Why it’s important to log your catches

By Alex Parker

Those that are familiar with Pest Free Howick and our backyard trapping project are probably aware that for each trap we hand out, we have one requirement – that you must log your catches.

Why do we ask this?

It’s quite simple – the free rat traps, and our project as a whole is funded through the Howick Local Board. In order to keep these rat traps free, we need to be able to prove how effective the backyard trapping project actually is.

We do this through a website called CatchIT, which allows anyone to join our project and input catch data online, which can then be collated and turned into reports, and data maps, like the ones below.

The top one is a heat map, it displays all recorded catches in our traps between April 2023 and April 2024. Heatmaps work by displaying the highest density of catches over the given period as larger and darker ‘blobs’, where the lighter blobs are places that have experienced fewer catches.

The above image displays every Pest Free Howick trap in the Howick Ward with a 250m buffer zone around each trap. This shows the coverage of our current trapping project, but do note how many of these traps have not been reporting catches when compared to the heat map.