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Protecting the Natural Heritage of the High Country

The 'high country' of the South Island has a special place in the psyche of New Zealand. Running down the island, hard against the Southern Alps, it blends into an iconic landscape of shingle riverbeds, tussock-floored basins, lakes, wetlands, and the ranges themselves.

For a century and a half, this high country has been a frontier in the farmers' fight against the forces of nature. It is also the only habitat for many of New Zealand's most endangered plants and animals, a whole biota of life which has developed specifically to live here. Protecting these values has been high on the agenda of Forest and Bird for at least a generation but, until recently, progress has been extraordinarily slow. While hundreds of thousands of hectares of native forest have been protected elsewhere, the values of the country's tussocklands have remained largely unrecognised. Sometimes the most valued species have been hidden away in inaccessible corners of the alpine foothills, generally on Crown-owned land, but nevertheless treated by some of the leaseholders as private fiefdoms.

Now, as the Crown moves to freehold the high-country leases, Forest and Bird is determined to see that extensive representative areas are retained in public ownership, to preserve the natural heritage and allow all people to have access to some of these magnificent wild lands.

The character of the high country is difficult to contain. From the high valleys of the Nelson Lakes district and the Marlborough foothills, the grasslands curl down the Southern Alps, crossing broad river valleys, glacial plains and pockets of wetland and lakes. In the Mackenzie Country, the high country encompasses a broad inland basin, shingle-filled by vanished glaciers. The skeined riverbeds of high-country rivers, habitat for ground-nesting birds, often spring from remnant glaciers which hang from the alps themselves.

Then, in Otago, the high country comes down from the high mountains to clothe the flat eroded tops of the central Otago massif, a series of exposed schist ranges extending from the Otago lakes almost to within sight of Dunedin.

The changing character of the high country, from north to south, is reflected in the differing species of plants and animals adapted to its varying harsh conditions. Generally, the high country has a dry climate, often hot and windswept as the nor'westers lose their rain on the western slopes of the Southern Alps and leave the eastern grasslands in a dry rainshadow. Because much of the land lies above 700 metres it is frequently cold, too. From daylight to nightfall the temperature can drop from baking hot to freezing, even in summer. In winter, snow covers the mountains and many lakes freeze, while elsewhere the hoarfrosts extend from the sheltered slopes and along the valley floors. Hundreds of different native plants and thousands of animals have evolved to cope with these conditions, and Forest and Bird wants places set aside to protect them.

The classic high country was once predominately in tussock, itself a variable range of plants, from red tussock in the wetter places to waist-high snowgrass on the mountainsides. Among the roots of the grasses may grow many herbaceous and small shrubby plants, including hebes, heaths and smaller species specially adapted to the harsh environment. Higher up, herbfields and cushion plants begin to predominate. Some consist of prostrate shrubs which can belie an age of 200-300 years, and among which banded dotterel and oystercatchers nest.

The insect life is extraordinary. Day-flying moths and alpine butterflies lend kinetic colour to the surfaces of rock and herb. An alpine weta survives the now and winter ice with a portion of glycol in its blood - a natural anti-freeze. Scientists have identified insect species sometimes peculiar to a single mountain range or peak. The late Sir Charles Fleming wrote of different species of cicada that occupied adjacent mountains. Through evolutionary time, the height of the mountains above ancient glaciers and deep river gorges had made separate and isolated islands of each peak.

Several species of birds, some endangered or threatened, migrate to the high country to breed. Wrybill, oystercatcher, dotterel, black stilt, and black-fronted tern nest on the riverbeds. Mountain birds such as kea and rock wren occupy the alpine mountain slopes, while high-country wetlands host populations of duck and threatened wetland species.

The high country is also a place where various unusual lizards survive. Lizard populations can be highly localised - the Seaward Kaikoura Ranges have two special species. The unnamed 'Takitimu' gecko described in our May 2002 issue is found only on one shingle scree (in western Southland).

Only in the past 10 or so years has it been possible to identify areas for conservation and follow a legal path to protect them in some form of park. The mechanism for this is known as Tenure Review, under which high-country leaseholders may buy the freehold to their run, in return for its reclassification into farmland and conservation land. The 28-step process is complicated and time consuming but has so far resulted in the setting aside of 116,000 hectares in Otago, and 8000 hectares in Canterbury, for future preservation in the conservation estate. Sadly, some farmers have set off to reclassify their land, then withdrawn from the process.

At the same time the issues have been complicated by the ease with which foreign interests have been able to buy up leases, often restricting public access and 'privatising' their properties for tourist developments - high-country leases in spectacular places are often ludicrously cheap by 'first-world' standards. There are also the very real opportunities to be had in selling off freehold high country, for tourist developments and sudivision into lifestyle blocks. At worst, among the earlier conservation reserves at least, some have been created as islands within freehold blocks, without public access.

Much of the high-country was formerly forest. Maori traditions speak of Tamatea Pokai Whenua, 'striding the land' warming it by lighting the fires of possession. Other traditions say early Maori settlers burnt vast tracts of Otago and Canterbury, including the plains, to drive out the giant moa which were slaughtered as they tried to escape. Even a cataclysmic storm, in a very dry season, could have triggered some changes, setting natural fires.

Charred stumps and fallen logs, particularly of totara trees, can still be found on some of the tussock slopes, lending substance to the traditional stories of the 'Fires of Tamatea'. In gullies which have escaped burning a few remnants of the old-time forests may still be found.

For around a century, pasture management was often reminiscent of the primitive 'slash and burn' practised by shifting agriculturalists. Fires lit by the first farmers to clear a way through the dry thickets of man-high tussocks and clawing matagouri became accepted pastoral practice. Firing the tussocks brought away the sweeter young growth, with a minimum of effort. The consequences, in terms of diminishing fertility and soil erosion, are easy to see today. When fires got away, as they often do, the natural protection afforded by forests of beech on the mountainsides was often swept away too. The sight of a small beech forest perched above an active shingle slide is a common reminder of the primitive farming methods which have so damaged the natural heritage of the high country.

Yet in the culture of time and place, the unsustainable nature of pioneer farming became enshrined in the myth of the high-country man. Sheep - Spanish merinos mainly - were let loose on the higher mountains from whence they were mustered down to the valley floors for shearing, and for hard feeding in the winter.
These musterers who climbed several hundred metres around dawn to drive straggles of sheep down to the valley floor might work their way in time to be head musterer, foreman or manager, and ultimately perhaps attain their own lease. It was a different world from clearing the northern bush, and the muddy labour of the cow cocky.

It was also a different world from today, where aeroplanes topdress the over-sown grasses and helicopters are used to spot the sheep; when improved communications, computers, and the involvement of big business have reworked the path to pastoral success. Ten years ago, 2.5 million hectares of the high country was farmed, supporting 3.2 million sheep, 100,000 cattle and 30,000 deer. Tenure review has reduced the the area since then, but changing farm practices have been a larger factor in the reduction of sheep numbers to round 2.5 million, with an unspecified increase in cattle and deer.

No longer subsidised, high-country farmers face a far more real world where resource management laws govern their practices to ensure they are sustainable. Introducing other income streams, such as tourism, can make or break them.

The vision of the high country as a place for any rugged New Zealander to wander freely, to shoot or fish, is fading rapidly as farmers and others capitalise on their assets in developing private skifields, safari parks and fishing lodges. One manager who had perhaps two visitors a month 10 years ago found himself with 200 a day at the height of the holidays: this growing number finds the way to his road-end gate in a Mackenzie country valley through the proliferation of four-wheel-drive recreational vehicles.

Foreign ownership, and foreign concepts of private rights, are affecting access to many properties too. Run-holders like this are probably unlikely to want to freehold their properties and lose their best conservation and mountain country in the process. Critics of these new owners are beginning to see the previous run-holders as comparatively benign and sharing people. They question whether the Overseas Investment Commission is doing its job properly as the high country goes through a social revolution which is leaving traditional New Zealand values only a glowing memory.

Forest and Bird's involvement in the high country debate is long standing. Its South Island field officers and branch people have been actively involved in the process of tenure review since it began. They have also used the Resource Management Act to advocate for more sustainable land and water management in the high country.

This year we have celebrated the creation of the Korowai/Torlesse Conservation Park, on high country inland from Christchurch, the culmination of a campaign begun more than 12 years ago. Now we are promoting the first drylands national park, over Crown conservation land in the Seaward and Inland Kaikoura ranges.. For the rest, Forest and Bird has a 'shopping list' of the kind of places which should become conservation parks and reserves. We must act now, while the ownership of high country is under review, if we are not to further endanger or lose the incredible heritage of plants and animals to be found in these outstanding landscapes.

Who Owns the High Country?

Most of the farmed high country is Crown owned, leased to farmers on a 33-year term, but with a perpetual right of renewal. A lease gives to a farmer the rights to graze stock, and control public access.

At the centre of the 'sustainability' debate has been a clause that requires farmers to obtain Crown consent for activities other than grazing; for example to burn vegetation, to cultivate or bulldoze the soil, or to plant pine trees. This is a step forward from the pioneer days (which ended in 1948) when farmers held their leases on a short-term basis - a system which according to a high-country farmers' own publication led to 'land abuse and exploitation'.

The move to perpetual leases at first led to a 'real sense of ownership'. For the early 1970s, however, farmers say the increasing involvement of Government agencies, and changing public perceptions of good management, frustrated them and led towards the bid to freehold properties during the 1990s.

Weeds in the High Country

A 'burn off' every 15 years or so clears the coarser plants out of the pasture grasses, according to a publication of high-country farmers.

The classic high-country weed story concerns 'the Molesworth', largest of the old New Zealand sheep stations, At 180,000 hectares it is more than twice the size of Tongariro National Park.

Over-grazing, soil erosion and economics, along with a plague of rabbits, led to the stations which make up Molesworth reverting to the Crown from 1938-49. High-country scientists, notably Dr Lance McCaskill, isolated the problems of what is nowadays known as 'unsustainable management'.

Gradually, the property and its associated runs were restored. Today Molesworth is still farmed by the State, maintaining a fragile balance with weeds, by carrying cattle not sheep.

Rabbits and weeds have been a cyclical problem in the high country everywhere. In more recent years hieracium species - various dandelion-like hawkweeds - have been a major problem. The silvery grey rosettes of hawkweed form a skin across the land (often when over-grazed by a combination of sheep and rabbit) inhibiting the regrowth of both introduced pasture and native plants. In the Mackenzie Country this even raised the spectre of planting out the magnificient panoramas with pine plantations.

Wilding pines blown across such landscapes are a common problem already in the high country. Wild brier rose, broom, lupin, stonecrop, thyme, bugloss and mullein are among the frequent weeds.

Once the original high-country cover is damaged, the landscape needs very careful management to recover, for farming or conservation.

Trees amongst the Tussock
by Gudrun Wells

The past distribution of woody plants in the now mostly treeless landscapes of Central Otago has been answered in a recent report by Susan Walker at Landcare Research. What is now mostly extensive tussock grassland and farmland was once a mosaic of closed forests, woodlands, shrublands, grasslands and herb communities.

Today there is very little native woody vegetation, and what is left occurs mostly on rocky outcrops and in steep gullies. These places are the last refuge for these plants because they were unprepared for the high rates of fire and stock browsing that humans brought with them. Some species, such as matai, are not found in the area any more.

In order to shape conservation goals, and to preserve what is left, there is a need to establish what the vegetation would have been before humans arrived. This was the aim of the Landcare Research report, which compared the current distribution of woody plants with the distribution of potentially suitable environments. The results were checked against the remains of wood, charcoal and pollen in the soil. This shows that diverse forests and shrublands were once extensive in Central Otago, but the picture at the moment for native trees and shrubs is grim, with the continued loss of woody remnants. There is much potential for revegetation from isolated stands, as seen on Flat Top Hill and at Locharburn, but only if they are not burnt and seedlings are protected from grazing.
Despite the fact that much more native woody vegetation has been lost at low altitude than at high altitude, lowland areas are represented in a much smaller percentage of reserved land. A handful of woody remnants are protected on covenanted land, and the process of tenure review may bring other areas under the control of DoC.

If the balance is not urgently addressed there will soon be little left for revegetation projects to work with, and the last vestiges of these once magnificent communities in Central Otago will be lost forever.

The Forgotten Fauna

The chance to protect some key native insect habitats in Central Otago could be lost through strained Crown resources, according to the president of the Entomological Society, Brian Patrick of Dunedin. Species potentially at risk include large weta, moths and stick insects, as well as thousands of much smaller creatures.

Moves to protect many local insect species through the process of Crown-land tenure review were highlighted during the annual conference of the Entomological Society of New Zealand.

'The Crown's resources to carry out surveys of areas of invertebrate biodiversity are "severely stretched" such is the pace of high-country tenure review,' Brian Patrick says. The 'unfortunate result' is that some areas which are not important botanically could be freeholded without taking account of their importance for insects, he warns.

'New Zealand's unique invertebrate species need to be safeguarded as part of world biodiversity,' Mr Patrick says.

The South Island high country has always been an inspiration for artists and writers. Few of the generation who in the 1930-50s made Christchurch the intellectual centre of New Zealand could have failed to respond to the alpine region on the upside of the Canterbury plains, its vast tussock basins, and the overshadowing alps.

In popular terms, the Auckland Weekly News regularly pictured the dramatic changes in the farming season: the musterer on horseback against shingled peaks, the skein of moving sheep, the dust in the shearing yards.

Such photographs confirmed the oral stories: only the hardest men went to shear and muster in this high country. Author Maurice Shadbolt and Magnum photographer Brian Brake, before their respective careers took off, made a mythologising documentary film about high-country life for the Government: the character and difference of farming in these mountains was encapsulated in its title, 'The Snowline Is Their Boundary'.

Painters were drawn to the high mountain valleys right from the European beginnings. Pick up any book about the old south and there's the horizon of snow-capped ranges, the foreground of golden tussock, with a a drift of smoke from a distant hut. In the 1960s, Colin Wheeler painted two volumes of Historic Sheep Stations of the South Island which were hugely popular. Now in the third millennium, painters such as Graham Sydney continue to celebrate the natural landscape in a totally different style. With them, southern writers such as Brian Turner and Neville Peat celebrate the land and its nature, as generations of southern writers have done before.

The Victorian author Samuel Butler began the literature with A First Year in the Canterbury Settlement. He then created powerful imaginary landscapes for his Erewhon satires, by simply recounting to a British public his experiences exploring the upper Rangitata and the Wilberforce.

For a century and a half, many well-educated run-holders took up the pen during the crushing days of winter and told the stories of their mountains and their experiences. There is scarcely a watershed in Canterbury which doesn't have its own literature.

Their women contributed pioneering stories too, notably A River Rules My Life (about Mt Algidus) by Mona Anderson which sold in excess of 60,000 copies in the 1950-60s.

Even the musterers mythologised themselves, in books like Musterer on Molesworth, Wayleggo and High Country Days.