Curiosity might have killed the cat but for a Stewart Island resident it has answered a question about the feeding habits of feral felines.
Before the Department of Conservation and Zero Invasive Predators dropped 1080 poison on Stewart Island in July Mike Douglass caught some rats and possums in traps. He set up a camera near the pile of the dead animals to find out what animals would visit.
The Doc and Zip 1080 operation is aimed at killing the feral cats that are endangering pukunui southern dotterel.
Rats and possums eat the poison and the cats eat the dead carcasses and die of secondary poisoning. Mr Douglass said the aim of the exercise was not to see if feral cats ate rats.
He wanted to see how long it would take a cat to find the food source.
A cat turned up two days later.
"Maybe because they have such a good sense of smell I shouldn’t have been surprised."
There were about 12 possums and six rats in the pile.
The cat ate the rats first.
"That seemed to be the preferred food source."
It ate all of the rats and then started on the possums.
The cat fed for several hours, left for six and then returned to feed.
After a week of filming the camera ran out of batteries.
When the batteries were replaced, the cat was still feeding on the carcasses which by now were 20 days old and not smelling good.
That also surprised him.
"I thought a cat would be a bit more particular and only interested in the really fresh stuff."
Although it was hard to tell, it appeared it was the same cat that visited each time.
When the cat lost interest, the camera recorded "a dramatic increase" in possum visits but he could not tell if they were feeding or not.
The exercise had also shown the difference in eating behaviour of a feral cat and a pet, he said.
If a pet cat caught a rat it was likely it would play with it but not eat it.
"A pet cat does not need to be concerned about food, whereas a wild cat does."
