Environmental Educator  

This month has been extremely quiet in terms of visits. There have been no schools or groups coming to the centre, but I made a visit to Alternative Education in Kawerau who hope to plan a trip out to our centre later this year.

My highlight for this month is working with Matata primary school and helping them to get started with trapping in the lagoon. They will do a monitor in the next few weeks and place 12 traps in September to start predator control. It will be interesting to see what birds will benefit from their effort. They will do another rodent monitor at the end of the school year and will organise some volunteers to keep the project going over summer into the next school year. By starting pest control in the lagoon we have made a huge step towards our mission of creating a continuous protected ecosystem from lakes to sea.  I am so excited about this!

Another highlight was attending an Exult about funding for non-profit organisations. This course clearly outlined what funding streams a small organisation like ours can utilise. There are lots of avenues for us to pursue which will help our trust in the long run.

There have been a couple of small working bees to keep the centre looking great. We worked on making  the gardens more presentable and Andrew did
the hard work of placing a new layer of bark in the playground and gardens.

Confirmed
upcoming visits

25 - 27 October Whakatane Intermediate

1-2 November Trident Special Needs unit camp

13 - 16 November Whakatane Intermediate

27 Nov - 1 Dec St Joseph's Opotiki

Liddy Bakker; email: educ.met@gmail.com  Ph: 0275699022 and check us out on Facebook!

Development Co-ordinator report

We are now well on the way with expanding our trapping efforts. We have 18 new traps on Leaming's property on McIvor Road, 24 new traps on the Weeks property on Herepuru Road and 5 new traps on Mounfort's road verge. Thanks very much to these landowners for servicing these traps.

We plan to install around 20 new traps along Braemar Road and have a landowner organised to look after these once we have
them in place. The letters have been delivered to the landowners on the Southern part of the road and once the responses have been collated I will
organise exactly where to place the traps. The good thing about these new developments is that we are working with new landowners, expanding our predator
control and doing this without having to search out new volunteers from outside the community to service these traps.

We have completed baiting the Cell Tower and Pickford's blocks and the rodent monitors indicate zero rats so the birds should have a good breeding season. Thanks very much to our loyal volunteers. We continue to service our existing predator traps and are always looking for new volunteers to support this effort.

MET has delivered all of the toxin for the landowners with Biodiversity agreements with the council and hopefully all that toxin will be in bait stations very soon.
There are now around 2600 bait stations in the Manawahe corridor!

There has been some discussion around the damage that browsers are doing to the Manawahe bush, in particular deer and wallabies and MET is keen to organise a seminar on wallaby control if there is sufficient landowner interest.

Finally I am aware there is a lot of discussion around the 1080 drop DOC is doing in the Rotoehu forest. The use of 1080 does raise strong opinions, however if you are interested in getting an independent Science-based view on this  the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright produced a very detailed report which makes interesting reading.

 https://www.pce.parliament.nz/media/1294/evaluating-the-use-of-1080.pdf

Contact Peter - 012 0395370