Author Archives: Friends of the Blade

What Plants Are Telling Us

And It’s Good News When we think about measuring the success of predator control, our minds often jump to native birds. After all, seeing or hearing more tūī, kererū, or toutouwai (Robin) feels like a clear sign that we’re making a difference. But birds aren’t always the best or easiest indicators of forest health. TheyContinue reading “What Plants Are Telling Us”

Whose Prints Are Those?

by Noelene Taylor When I saw unusual tracks in soft mud out west of our trapping zone, near Line 18, I hoped it might be a forest gecko. I looked up all the images I could find of gecko tracks but could only find the marks they left on hard tracking cards. But I didContinue reading “Whose Prints Are Those?”

An Evening With a Trapping Guru

An enthusiastic crowd of trappers gathered at the Tauranga Yacht Club in the first week of October for a talk by predator control guru John Bissell of Backblocks Environmental Management, whose creative thinking and commitment to predator control never fails to inspire. There was something for every kind of predator control project in Bissell’s talk,Continue reading “An Evening With a Trapping Guru”

What We’ve Been Up To

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 trapsContinue reading “What We’ve Been Up To”

Autumn Working Bee

A huge shoutout to the 13-strong crew of volunteers from Tauranga offices of the engineering company Vitruvius who turned out on Thursday, 21 March, 2024, to tackle some of the maintenance work that we never seem to get on top of. We are so grateful for all their mahi!  • Steps were cut into steep and slipperyContinue reading “Autumn Working Bee”

Benefit Gig: Have fun, Help the Kaimai!

Envirohub’s ‘Sustainable Backyards’ organising team have pulled together a benefit gig to raise money for traps for our predator control work. Huge thanks to them for spearheading this — we’re very excited to take part, and hope all our readers, supporters and volunteers will spread the word, and come along. Here’s a link to theContinue reading “Benefit Gig: Have fun, Help the Kaimai!”

Innovations at the Blade

Readers of our newsletter (click here to subscribe) may recall from previous issues that since October of this year, volunteer Stu M has been trialing the use of canola cooking spray to keep his rat and possum traps free of rust and working smoothly.  Stu reports the trial is over and he considers it aContinue reading “Innovations at the Blade”

Vegetation Monitoring

One of the recommendations made in a recent 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 Mike Tills andContinue reading “Vegetation Monitoring”