Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference

Stoats are a major predator of endemic forest-dwelling bird species in New Zealand and are responsible for several local extinctions. Thus, their eradication is key for biodiversity conservation. However, sustained control of stoats is required on islands within an impressive swimming distance of the mainland. Our objective here was to test the use of toxicant-free, automatic traps as a sole means of stoat control on a near-shore island with very high reinvasion potential. We installed a grid of Goodnature® A24 self-resetting traps on Great Island, part of a World Heritage site within Fiordland National Park on the South Island of New Zealand, in October 2016 and undertook pre-feeding and monitoring through March 2017, when traps were set. Within four weeks of setting traps, tracking indices for stoats decreased from 95% to 5% and have so far remained at or near effectively 0% throughout the ongoing project.