One-man wasp wipeout clears forest

‘‘The birdsong is amazing, absolutely amazing. You’ve even got hardened musterers saying ‘have you heard this birdsong? It’s incredible’.’’

One man who took it upon himself to clear out pests of all sorts from an area near Springfield says Vespex has had ‘‘the biggest impact’’ of all his efforts.

Sean Ellis has spent the past 10 years trapping a 100 hectare block of beech forest in the Torlesse Range, clearing out possums and stoats with his trap-lines including 80 stoatboxes.

He added wasps to his radar four years ago after their numbers started becoming unbearably high in late summer.

‘‘It got to the point that my wife just said ‘I’m not going up there any more, it’s just silly,’ so I just thought I’d do it myself.’’

Ellis looked into the options, and took it upon himself to become an approved user of Vespex. He bought all the poison and bait-stations he needed, and set out to take his patch of the Torlesse back from the wasps.

Ellis said the key to the Vespex was making sure to test wasp numbers by putting out unbaited cat food to check wasp numbers were high enough for the bait to make a difference.

‘‘I put the cat food out a couple of times, until they were crawling on it. The next day I got up bright and early, loaded all my bait-stations up. I went up three days later and there wasn’t a wasp to be seen, it was amazing.’’

From then on, Ellis was a firm Vespex believer.

He said the one-man campaign had been so successful he was now ‘‘more or less targetting a couple of nests’’, so this year he was planning to expand his mission and add two more traplines to his existing seven.

He said he already had coverage over the entire beech forest valley he usually trapped in, and was now pushing out into surrounding tussock-land and other stands of beech.

‘‘I want to try and get them all out on the same day ... this year I’m going to have to twist someone’s arm to help me.’’

He said removing wasps from the area had made a visible and audible difference.

‘‘The Vespex has probably had the biggest impact of everything that I’ve been doing there.

‘‘It went from zero bird-life to fantails, flocks of silvereyes 50-strong, bellbirds, I’ve even got kea coming in now.’’

He said in his time trapping stoats and possums he had seen vegetation, especially forest undergrowth, returning to the area, but Vespex had made the biggest difference for birdlife.

‘‘The birdsong is amazing, absolutely amazing. You’ve even got hardened musterers saying ‘have you heard this birdsong? It’s incredible’.’’

Not only has Ellis saved the block of beech forest for the local flora and fauna, but he’s managed to save it for holiday weekends with the wife again, as well.

‘‘She loves it there now.’’

SUPPLIED Sean Ellis with a stoat trapped in his patch of the Torlesse. He has spent years trapping pests in the area and says targeting wasps has had the biggest positive impact.