Dear Friends of Flora (FoF) and supporters, please take a moment to look at our email newsletter No.9 (September 2004) sent to inform you of our efforts to bring the birdlife back to the Flora.

Hats off to Paul! Friends of Flora stalwart Paul Ewers deserves special recognition for his strenuous and ongoing efforts to rid the Flora of pests. Rather than putting his feet up after a week of managing a kiwifruit orchard, once a month Paul takes on back to back our two 'alpine' lines - A (Mt Arthur) and G (Lodestone). Sometimes alone , sometimes accompanied by some hardy volunteers, Paul and his team have been responsible for the recent increase in possum kills and he is working with DoC on how to make these traps more manageable. Commitment to FoF runs in the family; Paul's daughter Kim is an enthusiastic supporter and recently spent many hours preparing our accounts for their annual audit.

Birds back. Kim Turner has been busy entering data from our bird monitoring efforts over the past 30 or so months into a DoC database. On the 'I' line (carpark to Gridiron) a trend is starting to emerge of a steadily climbing number of bird calls heard and birds sighted over the past 12 months. Kim will soon have some statistics to present to us once he has finished crunching the numbers. 'It's an early call, but the trend is that as we catch more stoats and rats, we are seeing and hearing more birds' says Kim. Just on birds, our smallest, the rifleman/titipounamu was present at almost every 200m bird monitoring stop between the Flora Hut and Gridiron Shelter in the snow last Sunday and Chris Potter reports a lot of kaka sign around Lodestone.

Snow bizz. The southerly of 18/19 September brought a good dump of snow to the Flora. It may not have been the coldest weekend of the year up there, but it certainly looked that way. The FoF sign at the junction of the I and A (Mt Arthur) lines was covered with a thick blanket of snow, causing it to resemble a large, leaning iced cake. Traps were a bit hard to find, too.

'Sno stoats for Sept? Like July, the pest catch for August was fairly modest, but boosted by possums on Paul's A and G lines. For the record we got rid of 4 stoats, 14 rats, 3 mice and 12 possums, bringing our total pest kill since Feb 2002 to:

Stoats: 176 Rats: 329 Mice: 467 Possums: 34

along with the odd cat, weasel and wasp nest. However, September looks set to be our first 'no stoat' month for the 30 months we have been keeping records. Confirmation in next month's newsletter.

That's all for this month. We'll be in touch again soon.

Ivan Rogers FoF Committee