It’s a cheezle mate, it’s worth a crack

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Another one of the random things my wife has signed me up for recently is helping out with a pest eradication programme in Wellington.

We had a nice, young, earnest chap come around one evening with a rat trap and a mouse trap and a wooden box. He explained how to set the traps, what to put in them etc – peanut butter works well.

He then tried to manage our expectations by telling us that some people haven’t caught anything in their traps, and that’s ok.

Setting the mouse traps is no biggie. The rat trap however is a bit more scary. If that thing goes off and you’re a bit slow to get out of the way, it’ll take your finger off!

So now every morning I go out to check the traps. So far we have caught at least one mouse each day. The last couple of days we didn’t get anything and I was beginning to think that we’d got them all. But this morning there was a poor wee chap in the box, not looking at all well.

You see, we had been catching mice so regularly, (and still all the bait was being eaten) that we got some more traps and filled the box with them. The hapless mouse got caught in the first trap which set off the other traps. When I pulled him out the poor bugger was ‘trapped’ from both ends.

That makes the unpleasant process of ‘untrapping’ the mouse just a bit more unpleasant.

Despite that, we’ll continue doing our bit to free our neighbourhood of rodents. The country plans to be pest free by 2050. And if we can do that, it would be really good.

Since Zealandia – the first ever predator free reserve inside a city, opened up, the regeneration of native birdlife around Wellington has been quite remarkable. When I first came to Wellington you never heard the call of a tui. But now we have tuis and kaka and fantails all over the place, which is just awesome.

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Tui

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Kaka

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Fantail

The title of this post comes from a TV ad from my childhood – two mice are investigating a mouse trap with a cheezle on it.
One says, “I don’t think you should.”
The other replies, “But it’s a cheezle mate, it’s worth a crack.”
SNAP!!
The first mouse says “Oh well, it was worth a crack Nigel. Nigel?”

“It’s worth a crack Nigel” is a saying that is now in common use in New Zealand. And when things go wrong, you can quite often hear, “Oh well, it was worth a crack Nigel.”

It’s a bit like earning money on Steemit – it’s worth a crack Nigel.

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