Ruud Kleinpaste: Time to start catching mice

2020 is not just a leap year, but also a Mast Year. That means a lot of trees are flowering all at the same time, making a bumper crop of food for mice. And those mice become great prey species for rats who will chew through the millions of mice and really boost their own numbers enormously.
That means: rat plagues in late autumn/winter. Not just in the suburbs, but also in the New Zealand forests and especially in the South Island and our National and Regional parks. These rats are fabulous food for stoats. Stoats are very clever killing machines and superb predators of everything that lives and breathes – rats simply don’t stand a chance with stoats.
In late winter/early spring, when the mice have consume all the fallen seeds and fruit and rats have eaten most of the mice and stoats have gobbled up a heap of rats you end up with heaps of stoats, and some very fat rats and they are all looking around for something to eat, right at the time when our native birds are starting to build nests.
Our birds don’t stand a chance at all! Even “armed” birds such as kaka and kea will fall prey. So it's time to get your traps ready. Catch as many mice as you can right now, peanut butter and Nutella are great attractants. Catch rats with Victor traps and DOC 150s and DOC 200s, with fresh rabbit meat or erayz blocks and egg in the box. For ferrets, DOC 250s are the recommended traps. Bait with fresh meat; rabbit, chicken or fish. Grab a possum trap, Tim's Traps are probably easiest to use, and bait with apple and cinnamon. There are many different attractants for the various target species.More Info: DOC website or https://predatorfreenz.org/LISTEN TO AUDIO ABOVE