Tracking Tunnels

I have been working up at Macraes Field Base recently - last week we had A LOT of snow and got snowed in!

Luckily the snow cleared away by Thursday and I was able to get out and do my work. 

 I was working on checking the tracking tunnels in the reserve predator-proof enclosures. We use the tracking tunnels to make sure there are no animals we don't want in the enclosures e.g. rats, mice, stoats etc - predators. 

The tracking tunnels also help us to see where the lizards are by showing their tracks.

I use a map with all the tunnels marked on it to find my way around the reserve and make sure I have checked all the tunnels.

Each tunnel is marked with a blue triangle so I can find it. Can you find this tunnel on the map above?

The tracking cards are kept in a tunnel that directs the animals over them

A blob of peanut butter is placed in the middle to attract the animals over the ink.

The black stuff is a non-toxic, natural ink. The animals walk over the black ink and then over the white card at either end and leave their tracks.

This card has a mixture of skink and gecko tracks on it. Each type of lizard leave a unique print that we can use to identify what species it is. There were no predator prints on any of the tracking cards, which is awesome!

While I was checking the tunnels I saw lots of lizards - if you look closely at this picture you will see a gecko sleeping - geckos are nocturnal so don't come out in the sun like skinks do.

I managed to get really close to the skinks sunbathing! It was really exciting seeing so many.

These are two quite young skinks. It is unusual to see skinks sunbathing close together unless they are young siblings.

Science and history.

Yesterday I took a 2.5 hour drive to Macraes Flat to the DoC base there. I'm going to be working up here in a few weeks - I will be living at the base for about 6-8 weeks. Luckily they are letting Billie (my dog) live there too!

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.

 Near where the pub might have been - these are a pile of old glass bottles - the class is really thick.

Notice the flat area? Another building would have been here.