Photo catch up

Woohoo! My monthly 5Gb data allocation renewed itself today so I can get back online. I dream of having a fast fibre internet connection with unlimited data but I don't think it will ever come to Rakiura. My Win10 notebook is performing very well but the upgrades for the operating system and apps seem to hog a lot of the 5Gb so I'd better get a few blogs up before I run out again! This blog is a potpourri of photos from last month...

Golden Bay with Iona Island to the right and Ulva Island in the background

Golden Bay at low tide

As usual, the weather in April was a mixed bag but still very warm...

Beau and Nonu playing on Ringaringa Beach

What better way to spend a day than walking Ringaringa Beach at low

tide - Mac looks on while Nonu and Beau play tug-of-war

Beautiful rainbows abound on showery days - this beauty appeared 

at the bottom of Hicks Road

Low cloud over Halfmoon Bay disrupting flight schedules

My bush track was mostly under water through the month; we've had quite a lot more rain compared to last year and it hasn't drained away. Gumboots are the perfect footwear for stomping around my rat traps as long as you know where the deeper puddles are, otherwise you end up with wet and muddy feet!

Muddy tracks - great for seeing kiwi footprints

April was a boomer month for catching rats - a grand total of 18 caught in the traps, 17 of which were adults. Twelve of them were kiore, five ship rats and 1 Norway rat - great to have those out of the area as we go into winter but I wish I could eradicate them rather than just keeping them at bay.

Graph of rat catches per month since Jan 2015

Nicely caught

Rattie stats

I've had rat traps set since I arrived here but didn't keep any formal records until mid-August 2012. I now have 30 traps set around the house and the bush boundary and have checked them on a daily basis since mid-October. I've set a number of traps in pairs so that I can trial different types of bait including dark chocolate (still the favourite), peanut butter, white chocolate, bacon, FeraFeed and FeraFeed Smooth.

I only had 16 traps ready when I first placed them around the boundary so when I paired them up, the traps went a bit like this:

1/4: back deck
2/3: front of house by drive
5/17: shade house/garage
6/18: totara (there's also a GoodNature possum trap on the tree)
7/19: rubbish heap
8/20: mud puddle
9/21: boundary peg
10/22: clearing, back boundary
11/23: back boundary
12/24: back boundary
13/25: north boundary peg
14/26: small hillock
15/27: bendy bit
16/28: northern boundary bush end
29/30: water tank

Not the easiest and no doubt I'll change them soon to make it easier to pinpoint rat incursions.

I had a play with Excel's pivot tables this morning and here's the results from traps that have caught at least one rat from 15 August 2012 to 21 April 2013.

The 'unknown' column come either from bodies that are too eaten/decayed to be able to sex them, or when there's definitely been a catch but the body was removed (probably by a weka). Traps 4 (back deck) and 6 (totara) have caught almost half the entire tally - trap 4 used to be the winner with 11 rats caught up till 20 January 2013 but it's only caught 1 rat since whilst trap 6 has caught 14 in the same time period.

Interestingly, trap 18 that is paired with trap 6 has never caught a rat despite me swapping positions from time to time. All traps are now baited with dark chocolate drops (Pams variety) and it still catches rats even when it's gone mouldy. The FeraFeed didn't seem to work as well and the cost was way more expensive - plus it went mouldy much faster. I'm not tempted to nibble the chocolate drops as I go round as I've swished my rat gloves around in the container!!

I need to get some tracking tunnels set up which will confirm whether there are rats present but which don't like going into the traps. Almost half of my traps haven't caught any rats: 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 30 - if the tracking tunnels don't show any rat footprints in that area then maybe I could redeploy the traps where there are higher numbers.

No possums caught yet with my GoodNature self-resetting trap - but I haven't seen any possum poo or heard possum noises so maybe there's none around. I did my second bird listening survey last Friday night; it was much quieter than the first one with one male kiwi call plus a couple of ruru 'cree' calls as it flew around.