Westlake Kaitiaki is an environmental club that works to protect our local reserve, Smith’s Bush.
We have been busy so far this year with class meetings and our first few trips. We have taken action like pest monitoring using footprints and bite marks, tree planting, and rubbish clean-up.
In Term One, several group members met Anna, an Auckland Council park ranger, to introduce the new members to the bush and discuss our plans for the year. In Term Two, in Week 8, we took about 15 students to set up monitoring chew cards and one tracking tunnel. We have collected these again and will analyse them in the next few weeks with our other club members to decide what traps we need to improve the environment in the bush for our native species including the flora and fauna. Next term, during August, we will have our ‘trapping pulse’ setting our traps to hopefully trap some mice and rats, depending on what we find from our monitoring, to help the environment of the bush!
