Lake Tutira

In a hollow of the hills north of Napier, New Zealand, lies Lake Tutira, and the tiny Lake Waikopiro nearby. I visited this beauty spot on an overcast day in April 2009. The water had a leaden cast, and veils of drizzle drifted across the hills. I had an interesting and thoughtful day walking around and photographing some of the abundant bird life. A pair of Canada geese grazed unconcerned on the parking area, and further on a group of black swans were busily cropping the grass. There were ducks aplenty, and I managed to get close enough to some wary pukekos to snap them.

I'm told the black swans were introduced into New Zealand by settlers from Western Australia, and they have flourished, dominating nearly all the lakes in North Island. Elegant birds, black swans can also be a tad tetchy -- while I was lining up photos, one pair swam purposefully towards me, raising their beaks and ruffling their wing-feathers in what was I suppose a classic 'territorial threat' attitude. However, this correspondent stood his ground and the great birds stopped just short of pecking me. In the process I snapped some quite interesting portraits!

The Challenge!

Tutira is a public nature reserve, and the lake and surrounding 2000 acres are the remnant of the large sheep station run by Herbert Guthrie-Smith, sheep-farmer, naturalist and a noted authority on New Zealand birds. At its peak the station comprised over 60 000 acres, but over the years much of the land was made available to ex-servicemen; the remaining 2 000 acres were bequeathed to the nation to be used for educational and recreation purposes. Tutira is held in trust by the Guithrie-Smith Trust: some of the land is farmed, there is a school and an Outdoor Education Centre, and the lake has long been stocked with trout.

It was a during visit to the national Te Papa Museum in Wellington, in October 2008, that I came across the name Guthrie-Smith. An exhibit in the nature section showed startling information on the extinction of native New Zealand bird species, and some facts about the deforestation of New Zealand by successive waves of colonists -- first the Maori and then the
Europeans. I would like to come back to my involvement with Herbert Guthrie-Smith in a later blog, as I have become very interested in his affairs and books.


Sadly to report, Lake Tutira is now polluted with a toxic algal bloom. The day I was there, a group of scientists from NIWA (National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research) were trawling the lake for aquatic organisms ("bugs") , the statistical analysis of which indicates the health of a body of water. My water chemistry and microbiology is rusty, but I intend to do some more reading on it.

Guthrie-Smith the farmer burnt off the fern growth to plant English grass seed, as did most settlers; they had to clear the native forests and bush to make pasture and arable land to survive. The pasture was often fertilized with super-phosphate, but with my present knowledge I have no idea what happens to the run-off from fertilized land. I fear the early settlers, and the Maori colonists before them cleared the native vegetation from regions with unsuitable soils. My view of the soils at Tutira was that they were very thin and poor, underlain with a soft mudstone.

The business of deforestation gives me food for thought, but there is much more to it than one can write here. Of particular concern was the logging of the old-growth Kauri and Podocarpus forests, in North and South Islands respectively. Those forests will never be reinstated, but then that process is a bone of contention wherver forests are pillaged for timber.

I'll probably continue in another blog, as I mentioned I have aquired an interest in all this.