Chewing and Tracking at Our Place.

 

In the last few weeks the kids in Tautoru have been curious about creatures in our environment.  

Off the back of our innovations and inventions inquiry we decided to learn a bit more about the inventions that have contributed to the success of the Miramar Peninsula ‘Predator Free’ Project.  

The Miramar Peninsula Predator-Free Project was and is an initiative based in Wellington, aimed at creating a predator-free environment.  Overall, the Miramar Peninsula Predator-Free Project is part of a much bigger project that set out to restore and preserve New Zealand's unique natural environment by reducing the threat posed by non-native predators.   Mahutonga and Matariki kids participated in the early stages of this project. 

We know that this project targeted rats, stoats, and possums to protect,enhance and bring back local native wildlife. 

There has been lots of community and school involvement over the years so we decided to get involved and see what we could discover.  We wondered if we would discover anything now that we are mostly ‘predator free’.   We had lots of locations where we had seen trapping inventions out and about in our neighbourhoods.

We decided to test out some of the inventions.  We had a go at using chew cards and we put together some tracking tunnels.   While we were on our adventures we found out we knew heaps about trapping, tracking and native NZ species.  Putting out our chew cards was so exciting.   Here are some of the things we shared with each other.  

RESULTS:  

After 2 weeks , we are excited to find that we have had some visitors to our chew cards………but who and what ?  Judging by the teeth marks we think they were ‘invertebrates’ or mice.   We know they are not rats or stoats because the teeth marks are different.   That’s lucky !!!

Tracking Tunnels 

Now that we have discovered the chew cards we decided to try our hand at homemade tracking tunnels too.  We are putting these out and we will check these in the coming days and weeks to see if we can learn more about the creatures in our local environment.  However, through some good old experimenting and wondering we realised that our tracking tunnels were not going to be effective with our original placement of the bait tray at one end so we had to make some changes.   We know that the bait needs to go into the middle of the ‘inked’ section.   We will try fruit, peanut butter and cat food to see what we can attract.  

We can’t wait to see what tracks we find !!  Watch this space.