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Te Kōhanga Āhuru pest control involves three North Taranaki iwi - Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Maru. Te Kōhanga Āhuru project administrator Marlene Benson said the project would create sustainable employment for the wider whānau and hapū, and ensure that the forests within their rohe are safe for kiwi. The three iwi involved in the project have a deep attachment to the land, she said. Experience Purangi conservation trust general manager Rebecca Somerfield said the funding would allow the East Taranaki Environment Trust to expand pest control boundaries out 5775ha to 18,775ha, and 15 future staff.
“I was expecting we would get two to five stoats a year around here,” he said. “Already in the first two months we have caught 10, and I know of another farm where 27 have been caught.”
GLENN JEFFREY/Stuff
Whitehead shows off a stoat caught in one of the Podi predator traps set up on the farm. Whitehead encouraged other Taranaki farmers to join the predator-free programme. “Most of the farm owners have volunteered to be part of it and there a few who haven’t for their own reasons, which I can’t understand. “It’s no real benefit to my farm except to get rid of stoats which kill native, and ground nesting, birds.
ANDY JACKSON/Stuff
A combined community effort from Taranaki conservation groups, local authorities and school children is getting behind a predator-free project to release kiwi into the Kaitake Ranges for the first time.
Adult kiwi are soon to be re-released onto Taranaki s Kaitake ranges for the first time, prompting a warning for dog owners to keep their pets leashed around the park area. The kiwi are to be released onto the range in about three month s time, following extensive trapping and aerial 1080 operations that have decimated rat, mustelid and possum numbers in the Kaitake and Pouakai ranges. The re-release is a significant milestone in the Restore Kaitake campaign, undertaken as part of the Taranaki Regional Council’s Towards Predator-Free 2050 programme.