Kauri Trees & Birds

Trip Start Mar 13, 2008
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Trip End Sep 12, 2008


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Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Just a quick little blog to talk about some beautiful little parks we've gone to over the past week or two.  One of them, Parry Kauri Park just outside Warkworth, has this magnificent 800 year old Kauri tree (and a 'younger' sibling nearby at roughly 600 years).  Much of the older Kauri have been logged over the past 150 years, but those that remain are now protected, and the pictures here are of some of those.  It's so wonderful to stroll through forests like this, listening to the birdsong that sounds so different from what you can hear in forests in the U.S., and gazing up at these amazing edifices of leaf and mighty branches and the patience of centuries. 

In Kerikeri we went walking on a track that promised to lead us to some "Faery Pools"; it was a little disappointing as it was obviously a hangout for teenager drinking parties at night, and they'd left all their trash behind Little Bird That Followed Us 1
Little Bird That Followed Us 1
 .  But then we continued on and had a wonderful time being trailed and challenged by these amazingly brash little birds called fantails.  It was as if they themselves were little faeries playing tag and hide and seek with us as we wandered through their domain. 

The Magnificent Kauri Trees
Kauri are among the world's mightiest trees, growing to more than 50 metres tall, with trunk girths of up to 16 metres. They covered much of the top half of the North Island when the first people arrived around 1000 years ago. Maori used their timber for boat building, carving and housing and their gum for starting fires and chewing (after it had been soaked in water and mixed with the milk of the puha plant).
The arrival of European settlers last century saw the decimation of these magnificent forests. Sailors quickly realised the trunks of young kauri were ideal for ships' masts and spars and settlers who followed discovered the mature trees yielded sawn timber of unsurpassed quality for building.
The gum, too, became essential in the manufacture of varnishes. Gum was obtained through digging, fossicking in treetops, or, more drastically, by bleeding live trees. The exploitation of forests increased with the demand for more and more cleared farmland Shepherd
Shepherd
 . Kauri forests once covered 1.2 million hectares; now they have been reduced to 80,000 hectares.
 
Facts Of Kauri Trees
-Ancestors of the kauri first appeared in the Jurassic Period 190-135 million years ago.
-Kauri forests are among the most ancient in the world.
-Kauri forests once covered a million hectares of the north. Now only 7455 hectares of mature forest remain.
-Waipoua Forest is the largest remaining kauri forest in the world.
-3/4 of Northland kauri forest were felled between 1800 and 1900.
-Younger kauri trees (rickers) carry short branches up their trunks until they are 120 years old.
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