Dying-forest trip ‘reality slap in face’
The heart of the East Cape’s Raukumara Forest Park should be full of lush native trees and teeming with native birds. Instead, it is silent. Possums have savaged the trees, leaving 1000-year-old giants of the forest to die slow deaths.
Deer have been doing the groundwork, hoovering up the understorey, destroying both the forest’s future and a key food source of berries and seeds for native birds and insects.
Rats have been eating seeds and bird eggs, and stoats killing chicks in their nests. The lack of forest is drying up the land too, leading to erosion.
“The forest is dying,” Department of Conservation ranger Graeme Atkins said.
Atkins, of Nga¯ ti Porou descent, has been documenting the decline of the remote East Coast forest for 30 years, both as a hunter and in DoC surveys.
“It is bloody depressing work. When I first started, there was a glorious understorey, it was one of the last tracts of the country not invaded by red deer. It began to vanish before my eyes.”
Deer numbers had previously been kept in check by feral venison recovery operators, and possums arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, Atkins said.
DoC spent about $250,000 a year controlling red deer and goats over 30,000ha in the park, but there was no possum control.
Discussions about what to do about it had become heated in Ma¯ori East Coast communities, which contained many keen hunters. Threats had been made when 1080 use was discussed.
In a bid to show the community the reality of what they were up against and promote rational discussion on pest control, Atkins selected 15 Nga¯ti Porou community members to join him for a night in the heart of the ngahere. DoC provided up to $20,000 to helicopter them in.
Atkins said: “They all thought it would be this magical place, with pristine bush, bulging with birds, deafening dawn chorus. They all got a reality slap in the face.”
In the two days they saw no kereru¯, tu¯¯ı or bellbirds. Instead of a deafening dawn chorus, it was silent. In most places the understorey was gone, with hundreds of dead to¯tara. “Seeing that made the tears flow.” Atkins had seen it all before, but the group was devastated.
Te Runanganui o Nga¯ti Porou trustee Tui Warmenhoven said the visit highlighted the challenges they faced: “The issues are clear: decimated understorey, deathly silence, collapsing ecosystem.”
HFor video go to nzherald.co.nz Pesticides such as 1080 may be needed to target possums in the forest despite fierce resistance to its use.
The visit was the first stage for the iwi in terms of considering pest control options, Warmenhoven said. Raukumara Forest Park, established in 1979, covers 115,000ha of extremely rugged and remote, bushclad land. Iwi including Nga¯ti Porou, Te Wha¯nau-a¯-Apanui, Te Ehutu, Nga¯i Tai, Whakato¯hea and Te Aitanga-a¯Mahaki, and affiliated hapu¯ have occupied and continued to maintain mana whenua on all flanks of the ranges.
DoC, which administers the park, is working on a co-ordinated approach regarding its management. The last large-scale possum control
operation was 20 years ago involving aerial application of 1080. The region was free of tuberculosis (TB), which was partly why there had been little 1080 focus. There had also been strong local opposition.
After the tour, Atkins said the group was more open to options regarding pest control.
“Some people think the pests in there can be controlled by hunting, or trapping. After the trip they were all pretty resolute that manpower was not going to fix all of it.”
Options included increasing deer hunting and trapping in easy-toaccess areas. But with the remote places, Atkins said there must be a discussion on 1080 targeting possums.