FOREST VANDALISM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18631, 12 February 1924, Page 9

FOREST VANDALISM.

FIRES IN THE WAITAKERES DESTRUCTION OF THE BUSH. NEED FOR GREAT CARE. The careless lighting of fires in the Waitakere Ranges during the past week or two has caused a . lamentable amount of damage to the beauty of Auckland's western hills. At present the dead scrub on the outskirts of the bush is as dry as tinder and a fire o;ice started is very difficult to control. A well-known Aucklander who is spending the summer in the ranges writes strongly o n the subject, stating that within the last fortnight many hundreds of acres of bush and scrub-bush have been destroyed. "Whether it is the result of criminal carelessness or careless criminality I do not know," he writes, "but the result is the same. I rode over from McElwain's yesterday, and for a stretch of several miles, fire had destroyed' the green growth on one side or the other and dead logs _ were smouldering everywhere. That particular road, once one of the loveliest in the Waitakeres. has had many unhappy experiences of the same kind; but it was beginning to pick up again and now, alas, for many miles, it is a blackened waste once more." Much that has been burnt was' only scrub, continues the writer, but this scrub was sheltering valuable growths. • At one point, there were literally hundreds of young kauris from twenty to forty feet high, which are now scorched and' dead. Every time a fire of this kind is started, it runs a certain distance into the green bush and kills as it goes, besides leaving dead timber for the next burn.

Some of these recent fires have been started by people who . ought to Have more sense, states the writer, who quotes a case that occurred only two weeks ago, in which a fire was started in a little open space at the top of a mountain road by, or under the direction of, the owner of a summer cottage in the ranges. A high wind was blowing, everything was bone-dry, and for some hours the situation was dangerous, the fire finally being brought under control by * a' squad of "beaters."

"Bit by bit the edge of the forest is thus being nibbled away," concludes the letter, "and the unlovely scrub and fern area is being extended. Unless some action can be taken to prohibit foolhardy and careless people from pkving with fire in the ranges, these magnificent hills of ours, which it should be the pride and pleasure of all Aucklandei's to protect, will be a brown and ugly waste in the course of a generation or two."