Mountain Scene
April 9, 2021
By GUY WILLIAMS
The Wakatipu Reforestation Trust will celebrate a major milestone this weekend when its 50,000th native plant goes into the ground.
The moment will come tomorrow morning at Whitechapel Reserve, near Arrow Junction, where the trust’s holding the first of four planting days this autumn.
Operations manager Karen O’Donahoo says the trust and its volunteers have been planting natives throughout the Wakatipu Basin since 2015, and the milestone demonstrates that “from little things, big things grow”.
‘‘We’re restoring biodiversity to areas of public land that were not so long ago neglected and infested with invasive weeds,’’ O’Donahoo says.
Mountain Scene
By GUY WILLIAMS
The Whakatipu Conservation Celebration planned for tonight at the Kiwi Birdlife Park has been knocked on the head because of the elevated Covid alert level earlier this week.
But one of the speakers lined up for the event, local Department of Conservation boss Geoff Owen, says in a statement the community’s put thousands of volunteer hours into native planting and predator control efforts.
‘‘The birdsong is testament to this, as are the planted natives thriving where weeds once reigned.’’
He also gives a potted summary of other conservation efforts in the Whakatipu, including the wilding control group’s (WCG) operations covering more than 18,000 hectares since last July.
Mountain Scene
When a company boss thought a teenager had skived off with his wife’s purse on a night out in Queenstown last year, he decided to take matters into his own hands.
Encountering the alleged thief on the dark streets of the resort’s CBD about 3am, Jeremy David Smith, 46, smacked the 19-year-old to the head, three to five times.
But the teen who Smith chased when he ran away decided to exact his own revenge.
He rallied four of his mates and when they found Smith, who’s from Lower Hutt, they turned the tables, punching and kicking him, resulting in a trip to Lakes District Hospital.
BROOK SABIN
There is a part of New Zealand so remote, humans have never touched the vast majority of its enormous landscape. And here s how you can explore it.
Kiwis have certainly been doing their duty since the nationwide lockdown ended in backing tourism operators in their backyard, but some regions are still doing it tough. Beaches and lakes within a three-hour drive of our biggest cities have fared the best over summer, with the Coromandel and Tasman District proving particularly busy, Tourism Industry Aotearoa chief executive Chris Roberts said. Areas further afield which relied heavily on overseas visitors before borders closed are struggling, however, with the likes of Queenstown, Fiordland and Westland unusually quiet over the Christmas-New Year period, he said.