Boundary Stream Reserve A Pleasure To Visit

The Hawke's Bay on a good day is a superb piece of the country, and when we got there some lovely weather had arrived to show just how good the region could look.

The Hawke’s Bay on a good day is a superb piece of the country, and when we got there some lovely weather had arrived to show just how good the region could look.

I’d been invited to a gathering of former Wildlife Service officers who were honouring  48 years of service to the conservation of wildlife and wild places by John Adams. The stories of great feats, marvellously accurate shots, wild mountains and hidden valleys visited, dogs of extraordinary intelligence, and hazy days in back-country pubs all flowed thick and fast, and were accompanied by much laughter, camaraderie, rich venison casseroles and an occasional libation. 

In was both a privilege and an education to sit and watch and listen; and although Sunday was, perhaps, a tad more genteel and slower, the day was again crisp and clear. The birdlife in the wetlands west and north of Napier was plentiful and busy with the business of nesting, hatching and feeding the next generation.

We headed north towards Wairoa – grape-vines and orchards were all breaking into brilliant green leaf, and suddenly the country’s sodden, miserable winter was a fading memory.

Highway 2 initially hugs the coastline, and that morning the Pacific Ocean, stretching away unbroken to Chile, was a great slab of flat blue-green marcasite that sparkled and glittered in the warm sun. But as the road turned inland at Tangoio, so the countryside changed, becoming tough and lumpy, scraggy farmland interspersed with steep pine forests and pockets of native bush trying hard to regenerate.

The land here is fragile, showing plenty of deep scars, jagged rents and precariously-perched boulders, all indicating that the ground is prone to slipping if the natural covering of bush is removed.

As we neared Tutira, the Tutira Wildlife Refuge lake sidled along the eastern edge of the highway for a kilometer or two, and then it was left behind as we turned inland, the road heading up past the iconic Tutira Station, the remarkable story of which is so intricately told by William Herbert Guthrie-Smith, renowned ornithologist, environmentalist and conservationist, who lived on the station for 58 years after settling there in 1882. His descriptions of the changes to the land, the wildlife, the bush and the traditional Maori way of life in the region are a fascination to any student of New Zealand history.

The road, not yet sealed, twists and winds dustily, rising rapidly past the Tutira Lodge and the substantial station itself. Around it, sheep and beef country sweeps to a skyline of bare, round-nosed hills, and away south we could clearly see the Kaweka Ranges, still with a blanket of snow on the tops.

And so we came suddenly to our objective – the Boundary Stream mainland island reserve, on the eastern side of the Maungaharuru Ranges. It is 800 hectares of quality native forest said to be the last significant patch of such bush in the Hawke’s Bay region. In fact, two bush blocks are connected by a narrow neck of trees that act as a corridor for native birds to pass from one patch to the other. Just over 700ha is administered by the Department of Conservation, while an additional 100ha is privately-owned land, which Doc also has a hand in managing.

It’s different from the ring-fenced Maungatautari mainland island reserve we have here in the Waikato. Boundary Stream has some pest-proof fencing along a portion of its flanks, but elsewhere it is open to the possibility of invasion by predators.

The reserve was established just 15 years ago, and in that time Doc has worked strenuously to bring the bush and its wildlife back to something that begins to resemble what might have been. There is a good latticework of tracks throughout the area, some an hour or so of gentle strolling, and others up to five hours of solid walking.

And there are also signs advising that Diphacinone poison has been laid in the reserve – dogs should be kept out, and children reined in.

As we headed onto the hour-long Tumanako loop nature walk, we were immediately taken by a constant and delightfully bright babble of bird-song around and above us. It was close to mid-day, yet tui and bellbirds, fantails and robins, and the occasional strident kingfisher were all chuckling and chortling with their strongly-held views on the sunshine and the amount of good trucker that was obviously available.

“The anti-1080 people should come in here and listen to this for five minutes, and then try telling the world that all the poison does is create silent forests,” noted one of the Wildlifers.

Just inside the bush edge was a bulletin-board, with its latest chalked-up entry noting that three pairs of kokako had been located in the latest survey. Five pairs were brought to the reserve from Te Urewera National Park, to the north of the reserve, in 2001. Brown kiwi were reintroduced in 2000 after the last kiwi had been heard in the area only three years before.

For several years after the reserve’s establishment, Doc worked hard to get rid of pests and predators, taking out deer, pigs, goats, possums, rats, stoats and weasels. That control programme continues, and along the track we came across a number of mustelid traps, baited with either eggs or dead rabbit.

The regenerating bush is strong and good to see – towering tawa, red and black beech, rimu, matai, kamahi, hinau are all providing great canopy cover for seedling crops and dense patches of pepperwood, coprosma and fern in the lower storey.

And, of course, they are also providing plenty of nesting sites and good year-round food for the flourishing native bird numbers. Morepork, falcon, riflemen and whitehead are all adding their chatter to the others we heard.

Along the way we saw half-metre square stacks of what looked like dull brown corrugated core-board which, said the Wildlifers, were lizard monitoring sites – the little creepies crawl into the invitingly-safe narrow gaps between the core-board layers, thus allowing themselves to be counted from time to time.

We saw a similar weta-monitoring station tacked to a tree along the way, and passersby such as us can open the hinged wooden front and peer in through clear Perspex at the denizens within – in this case several weta and a bush cockroach.

At one stage on the track we apparently passed through the territory of a karearea, the New Zealand native falcon, and probably because his mate was nesting at the time he objected vociferously to our intrusion, hurtling in speeding swoops across the sky above the bush canopy and screaming a series of sharp, staccato epithets as he ordered us out.

We obliged, and wandered back to the vehicle, having seen and heard a better array of native birdlife than I’ve come across in a long while.

The Boundary Stream reserve may be a little off the beaten track, and I’m sure Doc still has plenty of work to do there over the next decade or two, but what they’ve accomplished so far is hugely worthwhile.

“Yeah,” said one of the Wildlifers as we drove away, “it’s nice to have been part of an outfit that can do something as good as that.”             

Kingsley Field can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz  He has so far published two illustrated volumes of his Outdoor columns.

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