Catch…..and release
Blogger: Web Manager for Forest & Bird, Mandy Herrick
Trap designer Robbie Greig is what you’d call a possumologist.
He has spent umpteen hours examining their anatomy, observing their family life and dishing up various foods to them so he can develop a deep understanding of their palette.
Indeed, if you searched through the filofax of his brain under ‘all things possum’, it’d be crammed with a bounty of facts, anecdotes and deep musings.
Did you know that the possum to person ratio in NZ stands at 7.5: 1
Did you know that the West coast is the fat capital of NZ for possums?
Did you know that a possum’s brain accounts for a mere 1.4% of its body mass, whereas our brains account for about 18%?
Of course, it’s their body that he’s most interested in – and possums come fitted out with a fully-armoured body that is used to hard knocks.
It has a brain case that’s more durable than most, and it has a miniscule brain, so his work requires almost surgical precision.
For the past 5 years, him and his two co-directors at Good Nature have been toiling away trying to solve DOC’s $20 million dollar question – how do you effectively and humanely get rid of pests so our most imperilled species have a chance of survival?
Their CO2 piston powered re-setting trap, which is to be trialled at five sites around the country to the tune of 4 million dollars, was the result of a million little eureka moments.
The final iteration of their design – Richard Henry – was the end product of over 200 draft-versions that were tweaked and re-tweaked over five years.
automatic possum trap sunny grove from stu barr on Vimeo.
The traps, which can re-set up to twelve times, helps to free up countless man-hours by eliminating the need to go and re-set the trap.
If the body of the animal is eaten, or cached a counter on the trap tells you how many times it has fired.
For six-months, he spent many red-eyed hours filming and observing possums interacting with various rigs.
And after workshopping a few ideas with avid trappers – he went about trialling a few prototypes.
The nitty gritty of designing a trap that’s humane is filled with nightmarish stuff that could fill your brain with a lifetime of night terror.
So Greig likes to concentrate on the big picture, and the thought that these traps will ultimately give our forests & birds some reprieve helps to erase some of the more irksome parts of his day-to-day job.
