On Tuesday 30th June Alex, Blake, Grace and Mrs Chissell went trapping with Barry and Barbara from the Aongatete Forest Restoration Trust.
We wanted to learn how to set traps.
Before we went into the bush Barry taught us how to use the stoat trap.
Barry has set up a trapping line just for our school. There are 11 stations and they are approximately 200 m apart. On this trapping line they have set up live kill traps for possums and stoats.
The first station is called the graveyard. There was nothing in the two traps.
At the second station we found a dead male possum. Barry showed us the claws a
nd teeth of the possum. We learnt how to reset the traps and how to attract the possums with flour and aniseed.
It was hard to reset the traps because the mechanisms are hard and a bit rusty.
We discovered 2 possums, 1 mouse and 1 rat.
The entire trapping line took us 3 hours to walk but there was lots of talking and in the future it should take us two hours.
Barbara also asked us to keep track of the birds we heard and saw.
We saw 1 woodpigeon and we heard lots of fantail, a robin, tui, grey warbler and a rifleman.
It was really awesome to go out with Barry and Barbara and we can wait to do it again.
Leave a Reply