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In between Bluff and Invercargill, the small village of Omaui sits next to two reserves, one administered by the Invercargill City Council and the other by DOC, that are remnants of the lowland coastal forests that once covered the area. There are large rātā, some up to 800 years old, rimu, totara, birds, invertebrates and native lizards. Visitors are able to enjoy the reserves with a walking track forming a popular loop walk through the bush.
The Omaui Landcare Charitable Trust (OLCT) has been trapping introduced mammalian predators in the reserves since 2013 in an effort to protect the bush. In 2016, they received a grant from the Leslie Hutchins Conservation Foundation Trust to help them in this work. The OLCT is run by volunteers who spent many hours walking trap lines and re-setting traps. The grant from the LHCFT allowed the OLCT to buy replacement lures and gas cylinders for the re-settable trap network that they had just established. These traps need fewer volunteer hours to run, and free up the Trust for other jobs on the reserves such as monitoring introduced predators, bird counts and just enjoying being on the reserves.
The bush takes time to recover from the effects of introduced predators, but the signs are encouraging. In 2020, the OLCT volunteers are still trapping, but are also seeing large flocks of kereru and hearing groups of red-crowned kākāriki chattering to each other.
