It’s that time of year when rats’ thoughts turn to warm, cosy places to nest – that means your garage or, even worse, your house!

Predator Free Opoutere has a backyard rat trapping program that is providing traps to Opoutere Ratepayers & Residents members. The Whangamata Community Board has kindly donated funding for materials that volunteers have made into rat traps – these are safe for pets and perfect for backyard trapping.

Our last lot of traps disappeared very quickly so don’t muck around – if you would like a rat trap for your property see Victoria or Daniel at 305 Opoutere Road and we can set you up with the tunnel, a trap and some delicious lure to tempt your neighbourhood rats to their doom.

While we are talking rats – would you like to get involved with our other trapping activities? We have 40 traps in the beach reserve that are regularly checked, cleaned and baited with non-toxic lures like peanut butter and eggs. If you like the occasional walk in the forest and don’t mind an expired pest then email the team at opouteretrapping1@gmail.com. You can do as little or as much as you can manage and we will provide training and all the safety gear required to do the job (we don’t use any poisons and our traps are all NAWAC approved and humane). We would love to expand our team and welcome some new trappers into our mammalian correction unit!

The birds will love you for it.