Innovator Kevin Bain in New Zealand has come up with two types of multiple-kill, auto-baiting, self-resetting traps that can kill 100 or more stoats, rats, and mice and operate without maintenance for up to a year.
"NZ Autotrap's mission is to assist the people caring for New Zealand’s Flora and Fauna to reduce the predator population by providing innovative and efficient predator trapping systems."
The traps are stainless steel with epoxy-poured and silicone-protected parts for weather-proofing, and are designed to be placed on poles, trees or fences which possums, rats, and stoats can readily climb, with holes through the bottom to minimize bycatch.
About 117 New Zealand islands have been made made predator-free thanks to poisons and traps, and sections of New Zealand are being cordoned off with fencing to achieve the same results within.
The capitol city of Wellington is on an isthmus, and communities there (see map) are actively trapping their way towards a healthier bird-friendly environment free of the foreign invasive predators that have been killing off the natives wholesale.
A nearly one-mile square area within Wellington has been fenced off with all predators inside killed off, and bird life there has roared back as a consequence.
So I wonder what happens to the bodies of the animals that are caught -- do they just lie there to decay or to be scavenged beneath the trap? Is there a hole dug for the animal's body to fall into? And how about those possum pairs--the trap dispatches one of them and the the second one sticks its head into the same opening to get whacked right afterward?
ReplyDeleteFor Welly, make that all predators EXCEPT cats
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