On the trail: a day with the Capture team
PFW Field Operators in the bush around Breaker BayWho you gonna call? Our Capture team are on the frontline responding to sightings of rats in areas where they shouldn’t be. We spent the day with them to learn more.
Ears to the ground. Cameras watching. A keen doggy nose. As we make more of the city predator free, our team is always ready to respond to rats that sneak into areas we’ve cleared. When we detect a rat, it’s over to the Capture team.
Areas with no (or little) evidence of rats, stoats, weasels or possums – currently Miramar Peninsula, Lyall Bay, Rongotai and Kilbirnie – are in our ‘biosecurity phase’. We rely on the community to report sightings (and droppings and chewings) to our 0800 NO RATS number or online. We also install a dense network of monitoring equipment including cameras and chew cards.
Responding to a sighting
Say cheese. A rat is spotted on our of our monitoring cameras.One of our cameras spotted a rat in the hills above Breaker Bay so our Communications Lead David went out with our field operators on a wet and wintery day. We have one camera every 5 hectares on the Peninsula and the community also reports signs of rats. After this sighting our team activated traps in a 150m buffer around the camera, which added another three bait stations or traps in each direction. We also sent in Rapu the rat dog and handler Sally for a closer smell.
The three field operators – Sophie, Anna and Blake – split up and knocked on doors to check stations in the backyards of Wellingtonians. After installing fresh bait and setting traps, we met up at the ute. Sophie had found a dead female rat in a trap. However the camera had seen a male in the area… a potentially explosive mix. The team talked about next steps. Understanding the urgency and the need for more information, Sophie pulled down the tailgate of the ute for a quick roadside rat dissection. We crowded around and found that the rat was pregnant but hadn’t given birth. The Capture team and our biosecurity monitoring did the job.
Checking the bait stations in the area indicated a rat had eaten toxin but our dissection showed that this female had not. The team thought it was most likely the male who ate the bait but we wanted to make sure it was caught. We set out a different type of bait and installed tasty wax tags – a rat in the area would chew on the wax and we would be able to identify it by the distinct teeth marks left behind. These alternatives help us detect rats that are trap- or bait-shy.
Driven by data
Investigating a rat caught in Breaker Bay
While Wellington is our capital city, PFW covers some fairly remote places. The team dealt with patchy reception but sent the catch report to HQ, where the technical team looked at our network of traps and bait stations. An updated map then pinged back to us in the field on the Trap.NZ app, setting the agenda for the afternoon.
The sun had come out and we drove around to Strathmore, added fresh bait and reset some traps. In biosecurity areas, we rely more on monitoring (with cameras and community reports) than on weekly trap checks. The traps and bait stations though are kept ready to come back ‘online’ if needed. We’ll check these in a week’s time to see if a rat is still lurking around.
We’re always watching
Can we still call these areas ‘predator free’? Absolutely. We know rats or stoats can slip back in and we have a proven system to detect and remove them. No one is looking harder than us. Wellingtonians also fully support having a predator free city and their reports are essential. We are confident there are no rats in biosecurity areas and when we occasionally find one has snuck in, the Capture team swoops in to take care of it.
Posted: 14 August 2024