In July, a community information session in Maori Hill saw 20 people come along to find out how they can get involved with backyard trapping. Maori Hill is one of three City Sanctuary pilot suburbs where 1 in 10 households can host a backyard trap to protect native wildlife. Over the coming weeks, the team is launching a survey to find out how people in the community see predator control fitting into their daily lives. Traps will be available from mid-September so if you live in Maori Hill, visit the City Sanctuary website to find out how you can get involved.   

City Sanctuary also celebrated the launch of Open Valley Urban Ecosanctuary’s new Backyard Ecosanctuaries programme by co-hosting a backyard trapping workshop. If you live in the wider Lindsay Creek catchment (Opoho, North East Valley, Dalmore, Pine Hill, Liberton and Normanby) you can sign up to host a backyard trap on the Valley Project website.

There has been plenty of interest from communities to do predator control in City Sanctuary’s ten priority reserves. Community-led monitoring has started at Dalmore Reserve, Ross Creek Reserve and in the Town Belt. In the next few weeks, City Sanctuary will begin wax-tag monitoring across priority reserves to get baseline data before installing a brand new network of traps in Spring.

Finally, the team has created a “trap map” for people who are already doing backyard predator control to register their traps and share information about what they’re catching. This helps the City Sanctuary team keep track of who is helping to achieve our collective goal of achieving a Predator Free Dunedin!