Thread: Bird Predator Control

Just to show you what can be achieved with intensive trapping around a 70 acre community reserve – approx. 200 trap sites – targeting all the animals seen on the graph below – we use approx. 160 Kness snap-e rat traps
A team of four still doing the rounds every week – just four kills in July and seven kills in August. The 2021 year to date total of 314 pests. Mainly rats but a good number of the other prolific bird killers – hogs continue to invade around the perimeter and threaten our Quail population. The cats were seen and reported by visitors and were quickly removed. One ferret in a Doc250 was quickly followed by its Mate in a nearby Doc250.
Possum paste is still our trap lure of choice – the ants and cockroaches clean it out in a couple of days but the Cinnamon odour seems to persist in the bait cup and still trips up the odd rat
One of our team checks a line around our internal roads and gets good numbers of rats from the traps – and keeps bait stations supplied with Contrac poison, about six buckets so far this year - so we kill more rats than what shows in our kill numbers
We have been doing this level of pest control for about eight years – but they always come back
Rabbits are controlled by a Council night shooting contractor – so I don’t have the figures but they are now under reasonable control
For those that think that pest control is a simple task of setting up a few traps per hectare – sorry – they are smarter than we think – I have a variety of eight traps in my one acre back yard – all our neighbors have multiple traps – they don’t like mesh on boxes, or a GN A24 – I mostly trip them up running over a Fenn6 in an open Phillproof tunnel – they keep coming up from the nearby estuary