Kereru © James Allan
5th August 2024
The Wye Creek trapping group, through the Queenstown Climbing Club, have received funding from the Tūpiki Trust. This funding will be used towards a possum and feral cat control project in this alpine area. The Southern Lakes Sanctuary team have set up pre-monitoring using wax tags and trail cameras, which will be continued to run twice per year.
Soon we hope to have self-resetting possum and rodent traps (AT520 by NZAutotraps) available to install here. The Wye Creek crew have been working with the team at FTP Solutions, who have made a node with an AI camera that attaches to a trap. The camera includes firmware that has been trained to only activate the trap for target species (e.g. possums and rodents). Within a few milliseconds, the camera can decide if it is a target species, and whether to arm the trap or not.
They have been able to call on some help from our friends at the Kiwi Park, and had traps installed in the kea and kaka enclosures (disarmed of course) for the birds to interact with. This enabled the AI to see enough real world kea and kaka images for its machine learning. Having these self resetting traps kea safe and able to be used in hard to access alpine areas will be a game changer for the predator free mission.
The heatmap below shows the possum chew card results from the first round of wax tags at Wye Creek. As you can see there are some hot spots we can’t wait to get into with these new AT520s!
There are 85 AT220 self resetting traps in Bush Creek now, and Southern Lakes Sanctuary runs possum wax tags twice each year. Over one year, the wax tag index (% of wax tags that were chewed) has gone from 56% down to 17% which is a fantastic result, and shows the effectiveness of the AT220s. As possum numbers continue to drop, we plan to space out the traps further to cover more area. This project is generously funded by The Hills and Hill family.
In the photo below WWT Trustee and SLS team team member Phil Green analyses and records the chew marks on wax tags for these monitoring programmes.
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