A release of robins at Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari. Photo / Phil Brown
From an ancient forest that used to be home to an abundance of native flora and fauna, to being eroded for pastoral land, to becoming home to more than 700 species, Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari has had quite the journey.
Standing amongst the dense green tree canopy, listening to the cacophony of birdsong, it’s hard to imagine Maungatautari looking any different.
But what can be experienced today is the result of decades of work, mostly by passionate volunteers and locals.
The ancient 797m volcano between Cambridge and Putāruru was once largely eroded for forestry and farming, which caused many native species to vanish.
Over the past 30 years, Maungatautari has come full circle.
The 3400ha now known as Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari (SMM) is predator-free, surrounded by 47km of pest-proof fence, covered in forest, and home to 730 species.
“[The maunga] pulsates. You can really feel it’s alive when you are standing in the forest,” Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari chief executive Helen Hughes says.
“It blows me away every day. This is what 100% New Zealand looks like.”
SMM had been struggling financially in recent years and was on the brink of closure.
Now it’s slowly coming out the other end, but Hughes says the work is far from over.
“We need to make sure the sanctuary is still here in 500 or 1000 years.
“Every human relies on nature every day... And there is a reliance on nature continuing to provide [well into the future].
“Yet humanity doesn’t always do right by nature.”
Hughes says SMM provided a space where nature thrives.
“We are able to showcase what nature looked like thousands of years ago.
“We hope this will motivate more people to put nature at the front of the boardroom.
“If nature thrives, humanity thrives.”
Thousands of years ago, before human contact, Maungatautari was cloaked in ancient native and endemic forest, Waipā District Council’s Maungatautari Reserve Management Plan says.
Local iwi, including Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Raukawa, Ngāti Hauā and Waikato, have a strong connection to the area and the forest.
The mountain was named by Rakataura, a tohunga of the Tainui waka, who saw the mountain appearing to float above the fog and asked “ko wai te maunga e tautari mai naa?” (Who is the mountain floating there?), it says in the plan.
“The people of the Tainui waka have continued to live in and around the mountain for generations.
“All living things were perceived to have mauri and mana, so iwi sought permission from spiritual guardians of the forests before felling trees to build canoes and taking plants and birdlife for food.”
With the influx of humans in the 1880s, more of the forest was eroded for forestry and farming, causing many of the native bird and insect species to disappear.
Saddleback, North Island robin, and stitchbird disappeared in the late 1800s or early 1900s, while kiwi, kākā and kākāriki vanished by the mid-1900s.
In the late 1990s, a concerned group of locals, including iwi, landowners and local residents, came together to restore and protect this precious ecosystem.
At the project’s centre was local farmer and businessman David Wallace and his wife Juliette.
Wallace feels strongly connected to the area through his family.
“My grandparents had a farm... on the lower slopes of Maungatautari. All my boyhood and the holidays, most of it was spent up on the farm,” he says.
Wallace said he considered himself to be “a land person” which was also reflected in his work as a farmer.
“[I] just have a great love of land and respect for it.
“[I’ve] come to see [land] as a gift and a responsibility... Our ownership is temporary.”
However, the “birthplace” for the Maungatautari project was his and Juliette’s home, called Warrenheip, near Lake Karapiro, about 20km away from Maungatautari.
When they purchased Warrenheip in the 1990s, the property, which featured a forest and stream, was covered in pest plants such as blackberry and pussywillow.
“We wanted to restore it. We learned of a man named Roger McGibbon, who had just retired from Taupo Native Tree Nursery.
“He made us a planting programme every year.”
Through the planting on their private property, they connected with people from DoC and other environmentalists.
“[Through them] Juliette and I learned the blinding truth about New Zealand and its history.”
They read several books, including Nga Uruora by Geoff Park, Wallace said, which detailed the “degradation” of several areas of New Zealand “as we humans impacted upon them”.
Inspired by this, as well as the work of DoC, which by then had eradicated pests from a large number of offshore islands and “brought them back to life”, the Wallace’s looked to recreate those efforts in their own backyard.
“The sea protects those offshore islands. I spent the first 15 years of my farming life... building fences. [I thought] why don’t we emulate the sea by designing a pest-proof fence?”
Together with Tim Day, who Wallace got to know through AgResearch, they came up with several pest-proof fence designs for their property at Warrenheip.
Together with local fencer George Calvert, they built prototypes and trialled each design to see which was most effective.
They then built the one deemed most successful around Warrenheip. The 2.5km fence was completed in 1999.
They then eradicated the pests inside the fence by spreading rodent bait by hand through the enclosure.
“It’s not a kind way to eradicate animals, but it’s effective.”
Wallace never lost sight of the bigger dream.
“[I always said] we’ll do our small postage stamp forest [at Warrenheip], but one day I wanted to make Maungatautari... pest-free.”
Wallace easily found volunteers for the project, saying they “flooded in” sharing the dream.
“Looking back, it was even more powerful than what we believed at the time.”
In 2001, they formed Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust, with support of mana whenua.
Together, they built 42km of pest-proof fence around the mountain, plus five km of internal fences, now known as the Southern and Northern Enclosures.
While about 20 people were involved in building the fence, once the sanctuary was up and running, at its peak, it had 400 volunteers.
The project received funding from several local councils, as well as central government.
By 2004, all mammals were eradicated from the initial two enclosures and the maunga was able to become home to numerous native species again.
North Island brown kiwi were reintroduced in 2005, gifted from Ngāti Hikairo ki Tongariro and other iwi.
Now, SMM’s population is booming and estimated to comprise about 2500 kiwi.
The population is doing so well, the sanctuary has gifted 599 kiwi over the past three years to other sites across New Zealand.
The sanctuary is also part of the Takahē Recovery Programme: the first takahē breeding pair arrived in 2006.
There are currently two breeding pairs of takahē living at the sanctuary with their chicks and as of the end of 2024, SMM contributed 27 chicks to the programme.
The sanctuary wrote history in 2023 when it became home to a male kākāpō population.
The translocation, in collaboration with DoC and iwi Ngāi Tahu, marked the first time for kākāpō to live on the mainland in nearly four decades.
Other species at the sanctuary include giant weta, tuatara, Hochstetter’s frog, North Island saddleback (translocated 2013), North Island robin (translocated 2011), kākā (released from 2007) and kōkako (first translocated 2015).
Numerous fungi and plant species are also thriving.
Danielle Zollickhofer is the Waikato news director and a multimedia journalist at the Waikato Herald. She joined NZME in 2021 and is based in Hamilton.