October 2020

Trap Line Refurbishment - Drew Hunter

Over the last few months volunteers have been working to renew the traps up the Rainbow Valley and ski-field road.

Some of the traps have been in the field for over ten years and the walk through design was only made for the two year trial and they have deteriorated badly.

There has been great work done by Barry Thomas, along with a little help from others, to build new walk through traps and build new traps to replace the DOC 250s up the ski-field road, The whole line has been updated and should be good for 10 to 15 years.

Over the next few months we will work on updating Whisky and Speargrass lines.

News from the Rotoiti Nature Recovery Project

RNRP update Winter 2020

Double set trap trial

The data collection for the double set trap trial has now been completed and the report has been written up. This trial compared the efficiency of the run-through trap boxes and the standard best practice boxes (box set with two DOC220 traps) in trapping stoats. Data collection began in January 2019 and ended in March 2020. The key findings of the report are as follows:

• No differences in the number of stoats and weasels caught between the two trap box types.

• Significantly more rats and hedgehogs caught in the run-through boxes that in the standard boxes.

• There were 5 native non-targets caught; 4 robins and 1 bellbird. Six other birds were caught; 5 thrush and 1 blackbird. A total of 7 birds were caught in run-throughs and 4 in best practice.

• No difference in the humaneness score between the two trap box types, on average 93% were scored as humane kills.

• Best practice boxes had less sprung traps (642 BP vs. 847 RT)

• Best practice boxes have fewer potential escapes.

• There is a concern for animal welfare with a high number of sprung traps – it is unknown how many animals escaped with an injury.

• Higher catch in run-through likely due to the willingness to enter the open architecture of boxes

• Animals like hedgehogs (also birds?) may be more able to access the run-through boxes

We will be meeting with team involved in this trial to decide how much more of this work will be taking place in the RNRP.

Kea Conservation trust

The Kea Conservation Trust spent two weeks with us in August. During this time, they worked with Emma, Monty and Ricki to visit the known historic kea nest in the park. They found one kea nest with some nesting behaviour beginning and another two possible nest sites where there were kea pairs around, but no nesting had begun. DOC200 traps and sentinels were set up around each of these sites for nest protection. These sites will continue to be monitored for nesting attempts and we will continue to observe any other nests that become active.

Recording sightings of kea is a really important tool for informing population trends across the South Island. A great way for parrot loving people to help is to log all our kea sightings and encourage others to do the same. If you see or hear kea there are a few places that you can record this.

https://keadatabase.nz/ A homegrown project developed by the fantastic George Moon!

https://www.inaturalist.org/ A wider database for nature loving people out there where all birds, insects, reptiles and plants can be recorded.

Kaka

The Friends have been helping us with fortnightly checks of the five kaka with transmitters in the park. They are regularly locating all five of the birds. We will continue to monitor their movements and any dispersal out of the area. It is not looking like this will be a beech mast year and as the kaka breeding is linked to a mast, we are not predicting any nesting attempts. If the conditions change, we will begin to monitor for nesting attempts.

Tracking tunnels

June Rotoiti

Mean rat tracking per line 37% ± 4%

Mean mouse tracking per line 17% ± 3%

June Rotoroa

Mean rat tracking per line 42% ± 5%

Mean mouse tracking per line 1% ± 1%

August Rotoiti

Mean rat tracking per line 31% ± 5%

Mean mouse tracking per line 4% ± 1%

We were unable to complete the Rotoroa tracking tunnels in August due to poor weather conditions. But we feel that we have enough information from the June tracking tunnels (which were later than normal) and the extra tunnels that were completed by the Biodiversity monitoring team for the Tiakina Nga Manu operation.

Roroa/Great spotted kiwi

We will be repeating the acoustic monitoring for the roroa in the park in late November- early December. This is the beginning of the peak calling time for this species. This will provide us with a better understanding of the territories and distribution of the birds in the park in preparation of the translocation on new birds.

Cats

The Friends of Rotoiti and DOC have been involved in trapping cats at Teetotal area. Four cats have been caught. We are now doing some post operation monitoring with trail cameras to see if it shows a decrease in encounter rate.

At the beginning of September, Wayne, Drew and Butch joined the Biodiversity team to learn about the Celium remote encounter system for live capture cat traps. This system will allow us to set up more traps and in areas that we haven’t previously trapped. We will receive notifications when the traps are triggered, so will only need to visit the traps when we have captures rather than visiting every day. This will be much more efficient trapping saving money and time. We have enough to set up 20 traps but will also be able to use these on live capture pig traps. We would like to be able to trap cats on the Travers Valley flat where there is a lot of cat sign around. It is important for us to control cats in this area as the roroa move out of the RNRP further into the Travers Valley. Cats also eat a wide variety of species including lizards, insects and birds so it is important for us to remove them from the environment.

Outside the RNRP

The whole team has been working to remove pigs inside a ‘pig proof’ fence at Blair Athol Gully. This fence protects three threatened plant species and the pigs were doing a lot of damage to the vegetation inside the fence. It has been a long process, but we think we may have excluded all the pigs now.

A lot of weed control work has been happening around the Wairau, Upper Buller and in the Lower Howard. As we come into the spring and summer months, we hope to have more work undertaken in the Village to control common weeds and prevent reinvasion of these weeds into the National Park.