Latest posts
Phase 3: Our Plans This Winter
27 May, 2016
This winter we will begin Phase 3 of trapping which will further extend our protected area to the western end of the Dansey Road Scenic Reserve, leaving only the eastern (Rotorua) section of the forest left to trap. To implement this trapping phase, six staff members will spend around 80…
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Phase 2: The Results
27 November, 2015
In late November 2015 (a month after our Phase 2 trapping programme began), we did a post-monitoring survey to see how successful we had been. This involved placing chew cards (small squares of plastic corflute spread with peanut butter), out into the forest every 50m along our monitoring lines. When…
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Phase 2 Gets Underway
27 October, 2015
In October 2015 Rotorua Canopy Tours invested in a new range of automated traps from Goodnature. The way we had begun trapping in 2013 worked. But our original traps were all manual and very labour intensive to re-set and monitor. Armed with this new technology, we installed 450 self-resetting rat…
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Director-General of DOC Comes To Visit
5 October, 2015
In October 2015 we hosted a very special guest in the Dansey Road Scenic Reserve. Lou Sanson, the Director-General of the Department of Conservation, was visiting Rotorua and was so keen to check out Rotorua Canopy Tours that we arranged a special 6am zipline tour for him and his daughter.…
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The Canopy Conservation Trust is Formed
27 June, 2015
Thanks to the great results we’ve already achieved, and the growing level of community and media support for our pest eradication project, Rotorua Canopy Tours decided to approach the Department of Conservation in 2015 about establishing a formal partnership. Fortunately, they were all for it! And so the Canopy Conservation…
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Goodnature Traps Introduced
27 January, 2015
Our original labour-intensive method of trapping pests in the Dansey Road Scenic Reserve wasn’t a viable long-term solution, so we went back to the drawing board. In 2015 we found the answer we were looking for. We began trialling gas powered self-resetting traps produced by a Wellington company called Goodnature,…
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Phase One: Lessons Learnt
27 June, 2014
Having begun trapping pests in a 50ha section of forest, our Rotorua Canopy Tours staff quickly learnt some hard lessons while trying to maintain our efforts. Re-setting traps and keeping them effective is time-consuming, exhausting, motivation sapping, gross and overall hugely expensive! We couldn’t keep it up – it nearly…
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Phase One Results
27 June, 2013
During Rotorua Canopy Tour’s first year of operation, we managed to save $35,000 through sponsorship, visitor donations and ticket contributions, to spend on pest control in the Dansey Road Scenic Reserve. We started ‘Phase 1’ by concentrating on a 50ha section of the Reserve, directly around the zipline course where…
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Measuring Results: Chew Track Cards
27 August, 2012
Here at Rotorua Canopy Tours, we wanted to confirm our suspicions about what was going on in the Dansey Road Scenic Reserve at night. We knew pests were around so we decided to monitor the forest to determine the extent of the problem. We cut long monitoring lines in the…
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Rotorua Canopy Tours Established
27 February, 2012
Rotorua Canopy Tours combines action and adrenaline with one of New Zealand’s most serene environments – two aspects that were always designed to go hand-in-hand. This eco-tourism business took four years of careful planning and was eventually launched in 2012. As well as providing New Zealand’s first zipline canopy tour,…
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