I joined Ray, Damian and Greggy one time on one of their walks to check and maintain these stations. The route took us between One Boat and Traveller’s Hill, passing nearby the refuse dump. It was fairly easy walking through a flat plain of gravelly rock coated in Mexican thorn bushes. They knew the route, but I had helped to digitise the walks they did around the island and thought it a useful idea to log the locations of the stations. It was a good practical exercise for the guys to learn how to use GPS and record and download waypoints.
Greggy, Damien and Ray at a cat station
Ray was carrying a sizeable rucksack. He was a bull of a man, not particularly tall and at first sight, his round shape might make you think he was unfit. But every walk I did with him he was at the front, and putting the lads half his age to shame. We found the first station; they were relatively easy to spot as they had red and white tape flapping from a piece of rebar fixed in the ground and was surrounded by a circle of beach sand. They used beach sand as the yellow always contrasted against the reds, greys and blacks of the inland soils. Attached to the piece of rebar would be the attracting bait, usually a small piece of fish that Ray and Stedson would fish off the rocks for the day before. The guys took a GPS waypoint over the rebar, then checked to see if the bait had been touched. Even if part of the bait or the whole bait were gone, this would not necessarily be evidence of a cat. The height of the bait on the rebar was critical, too low and crabs and rats could access it, too high and the birds might swoop in and capture it. The sand was there to detect any footprints. Crabs were easily distinguished by the lines in the sand as they dragged their shells. Cat footprints were different from rats in size and shape. With all this precision on a rather rudimentary piece of kit, no cat attempting to get the bait would get away undetected.
I asked Ray how many cat footprints he had seen. He said none in the last year. But they wanted to continue doing this for at least another six months to make absolutely sure. The last thing would be to miss a small pocket of breeding cats that once monitoring had stopped could reproduce unchecked and damage the restoration of seabirds on the mainland.
So they reset the bait, throwing away the old fish and tying on the new from the supply in a plastic bucket. Ray then unbuckled the rucksack and slipped it off his back, sprinkled new sand on the circle and raked it across, having removed bits of vegetative and mineral debris first. And on we went to the next one. A few months later, a large party was held at the Klinka Klub beach hut to celebrate the successful eradication of the feral cats.
When I Went To 