Tāne Mahuta, the largest known kauri tree, in the Waipoua Forest is a drawcard for many tourists. Photo / The New York Times
Tāne Mahuta, the largest known kauri tree, in the Waipoua Forest is a drawcard for many tourists. Photo / The New York Times
To celebrate Christmas, every day for 12 days the Advocate is sharing with readers a Northland charity or organisation that supports those within the community. In turn, you can learn how best to help them this festive season. Today we speak to the Waipoua Forest Trust.
Twenty years ago a group of Kaipara locals gathered together to secure enough funding to purchase three sections of land that share a boundary with the Waipoua Forest.
Waipoua Forest Trust general manager Georgina Read said they spent the next decade trying to regenerate that land which had previously been cleared.
The trust described the forest as an ancient ecosystem and one of the largest areas of surviving Kauri.
“The main aim is to protect the Waipoua Forest,” Read said. “The Waipoua is so diverse, it’s so ancient, it houses so much biodiversity.
“We’re creating buffer zones to protect it from the onset of climate change and we’re also hopefully creating weed buffer zones by doing maintenance on these reserves and stopping any more weeds going into the Waipoua.”
The trust was also trying to extend the Waipoua by creating new forests so it gets “bigger and bigger” rather than “smaller and smaller” due to land clearing, Read said.
She explained that they had managed to replant one of the reserves - 60ha big - in Aranga on the south side of the Waipoua Forest. They had help from the Government’s One Billion Trees Program. The initiative provides grants that work towards the goal of planting one billion trees by 2028.
“They’ve also helped us through milestone payments of successful plantings, that funding we’ve put towards building a native plant nursery.”
Read said four locals are employed in the nursery, undertaking propagation.
Currently, the Waipoua Forest Trust is made up of seven staff - two of whom are younger and hail from local iwi Te Roroa - and five board members, which includes two key conservation advisers, a business savvy volunteer, and chair Alex Nathan of Te Roroa who has been with the trust since day one.
Together they have branched out from their forest-focused roots, as Read said the trust had helped her establish the Kauri Coast Dotterel Watch a few years ago.
She said dotterels were nesting in many river mouths right along Mangonui Bluff through to South Head.
“And they have no protection programme happening.”
Nesting New Zealand dotterels and their chicks are particularly vulnerable to vehicles on the beach.
One way people could help the trust this summer is to watch out for dotterel while enjoying the Kauri coast.
“Keeping their vehicles above the high tide line and keeping their dogs on leads, kids contained, is absolutely essential for these birds to be able to nest and then fledge successfully.”
And when it comes to the forest, the Waipoua Forest Trust is looking for volunteers to get hands-on and help with bushland maintenance.
“Which is weed spraying and going into the bush and doing trap lines for catching stoats and putting out poisons in bait stations for poisoning rats and possums,” Read said.
She hoped young people would be keen to take up the hard graft, both because the work is more suited to them but to also to grow their interest in conservation.
“At times we struggle to fulfil all of our objectives because we just don’t have the people who are willing to commit themselves or learn these kinds of skills.”
