The primary target for the project is the coastal boundary and properties bordering the coastal land.
Last Tuesday the project received $3000 in funding from the Predator Free New Zealand Trust to help it build on the success it had last year.
Epidemiologist Tom Brownlie, design engineer Ritchie Winters and Barry Mclellan began the project early last year and were joined by ecology student Emma Ahlezon and documentary film-maker Claudia Babirat at a community meeting to help co-ordinate the project.
Ms Babirat said each member added value to the project in their own way.
Mr Brownlie was the "show me the data" guy, Mr Winters was the trap guru, Mr Mclellan was the networker and Ms Ahlezon and Ms Babirat were the whip-crackers of the team.
"We all work on our free time, we’re all passionate about getting rid of predators and increasing the native bird life in our community," Ms Babirat said.
The team had their hands full with a variety of predators in the area.
"We’ve got the whole sweep of predators, a lot of possums, a lot of rats, a lot of mice, we’ve had stoats and even a ferret recently."
Ms Babirat said people were beginning to talk about their vision for the community and were looking forward to expanding the project’s reach this year.
"Last year we had 18 different households buy traps of us and the aim this year is to at least double that number, but of course more would be perfect."
The new funding would help the project achieve this goal and host more community events in the area.
"We’re planing on running events like the trap-building workshop we had last weekend that was a lot of fun.
"We had several members of the community join us for that. We got 24 rat trap tunnels built."
By Mark John
