WAR ON THE RATA.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 109, 11 May 1927, Page 6

WAR ON THE RATA.

The forest policy of the Mount Egrcont National Park Board strikes one as curiously inconsistent, at any rate so much of it as is indicated by two resolutions passed the other day. For one thing the board has made this year a close season for opossums, either wilfully or unwittingly regardless of the fact that the little beast with the fur sneaks into native birds' haunts and feeds on eggs and nestlings, and lives on the young shoots and leaves of trees. Moreover, the bush is its headquarters for raids on the out-settlers' orchards. By way of contrast, there is a resolution instructing the board rangers to cut rata vines wherever they are seen embracing forest trees in order to save those trees, especially the rimu, from slow death by strangling. The novelty of this anti-rata campaign is perhaps its chief recommendation. The rata's clinging ways, its gradual growth from slender vinehood's tendrils to an iron-armed killer of {Treat trees are so familiar a chapter of forest history that no one hitherto has troubled to readjust matters as between strangler r d victim. Old bushmen, it is true, have a dislike for the rata, founded on the fact that when it becomes a forest tree, having squeezed the life out of rimu or pukatea or whatever it tackles, it is a hollow fraud, and useless as timber. That is why standing rata trees are frequently set on fire by the sawyer or the timber mill man. If this crusade in tree protection now set going at Egmont becomes general, the life of many a fine red pine may be prolonged, but forest lovers will lose an ulways fascinating lesson in the life story of the bush. And it is quite a debatable question whether the age-long processes of life and death in the forest should be interfered with in this arbitrary fashion by brief-lived man. What about a Rata Protection Society by wav of a counterblast ? —TANGIW \I. *