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Whakamarama Pest Trap Library: A Woman with a Mission

At the end of June this year, 2026, the amazing Debra Jager handed over the running of Whakamārama Pest Trap Library, which she set up in 2019, to Friends of the Blade. We're honoured to take on the role, which complements our own work so well, and hope we live up to the example Deb has set for the past few years. Thanks for all your work Debra....

What Plants Are Telling Us

When we think about measuring the success of predator control, our minds often jump to native birds. After all, seeing or hearing more tūī, kererū, or toutouwai (Robin) feels like a clear sign that we're making a difference. But birds aren't always the best or easiest indicators of forest health. They can be elusive, move across wide areas, and their numbers fluctuate for reasons beyond our control. That's why it's just as important to pay attention to the plants beneath our feet and above ou...

Whose Prints Are Those?

When I saw unusual tracks in soft mud out west of our trapping zone, near Line 18, I hoped it might be a forest gecko. I looked up all the images I could find of gecko tracks but could only find the marks they left on hard tracking cards. But I did find a wonderful thing — a herpetologist called Dr Dylan van Winkle who loves all things reptilian and froggy. He looked at my photos and decided, sadly for me, that it was a rat that made the tracks, after all....

An Evening With a Trapping Guru

An enthusiastic crowd of trappers gathered at the Tauranga Yacht Club in the first week of October for a talk by predator control guru John Bissell of Backblocks Environmental Management, whose creative thinking and commitment to predator control never fails to inspire....

What We've Been Up To

Friends of the Blade operates under the korowai of Whakamārama Community Incorporated, and every year we write up a report for their AGM of what we've been up to:...

Autumn Working Bee

A huge shoutout to the 13-strong crew of volunteers from Tauranga offices of the engineering company Vitruvius who turned out on Thursday, 21 March, 2024, to tackle some of the maintenance work that we never seem to get on top of. We are so grateful for all their mahi!...

Benefit Gig

Envirohub's 'Sustainable Backyards' organising team have pulled together a benefit gig to raise money for traps for our predator control work. Huge thanks to them for spearheading this — we're very excited to take part, and hope all our readers, supporters and volunteers will spread the word, and come along. Here's a link to the Envirohub event page, and the Facebook event link is here, if you're that way inclined....

Innovations at the Blade

Readers of our newsletter (click here to subscribe) may recall from previous issues that since October of this year, volunteer Stu M has been trialing the use of canola cooking spray to keep his rat and possum traps free of rust and working smoothly....

Open Day Report

The weather didn't co-operate for our Open Day on 19 November, which was moved from the Department of Conservation carpark at the Blade indoors at the Whakamārama Community Hall....

Open Day

Friends of the Blade / Ngā Hoa o Pā Kererū predator control group invites you to join us for a community day out....

Vegetation Monitoring

One of the recommendations made in a recent Bay of Plenty Regional Council case study of our predator control efforts was to introduce a vegetation monitoring project to measure our forest health and diversity over time — specifically the impact of browsing predators (possum, deer & pigs)....