A couple of months ago, I was out doing some driveway maintenance when Richard and a local contractor noticed a kākā in our neighbour’s tōtara tree. Over the course of the morning, half the neighbourhood got to witness the appearance of a very rare thing.

We’d never seen a kākā on the subdivision, and it seemed neither had anyone else. I knew my Dad would ‘get it’, so I fired him an email with a photo attached.

He replied with this:

A war with too many fronts

There’s a lot of pests in our bush. Pigs, possums, wasps, Taiwan cherry trees, and more. It’s a challenge to make progress in that war when we’re fighting on so many fronts.

Maybe if we only focussed on the pests it would be one thing. But even a small farm is a never-ending to-do list; we both have off-farm jobs; sometimes the weather means it’s dangerous to be in certain parts of our property; and there’s only 24 hours in a day.

Over the years, Richard and Roxy have helped to keep the possum population down. We’ve built a relationship with a local pig hunter who’s made a huge dent there too. We do our best with both the paper and Vespula wasps.

My major activity on any trip into the bush is pulling out cherry and privet seedlings. We’ve planted native trees—as have our neighbours. There are small efforts going on all over the place which collectively have had an observable effect on the ecosystem. Undergrowth is thicker; bird-life is getting closer, and more diverse.

But we knew we weren’t pulling our weight with the rodents.

Pest control is complicated by the presence of kiwi, which mean we have to be careful about which traps we use, and where we put them. It’s not insurmountable, but the idea of fiddling with boxes and intimidating traps didn’t fill me with joy.

Talking to our council, we don’t have enough land for a single effort. We’d need to get the neighbours together before they’d be willing to support a poison effort. That might still be something we look at, but getting 8 property owners to agree to one course of action can be… a lot.

So until now, rodents have sat in the ‘too hard’ basket, and we’ve attacked the pest burden from other fronts.

Fandangled rat traps

Every so often Instagram will show me ads for pest control products. And one company—Enviro Tools—caught my eye because their traps solved a bunch of the ‘ick’ I was feeling about the idea.

They can be placed in trees, away from probing kiwi bills. They’re easy to re-set and dispose of catch. They can be moved. They’re small and light, and they pose no risk to non-rodent species.

With the presence of the kākā fresh on my mind alongside my father’s words, I decided to pull the trigger and order 6 “D-Rat Pro” multi-rodent traps. These traps can be set to catch mice as well as rats.

I felt like setting up a little circuit to walk, and placing these traps on it would be achievable. We’d be able to monitor via the trail camera, and we could easily move them and adjust our paths over time.

The traps arrived quickly. I ordered them on a Friday and they’d arrived by Monday. I was really impressed to see that as well as the 6 traps I ordered, I also got a trap-clearing tool, trapping instructions, and a wee jar of peanut butter.

Each trap comes with a releasable zip tie as well as a jig to attach them to larger trees or posts. Everything we needed to get going was in the box.

Initially, Richard was almost more excited about them than I was. He was clearly itching to go catch some rats. So we decided to split them—three traps each—and have a little competition. We numbered the traps: K1, K2, and K3 for me; and R1, R2, and R3 for Richard.

The set up

We each claimed a section of bush to trap in, and I added a jar of Pam’s Extra Crunchy peanut butter to the groceries.

I began by reading the instructions, and placed my traps generally in line with the recommendations.

I placed them in small bushes, and attempted to line them up with the setting sun. Originally, they went in about 20m from each other, and I put a few dabs of peanut butter on the trunks of the trees to encourage the rats to eat the tasty yum stuff safely before the jaws snapped shut.

Despite my hints that he should maybe read the instructions, Richard headed out full of enthusiasm without bothering. He placed all three in the tree where we’d seen the kākā, on our neighbour’s property. He also trained the trail cam on one of them.

Game over

A couple of my traps started catching quickly. One got 5 rats in a row. I shot out ahead in the competition, and I guess there’s nothing quite as demoralising as an opponent who immediately starts smashing you.

Richard had a possum problem. Each night after he baited the trap, they’d come along to set off the trap and eat the bait.

He shot three possums out of the tree but… they kept coming, and I kept coming home full of glee about another rat.

Within a couple of weeks he’d pretty much given up. I was feeling enthusiastic and keen to extend my trap network. So Richard bought the camera and traps home.

I grabbed them and added them to my little trail.

A serious upgrade

By this point, I’d listed my traps on the Trap.NZ app and was making a report each time I checked in on them. And my father had offered us a secondhand AT220 possum trap.

This is a battery-operated, self-resetting possum (and rat) kill trap. It can take out multiple possums every night for months on end without any need for maintenance, rebaiting, or re-setting. You can get them with additional features, and it had been well-used, but it was like going from a unicycle to a late-model second-hand car.

We agreed on a place for it—a large tōtara covered in possum scratches, at the cross-roads of a couple of paths, and approximately in the center of the bush area I was working in. Before we even received the trap, we set up the camera to record the goings-on in that position.

After the trap arrived, I gave it a little clean, set up the accompanying app on my phone, and then we placed it on the tree.

Watching and waiting

To begin with, we didn’t turn the trap on, we just watched.

Then I turned the trap on for long enough to dispense some bait, and turned it off again to watch a little longer.

There’s nothing wrong with training pests that a trap is harmless. There’s a word for it—pre-baiting. Possums are smart creatures. They can be curious, or wary of new things. They watch what happens. Lulling them into a false sense of security can help increase your catch.

Plus it’s taking me a while to get everything ready to go. Almost every time I forget something—the right drill bit, the instruction book. In a bit of a comedy of errors, it’s just taking a bit longer than planned.

But all going well, it should be turned on next week.

Still fighting

I’ve moved my rat traps a couple of times since they were initially installed. I’m still figuring things out. As my range extends, I keep finding Taiwan cherry and privet seedlings, so I’m pulling them out as I go.

Sometimes I take my mini-chainsaw and use it to cut down the larger ones. Other times I just take my secateurs and remove rogue branches off the track. I bought a spool of rope to help make some of the slopes a bit safer to navigate.

Since I began setting the traps, we’ve caught 7 rats and 6 mice. Plus the three possums Richard shot.

After we picked up the pigs on the camera, we got in touch with our pig hunter friend who was out chasing them off the next morning.

Soon we’ll be heading into summer and I’ll be thinking about our next Vespex operation. Every little battle counts.

Progress might not be linear, but it is cumulative.