Once riddled with possums, after about a decade of hard yards by the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group, the outer reaches of Otago Peninsula are all but clear of the predator.
Only a handful of the introduced marsupials remain.
At Te Rauone, in Harington Point, there is still at least one.
Believed to be a female, the tenacious possum has appeared on camera but never in a trap.
Group operations manager Micaela Kirby-Crowe said the animal was dubbed "the Te Rauone bandit".
"It’s just become such a ‘thing’," Ms Kirby-Crowe said. "We know that there are a few more out there in certain locations but there’s just always one in this particular spot that we just can’t catch."
The "particular spot" was a scrubby patch of blackberry and vine-covered hillside near Te Rauone Beach.
The land was privately owned but publicly accessible and, because of its vegetation, it was hard to move around in and difficult to trap animals on, Ms Kirby-Crowe said.
At the start of the year, possum detection dogs and a hunting team from Taranaki came to sniff out most of the land between Portobello, Cape Saunders and Harington Point.
The specialist crew caught seven possums and were largely impressed by how few possums there were, she said.
They saw two possums in the Te Rauone area and after they left, the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group caught one.
"We’ve caught a lot of young ones in the area, basically, and then we’ve seen this big old one on camera that we just can’t catch.
"There could be more, just hiding in little patches that we haven’t seen, but it’s pointing towards there’s definitely one old female that is — I don’t know what you’d call it ... just good at keeping herself alive.
"She’s so savvy, I have a lot of respect for this old lady.
"Even though they’re the enemy, I still think they’re pretty neat little animals, and I respect them as creatures in their place — it’s just their place is not here."
Work was under way to try to track the animal to pinpoint its home range.
They had tried to use "food dumps" to lure the animal into a specific location, but those had only attracted other predators: hedgehogs, feral cats and stoats.
When possums were found, they turned up in "a lot of interesting places", she said.
"We often think of them as animals that will always be in trees, and that they need trees to survive, but we are seeing more and more that that’s just not the case.
"They just den in any sort of little holes and nooks and crannies.
"They can curl up and go to sleep in the middle of a flax bush.
"We found a young one that was asleep in somebody’s raised vege garden in their backyard in Waverley," Ms Kirby-Crowe said.
Bolstered by earlier — and ongoing — community efforts, since 2012 the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group had removed 22,000 possums from the area.
The group had used poisons — Feratox, brodifacoum and Double Tap.
Across the peninsula, a network of 80 or 90 cameras were used to detect the creatures’ movements.
But as they approached eradication levels in some places, they got harder and harder to catch, she said.
A Predator Free Dunedin spokeswoman said at the national Predator Free 2050 Hui in Dunedin last month, a field trip to the peninsula was a highlight for many of the about 120 attendees.
It was the first time the conference had been hosted in Dunedin and she said it was accepted, "reluctantly perhaps", Dunedin was New Zealand’s wildlife capital.
Predator Free Dunedin, its members and its delivery partners shared a long-term vision to get rid of rats, possums and stoats from Dunedin’s urban and rural landscapes by 2050.
The Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Group was now "well on its way" to eradicating possums, getting to very low numbers in the outer peninsula, she said.
Eradication of possums was seen as the most achievable, and removing the pest had the fewest negative "flow-on effects" — their eradication was the least likely to cause an increase in other pest species.
There were plans for stoat, ferret and weasel eradication being made, she said.
However, the organisation wanted to ensure that the proposed mustelid eradication would not have negative flow-on effects, which was why it was thoroughly "planning and researching" how it would do it first, the spokeswoman said.
