These orange pastic things are wax tags. They're a way of measuring how many pests are in an area.
We put twenty in both Akeake and Rangitane Reserve's and left them there for a week.
You nail them to trees about a hammer's height off the ground, in lines of ten, at twenty metre spacings. The white wax has an attractant and pests, if present, gnaw on it. Each species leaves a different bite mark.
We got three out of twenty chomped in Akeake: two rats and one possum and eight out of twenty in Rangitane: three possums and five rats.
We'll repeat the exercise once we've been trapping in there for a period and see how the results compare.
Here's a possum chew, they don't muck around:
This one's a rat, way more dainty :)
