Last Words

Trapping rodents in the Waitākere Ranges is not as daunting as it seems, says bird-lover Jenny Wheeler.

Walking the line in the fight against predators

There's nothing glamorous about trapping rats, stoats, and possums. Jenny Wheeler would know. The former journalist, first female editor of the New Zealand Listener, and now mystery-romance novelist, finds hauling carcasses to be quite the opposite of her day job.

Every month, swinging a bag of chopped and frozen rabbit, Jenny tramps into the Waitākere Ranges, west of Auckland. She resets a 3km line of 20 predator traps along the Whatitiri Track, something she's done for the last decade.

“It's hard work ploughing through mud,” says Jenny. “But it's just as hard to make a career as a fiction author. Trapping is great training for my other pursuits. I enjoy the physical expression of that kind of determination.”

Jenny is one of the hundreds who volunteer for Ark in the Park, an ecorestoration project in Cascades Kauri Park.

“Others have invested far more energy than I have,” she says. The conservation partnership between Forest & Bird and Auckland Council operates 568 traps and more than 4500 baiting stations. It relies heavily on volunteers to control the predator population.

The result is two vulnerable birds, the North Island robin and the kōkako, have been successfully reintroduced to the sanctuary. “Whenever I hear birds singing out there, I think of my part in allowing those creatures to live. Without this programme, it would be utter devastation,” says Jenny.

Pest-trapping wasn't something she initially sought as a pastime. Jenny learned to trap while chaperoning her stepgranddaughter, who was doing community service for a Duke of Edinburgh Award.

“I kept going (back) month after month,”

"Without this programme, it would be utter devastation."

she says. “It became my time to be in the bush.”

It reminds her of being a child and running to keep up with her father in the rainforest.

“I feel close to my dad when I'm in the bush — it's a restorative time,” she says. The Whatitiri Track, on the Hillary Trail, is also part of the 3000-kilometre Te Araroa trail Jenny helped launch in the 1990s.

She says being in the bush makes her feel alive, and in a sense, so does the trapping. Another reward is the solitude of the forest, but without much birdsong around, she often catches herself imagining what the bush used to sound like before European settlers introduced rats, stoats, and other predators.

“My English ancestors were very much part of the destruction process. I feel like I'm doing my part to help restore what was lost.” ■