The Ecology Division of the former Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) ran a forest ecology programme in the Orongorongo Valley. Among many co-operating projects was a single long line of 116 rodent trap run at quarterly intervals, providing baseline index data on the rodents available for stoats. The Division’s technician designed the Edgar live trap for stoats and built 51 of them, and from late 1971 the same field methods that had worked well for Wytham weasels was applied to Orongorongo stoats. We recorded 29 captures of five stoats in the first 4 months, but only another 15 captures of four stoats over the next 3 years. The project was abandoned in early 1975. Meanwhile, the New Zealand Wildlife Service (NZWS) was becoming concerned about the declining numbers of an endangered endemic bird, the takahē, for which a strictly protected Special Area had been established in Fiordland. In May 1972, NZWS supported an expedition to establish a permanent array of humane Fenn traps to clear stoats from the bird’s last refuge. The first two stoats killed were both fertilised females, and hundreds more have since been removed.