Meeting Eigill at the Kahikatea Walk

Emma and I'd met Eigill several months earlier at the DOC workshops in Hokitika. He's DOC's trapping expert and has been in the business for more than 20 years. A planned 15 minute visit turned into more than an hour of questions and explanations. We'd gone in there not knowing what we didn't know about trapping and left much better informed but also knowing there was much much more to learn.

Fast forward to late October and Emma, Elizabeth Sawkins, Liz Holland, Paul Dunn, Waikohatu Scott and I were standing in the Sunny Bight carpark at the Kahikatea Walk entrance chatting with Eigill.  We'd arranged for him to give us guidance on where to place traps around the Walk.

Eigill taught us to think like a rat or stoat... finding the easiest path through the grass, travelling along paths and edges of water ways, sheltering from the rain, and looking for its next meal.  We also talked about the design of the traps, why stoats are mostly caught in the second trap in a double-trap tunnel only after the first trap has caught a rat, and how he's designed a break in the floor of the trap to stop sympathetic firing of the second trap when the first goes off.

It was a fascinating field trip, with one hour turning into two very quickly. We had plenty to think about and plan over coming weeks. Our short-term ambition to place and maintain 20 traps around the Kahikatea Walk seemed very doable compared with the 3000 traps Eigill and his team have put in and maintain to protect the whio in the mountain rivers.