap.nz website and searching for "sound lure trial" and locating the South Taranaki trial.

Possum Activity and Interactions (Updated) June 2021

 

We are continue to monitor activity on a variety of local farm locations involving brush tailed possums, sound lures and interactions.

It is continuing to reinforce what we have been seeing recently over time and at a variety of locations - that the sound lures are proving effective at drawing possums to an area where we have been able to deploy Timms possums traps, which are now working effectively, with a number of successful catpures.

We are seeing that the springing of a trap is not proving to be a hinderance to additional possum activirty, if anything we are seeing heightened activity when there is a deceased animal in the trap, with numerous possum interactions with the dead animal.   

We believe that there is clear evidence that the lure, picture left, is drawing animals towards the areas of the lure, they are not frightened by the lure when in its vicinity (as evidence by the lure operating while they are present) and additional animals are being brought into the area once the first animal has been caught.   We have also recently seen the arrival of the New Zealand Hawk which has been feeding on possums that have been caught in the traps.   While this is not a focus for our investigation of sound lures it is proving some striking imagery.

Hawks in New Zealand are not considered a pest bird and while they are not a focus of our investigation we have seen then several times as part of our work - and them feeding potentially on trapped possums is safer for the animals than feeding on roadkill.

We have stated recently that we are going to be producing our final set of data for this project and essentially winding it down - we will be publishing our full results as we continue both this investigation and the stoat work that we have been looking at.

Possum Activity - Recent Notable Incidents

 

The following series of incidents and images are from a local student who has been experimenting with the sound lure on their local farm and using it in conjunction with a Timms trap.   As part of this sequence a possum is visible in the first photograph on the left.  The possum investigates the area around where the trap is set and then activates the trap.

In this incident the sound lure was adjacent to the trap not inside the trap as is in some local deployed variation.

Following this successfull pest removal there was heighten actvity at the site as a number of possums interacated at the trap site.    During this time the sound lure was still operating and additional possums were arriving at the sight (this has been witnessed before at various locations locally).

There were also additional activations from two other animals of note during the monitoring timeframe.   

The first of which, shown in the third picture, is of a feral cat that was pulled into the activation area and spent time investigating the site and the location.  

While we are not targetting feral cats at this location and it is not outside of the realms of possibility that the sound lure is responsible for this visit (it has been evident on numerous locations throughout trials that feral cats are showing interest in the noise being generated from the boxes or the sound lure).

The final photograph in the series shows a visit from a Hawk to a location on the same farm where another possum has been caught using a Timms trap with a sound lure in operation.

Shortly on this site we will be running a prolonged trial involving a double blind set up to montior and measure the effectiveness of the sound lure.