Results from the Wet Jacket Peninsulas 1080 Operation
We’re on the front lines of the Save Our Iconic Kiwi initiative. Our ranger Tim and his team have been studying the population of kiwi at Shy Lake to find out how to best protect them from predators like stoats.
In the last episode, we described the planning that went into the recent 1080 operation to protect kiwi chicks at Shy lake and beyond. The next step was to monitor the results – how successful were we at controlling stoats? Time to run some tracking tunnels.
Time to What?
Tracking tunnels are the tool DOC uses most commonly to monitor the levels of stoats and rodents in an area. A card is placed in the base of a plastic tunnel, with a patch of ink in the middle and a tempting bait. If you’re looking to track rodents, it’s peanut butter – in Fiordland we use the high-quality stuff, as this is more attractive to rats. Apparently only the best will do! For stoats we use chunks of rabbit meat. The rats and stoats will run through the tunnels to get to the bait and leave telltale inky footprints on the card. Roughly speaking, the more cards have tracks, the more stoats and rats there are running around the bush.

📷: Tim Raemaekers
The tunnels are spread through the bush in lines of ten, 50 m apart. The lines are then usually placed in sets that run from “ridge to river,” meaning that there’ll be a line in the valley bottom, a line a couple of hundred metres further up the hill, and so on all the way to the tussock tops. We want to be confident that our index of stoat abundance is representative of the changing forest types and conditions at different altitudes. Altogether we have 250 tunnels in 25 lines across the huge Wet Jacket Peninsulas 1080 block of nearly 40,000 hectares. Every three months, a group of keen beans wears out their boots and their knees bashing through the scrub to put fresh cards in the tunnels and collect them again.

📷: Tim Raemaekers

📷: Tim Raemaekers
How did we do?
Shortly before the Wet Jacket Peninsulas 1080 drop, teams of hardy contractors ran the tunnels and found that 71 of the 250 tunnels tracked a stoat, across 60 % of the lines. This is higher than usual for the area and reflects the widespread increase in stoat numbers following the 2019 beech mast. We had already seen in previous seasons that 20 or 30 % of lines tracked still meant zero survival of our kiwi chicks.
After the drop, our post-op monitoring painted a very different picture. None of our tunnels tracked a stoat. We also tracked zero rodents in the areas where 1080 was applied.
As a comparison, we also ran a set of lines just outside the predator control area. All of the lines were visited by stoats, and of those lines, 78% of the tracking cards within them had stoat prints. This gives us a lot of confidence that the 1080 operation was the reason for the drastic stoat reduction inside the control area.
This is a great result and as good as we could hope for from an ambitious and complex operation, and we’re all excited about what this could mean for hundreds of kiwi in the area. We do need to be a little bit cautious, because we know that tracking tunnels aren’t always great at detecting stoats that are present at very low densities. Furthermore, we need to sustain this result for a year to allow the kiwi chicks to grow big enough to be safe from stoats. It doesn’t take many of these ruthlessly efficient predators to kill all of the kiwi chicks in an area. So the acid test, of course, will be how many of our chicks survive. It’s not about how many stoats we kill, but how many kiwi we save.

📷: Tim Raemaekers
A few weeks ago, we headed in to Shy Lake to find the first nests of the season. After a few months away from the hills in lockdown and at my desk over winter, it was a tonic to be out in the wilds again after a fresh snowfall, tracking kiwi to their nest and installing a trail camera outside the entrance. And we’re off a really good start as so far, we haven’t seen any stoats on the trail cam footage from kiwi nests. This is a huge difference from previous years, when up to 90 % of nests were visited by stoats. At the moment I couldn’t ask for better and I’m looking forward to seeing how the chicks fare.

📷: Tim Raemaekers
This is the twenty-seventh in a series of posts about Tim’s work, follow the Conservation Blog to keep up to date on his progress.
Can we get an update on how 20/21 season chicks are getting on?
Lots of reasons behind all this stuff, 1. while there may be lots of Kiwi there before the 1080 drop there should have thousands 2. Adult Kiwi live for a long time 25 to 50 years and can defend themselves against stoats, so the numbers have been declining over a 50+ year period. 3. the results from comparing trapping to using 1080 are continually showing way superior bird recovery of all species after subsequent years of successful breeding seasons without stoats and rats. 4. A look at the terrain will show you just how unlikely you can get foot access into these places to cut tracks , carry and install thousands of traps and then check those traps for months. 5. Many of these predators are very smart and will not ever go into a trap.
Great blog, but please check your photo credits. The footprint tracking tunnel photo is Anthony Behrens’ image from DOC image library.
Great work. We should aim for every hiker or hunter to lay a few traps when out?
Can’t help as I am in Aussie (damnit)
I would like to think you are going to in the future look at stopping the use of this revolting poison that kills more birds than it will save. Where is all the birdsong?? No birds!!
You’re so close to getting the point it’s quite hilarious. “I wonder why there’s no birdsong hmmm? Oh well I guess we’ll never know”
How is it then possible that there where “hundreds of kiwis” in the area before this 1080 operation? Surely there should of been hardly any if this “huge” stoat population was killing them all.
Hey Leigh maybe you should read a few more of these diaries, you might even answer your own question! Or even just the one that you’ve commented on, where it references kiwi needing to get to a certain age/size before they can defend themselves from stoat attack…
Really – But even the adult birds had to be little before they got big! (said 6 year old granddaughter). So how did these “hundreds” survive all those stoats when they were babies??