from PFR General Manager and Fletcher Sunde

How often does the call go out for help on a Russell working bee? Loads! And out folks come. Many hands make light work.

You may have seen or met the Predator Free Russell team, who have been busily eliminating rats, stoats and possums from the Russell peninsula over the last year and a bit. The predator control work is going amazingly, down to almost zero predators now in the existing project area (Okiato and Te Wahapu), as well as recently expanding into 200+ hectares in Tapeka this year. With very limited budget and labour to do this work, the team are stoked to have great community support with the other aspects of the project.

The Russell Landcare Trust (who run Predator Free Russell) are fortunate to have use of the DoC property in Matauwhi Bay as part of their Community Agreement with DOC. It’s a great base for the PFR team and RLT’s other work, but as it had fallen out of use over the past 15 years or so, it needed a lot of love to get it tidied up again. On Thursday 18 April, a working bee was held, with about 20 volunteers helping out on a long list of tasks. This included giving the building a good clean on the inside and out, weed-eating all the surrounds, doing a bunch of maintenance jobs like securing doors and refinishing benches, weeding noxious weeds, and getting rid of decades of accumulated rubbish – four cubic metres in total! This was the third big clean-up at the site, and it’s really starting to become a great, functional base. As well as a place for weekly meetings and storing bait and traps, etc, the site is used by the trust for open days, monthly trustee meetings, and training workshops on things like predator control, weeding, and biodiversity monitoring. 

Predator Free Russell and the Russell Landcare Trust would like to extend a massive thanks to everyone who came along and helped out with the big cleanup; we can’t do this important work without the critical help of our network of volunteers! If you’d like to get involved with volunteering for RLT and/or PFR, please get in touch via email: contact@russelllandcare.org.nz or through our Facebook or Instagram accounts @predatorfreerussell and @russelllandcare.  

Below: Duncan Innes, Neil Roblin, Mike Lewin, Bob Drey, Gail Pearcy, Geoff Hindle, Nick Maarhuis, Annie Hill, Jeff Schnell, Fletcher Sunde, Mike McEntegart, Kevin Philpot, Mike Stephens.