A Visit to St Teresa's School

It's not often that members of Bluff Hill Motupohue Environment Trust are seen cuddling rats. Little gingery 'Willard' the pet rat, at St Teresa's is a bit special. He watched the trap demonstrations, listened to the talk about rodent monitoring and the pulse of cholecalciferol aimed at his relatives, inspected the abandoned bird's nest, looked over the maps and totally agreed that ferrets are fearsome predators before weeing on Mitch's upper thigh region and scuttling away underneath the bookshelf.
The students at St Teresa's are excited about their current inquiry into pests, weeds, native animals and plants on Bluff Hill. They were motivated by the ugliness of the north facing side of Bluff Hill after the pine trees were logged. The students hope to set up pest monitoring and a small trapping project and plant lots of native trees to make a healthy and attractive habitat for native animals. Awesome stuff. Maybe Willard will be allowed to visit in one of those big plastic balls.