Outcome measurement using DOC AI Cam showing toxin effectiveness.
Lawrence Smith from Towards Pest Free Waitaha shared some data showing the effectiveness of toxins for them. The DOC AI Cam was able to show them the detailed data.
Here’s something interesting for the data and monitoring geeks of us 
As some of you might know, I’m a big fan of using technology to make our lives easier, and when it comes to monitoring there’s not much easier than the Cacophony Project cameras. Not only are they significantly more accurate than trail cameras, the data also gets uploaded and classified with no manual input. Too easy! And yes that does come at a cost, but it's so effective and saves so much time …
So, check this out ... At this particular camera plot we’ve got a possum and rodent problem. In the view of the camera is an AT220 with interestingly, only 1 rodent kill in this period, no possums (that’s another story, think trap shy animals, we've already caught the "young and dumb").
Given the lack of success using traps I decided it was time to resort to toxins. In this case a Brodifacoum based rat bait (supplied by Orion Agriscience for this trial) installed in a 50m grid, in 200g Sentry bait stations.
That was on Aug 11. Now, there was a big spike at this point with no explicable reason, aside from the bait station installs. Yes, rats are neophobic, but maybe the drive for food overwhelmed this? Regardless, in less than a month, rat numbers are close to zero. In my mind this is a camera fault, surely!? But no, we’re still picking up small animals such as birds, the rats and mice have gone.
Two learnings here.
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Internet connected thermal cameras deliver you data in near real time, with little or no manual input. You can literally see the results of your work. They are the best and least effort monitoring tool.
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The toxins are more effective than I anticipated … The target was rats, but there’s evidence possums are eating it as well, despite it not being specifically designed for them.
There is however one possum that is overly trap shy. Friday night at 8pm I’ll be there with my .22 and thermal scope, that’s about when (s)he normally comes through. I’ll let you know how that goes
* rodents are in blue if you have trouble reading the axis legend