Discover who’s visiting your backyard!
Tracker Tuesdays
Not every conservation hero carries a trap! Tracker Tuesdays is a fun way to discover what wildlife and predator species are living in your neighbourhood and help guide Predator Free Cromwell's trapping efforts.
Monitoring tells us what's there before we trap, and what's there afterwards. It helps us place the right trap in the right place and measure how successful our collective efforts are over time.
Tracking Tunnels
Tracking tunnels use a food lure to encourage animals to walk across an inked tracking card, leaving footprints behind. They're one of the best tools for detecting rats, mice and mustelids, and can even reveal the presence of lizards and large insects.
Predator Free Cromwell has made a small number of tracking tunnels available through the community trap library, or you can buy your own.
Many of our Tracker Tuesday participants make their own tracking tunnels - it’s a fun activity for all ages, and very easy to do. We’ve got a guide to making your own tracking tunnel in our How To section here.
Place two or three along fence lines, near food sources, or anywhere you think predators might be present. DoC has a fantastic guide to Monitoring using Tracking Tunnels here.
Not sure whose footprints you’ve found? The Department of Conservation also has an excellent Footprint Identification Guide on their website here.
Trail Cameras
Motion-activated trail cameras capture photos and videos of animals visiting your garden, reserve or lifestyle block—day and night. They're ideal for identifying larger predators such as possums, hedgehogs, cats and mustelids - although rats and mice are also caught on camera - as well as recording native birds and other wildlife. We currently have one community camera available to borrow and are seeking sponsorship to purchase a second for our community library.
Chew Cards
Chew cards are basically pieces of card baited with a non-toxic lure that is attractive to predators. Different species leave distinctive bite marks, making these a simple and effective way to detect rats, mice stoats, hedgehogs and possums before you decide what trap to use and where to place it.
Chew cards are also a useful way of identifying where predators are on your property and where to place your traps or bait stations.
Chew cards are an important part of monitoring the effectiveness of our district-wide predator control programme.
You can buy chew card, pre-loaded with non-toxic lure, or they are very easy to make yourself with a bit of corflute from an old sign, or corrugated card. We have instructions for making DIY chew cards in our How To library here.
Our friends at Predator Free Wellington have a good guide to identifying the different bite marks on their website here.
Join Tracker Tuesdays
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Track
Put your tracking tunnels and/or chew cards in your backyard for 5-7 days.
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Identify
Check for prints or chew marks. Shift if needed. Use our How To guides (links above) to identify your predators.
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Let Us All Know
Take a photo and post it on Facebook with #trackertuesdays; Comment: your street; and tag us @predatorfreecromwell
If you’re not on Facebook, email your photo to predatorfreecromwell@gmail.com, or add to the project on trap.nz as an observation.
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Celebrate
We’ll post results each Tuesday. So you can enjoy the kudos of knowing you’re helping to make the Cromwell district predator free.
And don’t forget keep those tracking results coming in each week. We all want to see the progress!
QUESTIONS?
We’re here to help. Get in touch - we’re here to support you every step of the way.