Do Your Part in Making New Zealand Predator Free by 2050

Rats are one of the main predators targeted in Predator Free 2050. You can help New Zealand achieve the ambitious goal of eradicating these predators to protect our native birds and other wildlife; you can eradicate rats from your own backyard and control any that try to move in.

Identify the Predators

Look for signs of rats in your home and garden such as rat droppings or teeth marks in fruit. You can use monitoring devices such as chew cards, wax tags or tracking tunnels to assess rodent numbers in larger backyards and bush areas. These will give you an idea of the numbers of rodents in the area and where they are travelling. They may also inform you of the presence of other pests such as possums, mice and hedgehogs.

Choose Your Method of Control

Rats can be controlled using traps in tunnels or rodenticide baits in bait stations. Whichever method you choose, it will be important to make sure that non-target animals and children cannot access the traps or baits.

Traps

For safe and effective control of rats and mustelids (stoats) wooden boxes fitted with powerful BT200 traps and lured with rat or mustelid lure are the go to solution.

A cheap and effective trap and tunnel such as the Victor Modified in a rat/mustelid trap tunnel can be placed in a discreet, covered location, such as against a fence or wall and behind vegetation. Peanut butter or chocolate are the best lures to use on the traps.

Rodenticide

The NO Rats Bait Station is a safe and effective way to employ rodenticide to control rats. The lockable station is supplied with NO Rats & Mice One Feed Bait and can be refilled as necessary.

Remove Other Food

Make your trap or bait station the most attractive places for rats to eat by removing other food sources. Never put meat scraps in your compost. If other food scraps are encouraging rats and mice, consider composting food using a bokashi bin and keeping your compost heap for garden waste only. Pick up fallen fruit and pick fruit off your trees as soon as it ripens. Predator proof aviaries or hen houses.

Record Your Progress

It is a good idea to make a note of what methods you have employed and the successes you have had. This will help you improve your control by identifying the things that work and those that do not.

If you used monitoring devices before control, you can use them after control to measure your success and tell you if you need to continue your control or change to just monitoring for new rodent incursions.

You might also want to record the bird life in your backyard and note how it increases when the rodents have been removed.