Predator Free Dunedin on the Peninsula

The team from Predator Free Dunedin recently spent a day with staff and volunteers from the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group to encourage conversation, share learnings from different parts of the project and get to know one another.

At Hereweka, we heard from Mike Stuart about mobilising the community to track down individual possums as we get closer to eradicating them on the peninsula.

Marcia Dale showed us efforts to protect tītipounamu/rifleman using nest boxes. Volunteers are using a refined design to protect them from unwanted visitors (like mice and rats) during the breeding season. The first rifleman census last year saw their hard work pay off with 16 nests producing up to 64 chicks.

At Cape Saunders, we heard from Bruce Kyle, Rob Ashton and Micaela Kirby-Crowe about the network of self-resetting AT220 traps. Possum numbers are down on the northen half of the peninsula with an average Residual Trap Catch Index (RTC) of just 1 percent!