Home Pest Monitoring

Use the Black Trakka to track animals living around your home! Easy to set up, lightweight to transport, and affordable for the average household. A tracking information guide is included with each order of tracking cards for new customers. Set tunnels around your home to help locate pests, and engage in helping New Zealand become predator-free by 2050!

Key places to set the Black Trakka:

• Garages
• Barns
• Decks
• Compost sites
• Vegetable Gardens
• Flower Gardens

Once pest tracks are located, it’s easy to substitute the inked tracking card with a Kness rat trap. We have found that this trap works best in our tunnels, as it can be triggered from either direction and the size fits perfectly inside the tunnel.

Eliminating pests from your area will help assist New Zealand in becoming predator-free by 2050. In addition to locating pests, you can even discover unique, friendly animal species on your property. Identify the tracks of lizards, geckos, frogs, wetas, and other insects using the Black Trakka.

How to set up your tracking tunnel

You can set up a home tracking tunnel in 4 easy steps. Peanut butter works well as bait!

Placing Your Tracking Tunnel

If you have a bush area, a few trees or an area of long grass, place your tunnel or tunnels on any obvious pathways. Animals move along fence lines, around streams and pond edges making these sites good places for tunnels. If you are placing a tunnel under a tree, consider covering the tunnel with sticks and or grass so that it has the appearance of a hole.

Try hanging a piece of tinfoil above the tunnel so that it will act as visual stimuli. Stoats can be attracted from a distance to a tunnel they would otherwise not detect.

Another technique is to place a section of mirror on the outside of the tunnel. A piece 5cm by 5cm is sufficient. A glazier will cut you a piece which you then stick to the tunnel using a double sided tape. Stoats become annoyed by the image of what they consider to be another animal and will run around looking for it and track through the tunnel.

A cheap lure for mustelids is a section of chicken neck. These are readily available in the supermarket. Place the lure on a leaf on the inked section.

We had a female stoat living under our fowl house and it came out to eat at 10.30am, 1.30pm and 4.30pm daily.

For rats, mice and hedgehogs, peanut butter is a great lure. If you don’t want a mass of tracks just place a fingernail-sized blob on the inked section of the card. Smooth, crunchy, salted, unsalted all seem to be appreciated.

Lizards like banana, pear, and sometimes a blend of banana and honey. Place your lure in a milk bottle top and position this on the ink. You may like to experiment with more than one lure in the tunnel.

You might discover a better lure!

You may obtain insect tracks and they can be very small so use a magnifier to study your card.

If you catch an insect try placing it on the inked section of a card. You can begin compiling a database of insect tracks. If possible measure and photograph your specimen.