A Forest without Deer

Forest and Bird, Issue 169, 1 August 1968, Page 10

A Forest without Deer

By

BERNARD TEAGUE

ABOUT 60 members at the Waiomu (Thames) Forest and Bird camp in January set out on the final morning to follow an old mining track from the summit of the Tapu-Coroglen road, along the range, to the site of an old mining village named Neavesville. Only the fact that the track was ankle deep in red Coromandel clay prevented most from reaching the destination. The day was pleasant and all enjoyed the very beautiful forest. Common here were botanical treasures that could not be seen in many other parts of New Zealand. True, the beautiful climbing fern, Lygodium articulatum, is found only from the Bay of Plenty northward; so we from other parts would look on it with reverence. But what of all those other forest floor dwellers, filmy ferns and other ferns, and the shrubs such as Myrtus bullata, once common in the Wellington Province, and the beautiful white Senecio kirkii, thriving here, but now growing only in the Urewera as a rare epiphyte? Why are they here in such profusion, but absent elsewhere? Luxuriance of Growth It was not until I had been in this forest for about an hour that suddenly into my mind there flashed the realisation that I was tramping in a forest where no deer were present. I remember saying suddenly to someone near me, “Do you know we are tramping in a forest without any deer?” That was the reason for the luxuriance of the growth and the thickness and naturalness of it all. Then I realised what a loss it had been to me over the past, say, 40 years. Almost all my bush tramping, even high in the alpine basins of the New Zealand mountains, had been done in country where deer had arrived long before I had and had reached such numbers as to clear the forest floor and remove the understory of the big trees and half defoliate the alpine basins, destroying the succulent plants and shrubs and some trees wherever they fed. I have tramped in many parts of New Zealand, and, at. last, on this Coromandel range

top I realised what I and thousands of others now miss in places like the Eglinton, the Murchison district, and the Urewera. We miss the joy of a forest which has not been defoliated by animals such as deer and cattle. Only by a sight of an undamaged forest can we realise how much is now lacking at, say, Waikaremoana. This would be the reason then that Senecio kirkii is only a rare epiphyte in the Urewera. It can grow only on a jutting rock or on a tree trunk where animals’ tongues cannot reach. No Regeneration A few weeks ago I was alone in a patch of Waikaremoana forest for some hours. Though the bush was full of interest and I was able to examine many things from insects and fungi to curious growths, I also realised that this forest was really badly damaged. Only the big trees were standing and only a few unpalatable ferns were left, such as Blechnum discolor and Dicksonia lanata. Where a great beech tree had crashed, say, 100 years before and had now rotted into an excellent seedbed for seedling trees there was no regeneration, only the bare brown rotting trunk. Thirty years ago this area, above and below the Waikareiti track, already ravaged by 30 years of deer feeding, was a mass of small understory trees, such as the previously dominant five-finger, in a dead or dying condition. In the past 20 to 30 years these dead trees have fallen and now the forest is much more open and drier than it used to be. The variety of plant life is gone and the unpalatable crown fern and the Dicksonia lanata are increasing to such extent that soon there will be little else on the forest floor. In the higher Urewera country, in the damp basins beneath the tops of the ranges, acres of Todea ferns have been destroyed. Their gaunt dead boles stand as a witness to deer feeding. What a joy then, it was, to tramp at Coromandel in this beautiful forest without deer.