Background
Our group was proposed in 2015 to Whakamārama Community Incorporated (WCI) by Colin Hewens, who had ten years’ pest control experience with Friends of Puketoki while the Pā Kererū track was being established.
The Whakamārama community supported the project’s aim to start predator control and a successful grant application was made to Western Bay of Plenty Regional Council.
Friends of The Blade continues to operate as part of Whakamārama Community Incorporated, under an agreement with the Department of Conservation.
Volunteers
We currently have over 40 volunteers who visit all the trap lines every fortnight to record the dead pests, remove them, rebait and reset the traps. Pests targeted are possums, rats, mustelids, and feral cats that have no place in our native forests. Volunteers are also working to extend the area covered by marking out and cutting new trap lines, as volunteer numbers allow.
History
Manual Traplines
The above photo shows our manual trap-lines. We’ve since added more than 100 AT220 Traps (see photo at the bottom of the page). The organisation is sometimes confusing, but is the result of a steady expansion of the lines, starting, of course, with Line 1, expanding to the west, and later to the east. Our manual traplines are primarily composed of Victor rat traps in bird-proof boxes, Warrior tree-mounted possums traps, DOC 200 and 250 mustelid traps, as well as a few Sentinel possum traps and Goodnature A12s and A24s. The dates of establishment of all 23 lines are as follows:
Lines 1-4: 11 September 2016
Lines 5-6: 23 September 2016
Line 7: 30 September 2016
Line 8: 4 November 2016
Line 9: 24 March 2017
Line 10: 8 December 2017
Line 11: 2 February 2018
Line 12: 11 February 2018
Line 13: 16 March 2018
Line 14: 18 May 2018
Line 15: 15 June 2018
Line 16: 6 July 2018
Lines 17-18: Aug-Sept 2018 (dates unclear)
Line 19: 19 October 2018
Line 20: 23 November 2018
Line 21: 7 December 2018
Line 22: 11 January 2019
Line 23: 1 February 2019
Auto Traps
In early 2022, we trialed nine AT220 Autotraps in our trapping area, which proved a great success. We then began raising money in earnest with a goal of establishing a perimeter of Autotraps around our internal manual traplines.
In late 2022, we also began deploying monitored live capture traps targeting feral cats.
Thanks to our funders — BOP Regional Council, TECT, Western Bay of Plenty District Council and BayTrust — we began deploying more Autotraps in September 2022 (initially on our Southern boundary), finally completing the perimeter on 28 January 2024
At the beginning of May 2024, we deployed Autotraps east-west through the middle of our interior trapping zone.
Friends of the Blade 