Macraes is one of the last major places that grand and Otago skinks live in the wild. DoC are working really hard to look after them and have built a predator proof fence in one area and do A LOT of predator trapping in the rest of the reserve. There are over 800 traps spread out over a very large area. All the traps have to be checked each week in the summer and every 2 weeks in the winter.
Yesterday I was helping check one trapping line - it took us 3.5 hours to get along the one line in a 4WD. The traps we checked had caught 13 hedgehogs, 5 ferrets and one feral cat.
It's really important that DoC catch all these predators - can you tell me why? See if you can answer these questions and post them in a comment.
What is a predator?
What problems will the predators at Macraes cause for the skinks?
Sometimes there are people that don't like the fact that DoC traps these predators - especially cats and hedgehogs. What do you think? Why is it important that we do trap them?
Macraes is important for another reason - there is a giant goldmine up there, but it also used to be a big gold mining place in the 1880's when the Otago gold boom was on.
In this photo you can just see a hole in the ground - it is the opening to an old mine digging.
We visited the site of an old gold-mining town. It was in the middle of nowhere and you could only reach it by a shingle road and then 4WD or walking. It was strange to think there used to be a busy wee town here - there was a pub, school, shops and all sorts of buildings but now you can only see the ruins and the flat areas where the buildings were.
The only ruins still standing a bit.
There was a building here - see the stones and flat areas.
Great view!!
Site of another old building.
Notice the flat area? Another building would have been here.
