Friends of the Blade operates under the korowai of Whakamārama Community Incorporated, and every year we write up a report for their AGM of what we’ve been up to:
AT220 Autotrap Perimeter Completed 2023-24
As of April 2023, this was the status of our effort to ring fence our trapping area with AT220 auto traps — we were short of 20 traps to complete the eastern boundary. (The green dots are AT220s; the white dotted lines are our manual traplines checked fortnightly by our volunteers.)
As of August 1, 2024, we had completed the perimeter and added a new line through the centre of our trapping area.
We learned in September 2023 that our application to BOP Regional Council for funding to purchase some more AT220 Autotraps had been successful, and these were deployed at a working bee on 24 October. The final four perimeter traps were deployed on Sunday 28 January 2024 — a milestone event for Friends of the Blade.
In early May this year, we made an AT220 line through the middle of our trapping area (you can see it crossing the trapping area in the second map image above), partly to monitor how well we’re doing on the interior lines and also to catch trap-shy vermon. We checked these traps in July after 5 weeks, and only one possum was counted. All zeros on almost every trap. This is very very rare with ATs, which nearly always have solid kill counts, and we take it as an unequivocal endorsement of our AT perimeter of death and relentless interior manual trapping.
Results
(Note that the results are not strictly comparable because of the ongoing deployment of AT220 traps during both reporting periods.)
New Kill Reporting System
We rolled out our new kill reporting system utilising a shared Google spreadsheet. So far, it’s working well and saving our data crunchers some time.
Social Events
We held several social events including a potluck dinner, an Open Day in Whaka Hall, an end of year BBQ at the Blade, as well as 2-3 monthly leadership team meetings during the year. Below, some scenes from our Open Day at Whakamārama Hall in November 2023.
Communications
On 30 October 2023, we launched a new Website (the one you’re reading this on!) at friendsoftheblade.org.nz with a new email address: contact@friendsoftheblade.org.nz
Monitoring
VEGETATION: One of the recommendations made in a Bay of Plenty Regional Council case study of our predator control efforts was to introduce a vegetation monitoring project to measure our forest health and diversity over time — specifically the impact of browsing predators (possum, deer & pigs).
Two of our botanical enthusiasts established the first phase of this project on Saturday 7 October, 2023, by identifying two sampling areas, 5 metres x 5 metres of ‘representative vegetation’ and counting and identifying all plants within between 30 cm and 200 cm tall. One area is within our trapping domain and the other comfortably outside. The results are already pleasing: The volunteers were very impressed with the overall diversity and health of vegetation within the general Friends of the Blade domain, with a large number of healthy seedlings visible throughout.
BATS: For a month over Xmas-New Year, (2023-4) we deployed two bat monitors in our area. Analysis of the results show long-tailed bat (pekapeka) presence at one of the locations, on the edge of the wetland. These monitors cannot detect populations, only presence or absence. This was very welcome news. Given the presence of both pekapeka and fernbird/mātātā around the wetland, we are increasing trap density in that area.
BIRDS: Bird monitoring continued regularly up at the Blade with good results.
BLACK TRAKKA: This was done in April 2023, and again in July this year. (We missed the April round due to volunteer shortages and other issues.) In the July 2024 monitoring the tunnels were checked after one night and again after a week on 10 lines. Overnight there was only mouse activity on one card, line 5 (that’s down to 2% rodent activity). After a week, there was a bit more in the same vicinity on line 5 and 6. And also after a week rat prints on one card on line 13. That’s 10%. Great results. Here’s a link to an awesome page from Gotcha traps on how to ID tracks on the Trakka cards.
Health and Safety Nomination
Anna from BOPRC nominated Friends of the Blade for the New Zealand Workplace Health & Safety Awards for 2024. The nomination cited our Volunteer Handbook, Incident Report Forms, Buddy Forms, and the check-in/check-out roster we use on our trapping days (you can access all of those resources at our Volunteer Resources Page). We didn’t win, but the nomination was great, coming after praise from BOPRC for our Volunteer Handbook.
Volunteers
Local Community: On Thursday 21 March, 2024, 13 volunteers from local offices of the engineering company Vitruvius turned out to tackle some of the maintenance work that we never seem to get on top of. Images from the Virtruvius working bee.
Friends of the Blade: Several of our volunteers retired or left for other reasons but in the last part of 2023 and first half of 2024 we recruited enough new volunteers to almost have all our lines covered. And this includes moving some of our regulars off traplines onto AutoTrap lines. Most volunteers come to us via our listing on SEEKVolunteer, but also via referrals (friends of Friends, our Bay Conservation Alliance page) and the contact page on this Website.
Friends of the Blade 