Kia ora,

Welcome to the last newsletter for 2021. I hope our friends who have been in lockdown are enjoying their new traffic light freedoms. In this newsletter we have:

• New low-tech products: hazing and posts for our thermal cameras.
• Software updates: emailing you when a battery is flat, allowing you to see who is tagging videos, and more.
• A proposed re-design for our bird tagging interface, that we would love your feedback on.
• An update on the Cacophony Project traps.

Other quick pieces of interest:

• Check out the cammo camera created by the team at Shakespear Park.
• Check out the animal tracking camera prototype created by an open source contributor.
• Congratulations to the team at Motutapu Island who caught a stoat - with a little bit of help from our thermal camera and some very innovative luring and trapping.

Please let us know if you'd like to get access to some example thermal videos to get a feel for what it's like to use our cameras and tagging software. We have some test sites we will happily give you access to. Just create an account at https://browse.cacophony.org.nz/ and let me know your username.

Ngā mihi nui,

Shaun Ryan

2040 Limited.

New products

Hazing and posts

Although it's not a new idea we have been amazed at how well hazing improves the effectiveness of traps, even if they're not baited. In their latest blog post The Cacophony Project compares hazing to trawling for fish rather than using a line. Lincoln University's James Ross also recommends hazing in the recent Stuff article on tips for better pest trapping. With that that evidence we have released a hessian hazing product that is durable and easy to put up. This should improve the effectiveness of any trap on the ground.

We are also now selling posts to mount thermal cameras. These are ideal for when your camera is in a permanent position, such as at the end of a predator proof fence.

We have reintroduced the lithium iron phosphate battery for those customers outside of New Zealand that we are not able to send refurbished Lime Scooter batteries to because of freight restrictions.

Software updates

Email alerts for flat batteries and more

Existing customers will have noticed that we have released the functionality that emails group administrators when a thermal camera battery is flat. There are a couple of quirks with this and some bugs, that we have been working on. This blog post gives some more detail on the flat battery emails.

This blog post describes how you can see who has been tagging your thermal videos, along with some speed improvements and bug fixes. This is useful if someone is making mistakes so you can work out who needs some more training.

The engineers at The Cacophony Project have also made it so you can undelete videos and easily reset your password.

Mock up of bird tagging interface

We would love your feedback

We have created a mock up of what the bird tagging interface may look like. We're hoping to build this over the coming weeks. This will make it easier to tag audio recordings, which will give us more data to build automatic bird recognition models. We have some more information in this document specifying our audio tagging improvements.

We would love your feedback on this design. Please send any suggestions to feedback@2040.co.nz.

Creating a record of how the birdsong changes in your area is one way of measuring the outcome of your predator control efforts.

Incidentally, this week we had the privilege of meeting Carol Bedoya and Laura Molles who have developed technology to identify individual kiwi. They're expanding this to other species, so they can count the individual birds that are calling. Here's  their very cool paper: Acoustic censusing and individual identification of birds in the wild

Trap update

DOC having been catching lots of pests using our traps at Te Waihora: 11 last week, mainly hedgehogs and possums and at least one cat.  They've found that having thermal cameras with the traps has been extremely informative to show how much wildlife is out there.  It's also been a little bit addictive to wake up and see what's been captured overnight. Here's a video of mother with a joey being caught. The joey got away. We intend to do some more detailed analysis showing the catch rates of the Cacophony Traps vs the other traps out there, and showing the impact of the hazing on the traps.

Meanwhile the team at the Cacophony Project have been continuing development of the trap. We've been sharing snippets of this on our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram: 

• Stress testing of the new spring design that will make the trap cheaper and lighter.
• Stress testing of the blind mechanism to open and close the doors on the trap. The trap will capture the animal, identify it as pest or not, and then open up a door to free a non pest or the killing door for the pest. 
• The first successful test of the ramp - this was to test if a pest would climb a ramp and engage with an auto kill mechanism. In this instance the possum went straight up the ramp and engaged with the NZ Auto Traps AT220. The killing door will lead to the ramp.

They've also been working on:

• A self resetting and and electronic trigger mechanism for a DOC 250
• Cameras to do the machine vision in the traps, for the captured animal - we can use low cost, regular IR cameras for this, rather than thermal cameras.
• Embedding the machine vision algorithm on the camera, so we can play sounds based on the animal that is seen.

Watch this space for updates.

All of this is quite elaborate, but the aim is to create a fully automatic, high catch rate trap. For all the success DOC are having with our traps at Te Waihora, they still need to send someone to clear the traps. Making people more productive is one of the biggest opportunities in predator control.

We have been wondering what to call this "ramp trap". We thought if we had a competition it would probably end up as Rampity McRamp Face. If you have any better suggestions, please let us know.

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2040 Ltd is a social enterprise whose mission is to eradicate predators from NZ by manufacturing and selling open source technology developed by The Cacophony Project.