October 2024 Update - Results of winter trapping blitz

It has been a massive five-month cat-trapping season. We are pleased to provide you with an update on the program, and with the communitys support we are confident that total eradication of feral cats from the Dudley Peninsula is possible.

Working with many landholders and community members across the Dudley Peninsula and Pelican Lagoon, we've delivered the most intensive trapping and monitoring program since the feral cat eradication program commenced in 2020.

From December 2023 to the end of September, 2024, together with participating landholders, we've removed 347 feral cats from the Dudley Peninsula and Pelican Lagoon using a combination of cage, soft-jawed leg holds and thermal shooting. During this time, 305 feral cats were removed via cage traps: 212 from the Dudley Peninsula and 93 from around Pelican Lagoon, west of the cat fence.

The program has achieved a significant milestone, removing close to 1,400 cats since operations commenced in 2020, marking a substantial increase in feral cat removal compared to previous years.

Advances in technology and community participation are critical factors for success in this program.

Using game-changing technology on our traps and cameras has vastly improved the program's efficiency. It has also increased participation from landholders trapping feral cats and our ability to respond to cat sightings

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT

The Kangaroo Island Landscape Board (KILB) would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to our partners, funders, participating landholders, and the community who have supported the program this year.

Your support and active participation have been instrumental in our team's efforts to deliver this ambitious program. We truly value your contribution.

Feral cats in Australia kill over 1.5 billion native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs, and 1.1 billion invertebrates each year. In addition, feral cats can also carry infectious diseases that can be transmitted to native animals, livestock, and humans.

COMMUNITY REPORTED SIGHTINGS

At the beginning of the blitz, we launched a "Feline Hotline" initiative for the community to report feral cat sightings on the Dudley Peninsula, this proved highly successful, with 18 calls received, which helped us to direct efforts to remove these cats.

As we move into the summer months, please don’t hesitate to report any cat sightings on the Dudley Peninsula via the Feline hotline. This information provides valuable data for our team to continue to target and eradicate cats.

We are extremely interested in your cat sightings/observations on the Dudley Peninsula or around Pelican Lagoon and Prospect Hill area. If you have seen a cat or evidence of a cat including, tracks, scats, kills or scavenging on roadkill or deceased livestock, please call or text the Feline Hotline. Please report immediately or as soon as possible, for our team to follow-up. We are also asking that if you catch or shoot a cat that you let us know. This information is critically important to the program as we use remote cameras to track individuals and understand their movement patterns.

To make sure we are not looking for cats that have already been removed, we can then match your cat/s with our known cat catalogue and have confidence that the cat is not still at large.

IMPROVED TRAPS AND TARGETING TECHNIQUES

Adopting Encounter Solutions trap monitoring technology, called "Celium", has been a game changer for the program. It is 100% accurate, reducing daily trap checks by 80%.

We've successfully used this technology over the past two years, making it Australia's largest trap monitoring network, connecting up to 726 cages and 200 soft jaw-leg hold traps across the Dudley Peninsula and Pelican Lagoon.

In autumn, we reviewed cage trap locations to identify productive and unproductive sites. Over the winter months, we correlated this data with sightings of cats by 4G cameras and landscape features, which cats use to den or travel through.

The average home range of a Dudley Peninsula feral cat is 3.72 km², knowing this helps us to optimise trap placement and ensure we have sufficient coverage across the entire peninsula.

Our team member, Murray Schofield, designed a new style of longer trap this rear that uses cat scent, predominately urine, to attract feral cats, following repeated off-target captures and recordings of cats walking past baited traps.

We strategically deployed 44 of these new traps, which successfully removed 17 previously trap-shy cats since July.

Since September 2023, 5–7 Felixer Grooming traps have been strategically deployed at locations that are difficult to access in more remote areas of the Dudley, with known cat activity, targeting 27 cats during this period.

We plan to relocate the Felixer Grooming traps to the cat exclusion fence for increased defence to prevent reinvasion at this high-risk location.

Thermal optics, scopes, and drones have also been used recently with very high success rates. This technology is constantly improving and, in the right hands, giving us a game-changing advantage in locating and removing difficult-to-trap cats.

Our experienced marksman, pictured right has been instrumental in eradicating feral goats, deer and pigs from the island. He is now turning his sights to feral cats on the Dudley Peninsula.

Using information gathered from our extensive network of 4G cameras and community cat sightings, we know where to direct our attention. This technique has been highly successful over the last few months, with 13 cats removed.

LANDHOLDER-LED TRAPPING PROGRAM RESULTS

Supported by Agriculture Kangaroo Island and Livestock SA, we helped 35 landholders across the Dudley Peninsula participate in the landholder-led trapping blitz.

The KILB fitted landholder traps with Celium trap monitoring technology.

They could see if their traps needed checking in real-time using the Rappt.IO app, which is free to download on smartphones from the App Store.

Rappt.IO also made it easy to collect data, keeping track of captures and overall results.

The 2024 landholder-led trapping blitz officially started on 1 June and lasted four weeks until 30 June.

Many keen landholders wished to start opening their traps immediately, and some began trapping as early as May.

Despite the program finishing at the end of June, almost all landholders continued trapping throughout the remainder of winter, indicating the high levels of support and participation the program receives.

Landholders managed 115 cat traps on their properties, achieving a total of 3,100 trap nights, helping the program remove 202 feral cats during the blitz, 145 from the Dudley Peninsula and 57 from the Pelican Lagoon isthmus.

This is an outstanding effort, considering the winter blitz coincides with a busy time for primary producers.

However, this year was even more challenging due to extremely dry conditions and a very late break to the season.

We are especially thankful for their efforts.

Data collected from landholders and the community was incredibly helpful for the team in tracking cat movements and behaviour.

Looking forward to 2025, we aim to make the landholder-led trapping blitz initiative bigger and better by assisting more landholders on the Dudley Peninsula and other areas of the island.

Continuing to help landholders deliver intensive broad-scale trapping programs will mean that control and eradication programs are coordinated and have positive and lasting outcomes for our island's biodiversity and primary producers.

We are also keen to work with landholders to scale up the capability of Celium so they can potentially use the technology to remotely monitor gates, water levels and other farm activities.

COMMUNITY SUPPORT CRITICAL FOR SUCCESS

The program has excellent industry, government, community group, and landholder support on Kangaroo Island including:

On the Dudley Peninsula, over 99% of landholders support or are actively participating in the program by permitting access to their properties, supporting control tools, reporting sightings or trapping and removing cats.

Our thanks go out to all of the community members and landholders for taking the time to share their knowledge about feral cats on the Dudley Peninsula and for allowing us access to your properties to eradicate cats.

HOW TECHNOLOGY HAS IMPROVED EFFICIENCIES

The unanticipated benefits of using Celium trap monitoring technology have exceeded expectations.

Our program aims to improve welfare outcomes for trapped animals. Applying Celium trap monitoring technology allows us to manage many more traps in the landscape, as we are alerted when a trap is triggered.

Staff prioritise checking triggered traps each morning, significantly reducing the time an animal spends in a trap.

Reducing the number of manual checks each day helps us to manage staff fatigue and improves motivation. It frees up staff time to focus on other important aspects of the program, such as essential maintenance, training and applying other control tools.

Less frequent trap visits also reduce human disturbance and odour left at the site, which has increased catch rates, particularly of wary individuals.

Using this technology is highly cost-effective. A cost-benefit analysis estimated that the cost of Celium would be recovered within six months of operations, as labour makes up approximately 70% of the total cost of operations.

Celium has also enabled better community engagement, through increased participation. Many Dudley Peninsula landholders took part in this year's winter trapping blitz.

Trap monitoring technology supported by the Rappt.IO app made trapping easier for landholders and enabled critical data collection. As a result, most landholders who trapped over June continued to trap for the remainder of winter to support the program to remove as many feral cats as possible.

AI IMPROVES MONITORING AND DETECTION

Remote cameras are critical in monitoring and detection, but was previously constrained by having to manually downloading cameras and process images. This along with the requirement to regularly visit camera sites in the field has limited the number of cameras that can be serviced by the program. Two recent improvements have removed these bottlenecks: 4 G-enabled cameras and using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The use of this technology in the Kangaroo Island Feral Cat Eradication Program has resulted in several efficiencies.

The 4G download capability has saved travelling to camera sites for routine downloads. It allows near real-time access to sighting data.

Daily image capture has also improved our ability to detect and repair problems within the array. AI image processing has significantly reduced the time required to process images. It has also resulted in improvements in the detection of cats.

We’ve been able to leverage the efficiencies brought about by these innovations to expand the camera monitoring array across a much broader portion of the landscape than would have otherwise been possible.

The access to near real-time data on feral cat movements has enabled the timely deployment of control tools to locations with current cat activity and to verify removal of known individuals.

Since the onset of our 2024 winter trapping period, we have seen a significant decline in the activity of feral cats on our camera network.

Removing over 200 cats on the Dudley Peninsula between May and September has reduced the average number of sightings each night from 13.23 in April to 6.5 in September.

The camera array also provides up-to-date information on the location of the remaining individuals. This information changes day-to-day as cats move within the landscape, however we can now identify broad trends.

During September, key activity areas included Simpson Conservation Park, Cuttlefish Bay power station and Moffats Road. These locations have been subject to increased control measures, including thermal shooting and soft-jaw leghold trapping.

CHALLENGES

An ongoing challenge to the program has been restrictions on the types of control tools we can use for feral cat eradication.

In South Australia, land managers like the KILB are permitted to use various tools and techniques to control feral cats. However, as with other Australian states and territories, some very effective and humane tools are restricted. Other restrictions limiting operations include when and where land managers in South Australia can use specific tools.

With support from partners and the KI community, KILB is actively pursuing legislation changes to allow the use of these effective tools needed for eradication and to permit landholders to participate more actively in control programs.

These changes include an ongoing two-year consultation process with the Dog and Cat Management Board to remove proximity limits (distance that a cat can be controlled from a person's residence) on some tools, as these restrict effective control and eradication.

As part of this process, the KILB coordinated a whole of Landscape SA's response to the Cat Management Amendment Bill 2024, aiming to remove barriers for landscape boards and other stakeholders, including landholders, to manage feral cats better.

The KILB has also actively pursued amendment changes to Animal Welfare Regulations to allow soft-jawed leg hold traps within 1km of residences, with landholder permission, that will increase the land area in the eradication zone on the Dudley Peninsula by more than half.

To date, no feral cat eradication program anywhere in the world has succeeded without using soft-jawed leg-hold traps to remove the last remaining feral cats. It is essential that we receive approval to use this tool. Our program must have access to all available, approved control tools to support cost-effective, humane and efficient conservation efforts.

WHAT'S ACTIVITIES WILL TAKE PLACE OVER SUMMER?

Some cage traps will now be closed for an extended period. If you see a closed cage trap with hessian placed inside, it is being rested. We have found that it is best to leave traps installed rather than removing them as cats become more accustomed to their presence, resulting in higher catch rates when they are opened up again.

We will employ the services of feral cat detection dogs soon, which also represents another highly effective tool to locate and remove cats that have become trap-shy and problematic to remove as the weather warms up.

Detection dogs are trained to find, trail and bay (in a tree, hollow or hole in the ground) feral cats, which the dog handler can humanely dispatch. These dogs show no interest in stock or wildlife. The dogs are also used to search areas thought to be free of feral cats to confirm eradication success.

Over the summer months, soft-jawed leg-hold traps will be deployed in areas permitted for their use and a targeted shooting program will continue.

WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I SEE AN ANIMAL IN A CAT TRAP OVER SUMMER?

As the weather warms up, we see an increase in goanna activity, leading to more goannas caught in our cage traps. Our team checks triggered traps each morning, releasing unwanted captures like goannas. If you come across a trapped animal, be assured that our team will take care of it.

Please do not be tempted to release the animal as we collect critical information that will help us improve our program's efficiency and humaneness in the future.

HOW CAN I LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FERAL CAT ERADICATION PROGRAM?

We are very grateful for the support and advice we receive from community members.

You can follow us on Facebook or sign up to our e-newsletter via our website to learn more about the program

Please contact us either via the Feline Hotline or if you would like to speak to one of the team please call the Kangaroo Island Landscape Board on 8553 2476 with any enquiries and we will get back to you.