Volunteer Pest Control Setup and Monitoring

Over the last fifteen years Te Ngahere has setup volunteer pest lines in over 50 Auckland reserves/sites for Auckland City Council (and subsequently Auckland Council). We are still a preferred supplier for this work. Te Ngahere assist volunteers to set up pest control traps and monitoring equipment in a number of reserves owned by Auckland Council. Our staff work closely with the volunteers to set up and install the appropriate traps and monitoring tools in locations chosen by volunteers with our assistance. We then teach the members how to monitor and service the traps so they can manage these projects independently. Reviews from volunteers demonstrate that they enjoy the independence of servicing traps and seeing results first hand. Recent sites we setup over the last few years include  Waiata Reserve, Moa Reserve, Grey Lynn Park, Hakanoa Reserve and Churchill Park and are told they are running smoothly.

Te Ngahere prepared reviews of volunteer pest control in central Auckland in 2015 and 2016. This included reviewing the location, bait take and trap catch data from the start of each project and producing maps and graphs summarising this information. This allowed patterns of bait take and trap catches to be assessed over time to evaluate the success of the programme. The data was all added to CatchIT to improve data entry standards and to enable data to be reviewed more efficiently in the future.

 Figure 1: Map of total bait take (8g blocks) at Waikowhai Park between 2004-2015

Figure 2: Map of total rat catches at Waikowhai Park between 2004-2015