You’re catching a lot of rats. Is this a good thing or not? Maybe you are an expert rat catcher with some innate sense of where rats will be and how to attract them into a trap. Or perhaps there are just heaps of rats around.
Not being that keen on guessing games, we’d rather know. We encourage everyone to record their catches but we also want to know what is still out there. Killing 100 rats is not a huge benefit if there are still 10,000 out there.
Chew Cards If you want to see what you’ve got first, put out some chew cards. Not only do you see what’s there, you can also get an idea of which parts of your property are more likely to be an effective place to put your trap. There is lots of great information at the Predator Free NZ website, where you can also learn how to make your own chew cards.
Wax tags If you think you’ve got possums, try wax tags nailed to a tree. They’re usually left out for 3 nights then any bite marks are compared to known wax incisions such as those listed on Pest Detective.
If you think you have some possums around you, get in touch and we’ll either get some waxtags out, or lend you some traps for a few weeks from our trap tool library.
Tracking tunnels For more extensive scientific monitoring we use tracking tunnels which use an ink card to capture footprints. Urban Ark has a couple of sets of tracking tunnels which we loan out to our community groups. If you want to borrow a set, just let us know. Most authorities suggest that to give native species a chance we need to keep tracking rates below 5%. So if we put out 20 tracking tunnels for a night we are looking to get prints in only one tunnel (or none). With rats this is hard to stay on top of. Once again the Predator Free NZ website is the go to place for excellent info and for help interpreting results.