OK, this photo doesn't have much to do with the subject, except that it's Wintery.After 2 meetings with DOC’s pest control experts they have recommended that Bluff Hill Motupohue Environment Trust take a ‘winter break’ from Rat Poisoning. After much discussion we decided to go with this recommendation.
A winter break means that we do not put any rat poison out from now until possibly September.
The main objective of the Trust is… “To see native flora and fauna thriving not just surviving on Bluff Hill/ Motupohue”. Our pest control is doing this. The 90 mustelid traps went out in Nov 2008, they’ve knocked off 52 weasels, 36 stoats and 449 rats over the whole hill. Possum trapping and rat poisoning began in July 2009 and has slowly expanded to cover 90ha with 140 possum traps and 270 rat poison stations, we have killed almost 500 possums and put out more than half a tonne of rat poison, killing an untold amount of rats. We know there are heaps more birds out there and the anecdotal evidence is finally reflected by Lloyd Esler’s regular bird call count monitoring. The operation we run is pest control, not eradication, as eradication is almost impossible. This means that pests are controlled primarily in order to protect our birds.
When we started this operation I had the naïve view that we would simply cut tracks, lay down poison, kill the rats, then the birds would flourish and we would keep increasing our territory and chasing the rats out of town with pitchforks. I’ve since accepted that the sheer volume of rats in the environment means that they will always be around and constantly reinvading our block. It won’t be like a war with a frontline that we can raise a flag on, the rat control is endless so I can see why the thought of having a winter break from rat poisoning may feel like we’re walking away and giving territory to the enemy. The enemy will always be present and invading unless we get a bloody big fence, some 1080 and a big stick. What DOC is suggesting we have to do is work smarter, beat them at their own game.
Rats eat birds when they are eggs, chicks, fledglings and when they are parents protecting the nests; this is in Spring and Summer, not Winter. We don’t need to be killing rats in Winter because the birds are adults. In order to protect the parents and vulnerable young we need to hammer the rats in Spring and Summer.
Research shows that rats, like birds, have a strongly seasonal breeding pattern, breeding in Spring & Summer, not Winter. So any increase in rat numbers in our current block over the Winter break will likely be due to invasion, not the breeding of the resident ones. The extensive scientific research that underpins this is many year’s study of thousands of trapped rats which found that in Winter and Autumn the volume of male rats’ scrotums was significantly smaller and found that pregnant or lactating females were only trapped between mid September and April (Spring-Summer), they were occasionally trapped in Winter following heavy fruit fall.
So come September we plan to blast the rats out of the block with what’s known as a ‘pulse’ of a single dose poison recommended by DOC, the poison will thwack the population back before the birds breed and before the rats breed. We then follow up the pulse by using our current poison regime to manage the rat population for the rest of Spring & Summer.
Remember that during the Winter break we will be monitoring the rodent tracking tunnels closely and more regularly, -if you’re keen to help with this let us know. Possum and mustelid trapping will go on as normal. Track cutting and maintenance will kick into action so that when we start poisoning again we can cover an even bigger area. More rat tunnels need to be made. There will be a few intrepid beach clean ups. There is also plenty of paperwork to do to get next season’s poison, new possum traps and more tunnels.
Questions…
So has all the work we’ve done gone to waste? Hell no. There are heaps of birds, this is because more have survived possibly than ever before because we have controlled the predators at the crucial times in their breeding cycle plus more. Next summer there will be heaps and heaps of birds.
Isn’t it better to kill all the rats off in Winter so they don’t breed in Summer? –It’s inefficient, the amount of effort put in for the return isn’t worth it. We will never kill them all off. We are currently feeding a lot of mice and could possibly carry them through the Winter in large numbers.
Are the high mice numbers due to us taking out the rats? –Rats do hassle mice. But it is widely known that rodent population numbers are controlled by food availability rather than by predators. Tracking tunnel data shows mice to be at median 85% within our block and median 15% outside the block, -ie. there’s five times as many mice inside the block than out of it.
Why not put a perimeter of traps or tunnels with poison around our boundary to stop invasion during the break? There’s no point, it doesn’t matter if they invade, the pulse will deal to them in Spring. That said, if the tracking tunnels show that rat numbers are increasing at an alarming rate, possibly to uncontrollable levels, we will start poisoning again. If we don’t do this winter break thing we will never know how long it takes for rat numbers to build up in our block.
What about protecting the insects, lizards and seeds? This kind of protection involves all year round rat control -poison in the environment 24/7. To completely protect these things we would need mouse control, requiring a different kind of poison and 6 times the amount of poison stations than we currently have in the block. We have a very healthy forest due to the absence of pigs, deer and goats. We have done awesomely well for the forest by removing close to 500 possums. Yes insects and lizards might get eaten, but their population size, due to our pest control, will be building up, like the birds, a few may be collateral damage while we learn about the best way to efficiently control rats in the block.
Why not just carry on poisoning as normal during winter? Why not just feed your family Branflakes every day for 2 ½ years? Likely they would cease to enjoy the non-constipating cereal and even refuse to eat it. So yes poison shyness and resistance is a very real threat, not to mention the amount of Diphacinone poison building up unnecessarily in the environment. The rats that are shy to poison are the smart ones who will survive and breed up a generation, and eventually a population, of rats who will not go near the poison, this could cause chaos and calamity. These smarty pants rats need a poached egg one morning instead of Branflakes to catch them out, which is exactly what a pulse of another poison will do. Resistance happens over time when rats do not receive the full dose required to kill them and therefore can become resistant to the poison, much like an old alcoholic the body’s systems learn to cope with the poison and can handle more and more over time.
If you have any queries or suggestions about any of this stuff, talk to us about it, if you don’t tell us we won’t know...
The main objective of the Trust is… “To see native flora and fauna thriving not just surviving on Bluff Hill/ Motupohue”. Our pest control is doing this. The 90 mustelid traps went out in Nov 2008, they’ve knocked off 52 weasels, 36 stoats and 449 rats over the whole hill. Possum trapping and rat poisoning began in July 2009 and has slowly expanded to cover 90ha with 140 possum traps and 270 rat poison stations, we have killed almost 500 possums and put out more than half a tonne of rat poison, killing an untold amount of rats. We know there are heaps more birds out there and the anecdotal evidence is finally reflected by Lloyd Esler’s regular bird call count monitoring. The operation we run is pest control, not eradication, as eradication is almost impossible. This means that pests are controlled primarily in order to protect our birds.
When we started this operation I had the naïve view that we would simply cut tracks, lay down poison, kill the rats, then the birds would flourish and we would keep increasing our territory and chasing the rats out of town with pitchforks. I’ve since accepted that the sheer volume of rats in the environment means that they will always be around and constantly reinvading our block. It won’t be like a war with a frontline that we can raise a flag on, the rat control is endless so I can see why the thought of having a winter break from rat poisoning may feel like we’re walking away and giving territory to the enemy. The enemy will always be present and invading unless we get a bloody big fence, some 1080 and a big stick. What DOC is suggesting we have to do is work smarter, beat them at their own game.
Rats eat birds when they are eggs, chicks, fledglings and when they are parents protecting the nests; this is in Spring and Summer, not Winter. We don’t need to be killing rats in Winter because the birds are adults. In order to protect the parents and vulnerable young we need to hammer the rats in Spring and Summer.
Research shows that rats, like birds, have a strongly seasonal breeding pattern, breeding in Spring & Summer, not Winter. So any increase in rat numbers in our current block over the Winter break will likely be due to invasion, not the breeding of the resident ones. The extensive scientific research that underpins this is many year’s study of thousands of trapped rats which found that in Winter and Autumn the volume of male rats’ scrotums was significantly smaller and found that pregnant or lactating females were only trapped between mid September and April (Spring-Summer), they were occasionally trapped in Winter following heavy fruit fall.
So come September we plan to blast the rats out of the block with what’s known as a ‘pulse’ of a single dose poison recommended by DOC, the poison will thwack the population back before the birds breed and before the rats breed. We then follow up the pulse by using our current poison regime to manage the rat population for the rest of Spring & Summer.
Remember that during the Winter break we will be monitoring the rodent tracking tunnels closely and more regularly, -if you’re keen to help with this let us know. Possum and mustelid trapping will go on as normal. Track cutting and maintenance will kick into action so that when we start poisoning again we can cover an even bigger area. More rat tunnels need to be made. There will be a few intrepid beach clean ups. There is also plenty of paperwork to do to get next season’s poison, new possum traps and more tunnels.
Questions…
So has all the work we’ve done gone to waste? Hell no. There are heaps of birds, this is because more have survived possibly than ever before because we have controlled the predators at the crucial times in their breeding cycle plus more. Next summer there will be heaps and heaps of birds.
Isn’t it better to kill all the rats off in Winter so they don’t breed in Summer? –It’s inefficient, the amount of effort put in for the return isn’t worth it. We will never kill them all off. We are currently feeding a lot of mice and could possibly carry them through the Winter in large numbers.
Are the high mice numbers due to us taking out the rats? –Rats do hassle mice. But it is widely known that rodent population numbers are controlled by food availability rather than by predators. Tracking tunnel data shows mice to be at median 85% within our block and median 15% outside the block, -ie. there’s five times as many mice inside the block than out of it.
Why not put a perimeter of traps or tunnels with poison around our boundary to stop invasion during the break? There’s no point, it doesn’t matter if they invade, the pulse will deal to them in Spring. That said, if the tracking tunnels show that rat numbers are increasing at an alarming rate, possibly to uncontrollable levels, we will start poisoning again. If we don’t do this winter break thing we will never know how long it takes for rat numbers to build up in our block.
What about protecting the insects, lizards and seeds? This kind of protection involves all year round rat control -poison in the environment 24/7. To completely protect these things we would need mouse control, requiring a different kind of poison and 6 times the amount of poison stations than we currently have in the block. We have a very healthy forest due to the absence of pigs, deer and goats. We have done awesomely well for the forest by removing close to 500 possums. Yes insects and lizards might get eaten, but their population size, due to our pest control, will be building up, like the birds, a few may be collateral damage while we learn about the best way to efficiently control rats in the block.
Why not just carry on poisoning as normal during winter? Why not just feed your family Branflakes every day for 2 ½ years? Likely they would cease to enjoy the non-constipating cereal and even refuse to eat it. So yes poison shyness and resistance is a very real threat, not to mention the amount of Diphacinone poison building up unnecessarily in the environment. The rats that are shy to poison are the smart ones who will survive and breed up a generation, and eventually a population, of rats who will not go near the poison, this could cause chaos and calamity. These smarty pants rats need a poached egg one morning instead of Branflakes to catch them out, which is exactly what a pulse of another poison will do. Resistance happens over time when rats do not receive the full dose required to kill them and therefore can become resistant to the poison, much like an old alcoholic the body’s systems learn to cope with the poison and can handle more and more over time.
If you have any queries or suggestions about any of this stuff, talk to us about it, if you don’t tell us we won’t know...
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