NATURE—AND MAN

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 42, 5 March 1937, Page 12

NATURE—AND MAN

Urgent Need oi Stock Taking WEEDS AND WASTE * (Eldited hy Leo Farming.) No doubt, many New Zealanders are doing some deep thinking about things which wil be, or should be, discussed by the national conference which the Minister of Internal affairs (the Hon. W. E. Parry) has decided to convene in the near future. Of course, there will be some kind of stock-taking about waste lands, misused lands and the • spread of noxious weeds in preparation for an active campaign to prevent the repetition of blunders in the destruction of water-conserving forests in high country, to make amends, as far as practicable, for old-time stupidity, carelessness, or jack of vision, and to carry on schemes of planting for beanty and utility. My mind turned to that prospective conference the other day when I gazed out at a patch of tbe Wellington Town Belt where a score or so of workers smite the gorsa every summer. This year — to my pleasant astonishment— they spared clump3 of broom, which formerly was hacked away. I had always felt that if the QLty Council would, not order the planting of something better to shade out the gorse, jt should leave the broom, which would gradually smother the prickly pest. Then the broom could serve as shelter for suitable native plants or others, which in tura would tower over the broom, put it to death and feed on its remaimi. Meanwhile the broom would flourish its beautiful pennants of fadeless green and would pay a rent of fragrant gold in spring. When I mentioned this incident to a friend he said he was not surprised. He believed that enlightenmemt had come at last to the Reserveg Committee and the staff, for he had noticed that broom had been left on the slope of another hill of the Town Belt, and it was certainly conquerfng the gorse. A Famou® Naturailst's Viewr* Mr H. GuthrierSxnith, the famous literary naturalist who is also a farmer, has been one of the most careful, pains-» taking observers of the various stages of settlement in Neiw Zealand. Well, then, let u5 meditate on a passag© of a chapter (headed "Cry Havoc") in his "Sorrows and Joys of a New Zealand Naturalist" : — "The effect of this direct connection of rainfall and surface, though comparatively negligible on flat lands, is very perceptible on downs, uplands and hills. Especially after periods of drought, water rushes off as almost from a paved surface; erosion is proportionately increase d, the number and size of slips multiplied; gorges are deepened, each of them in in its turn with ever increasing declivity accelerating the volume of mud and grit carried downwards. Nor must it be forgotten that the faster the fiow the larger the fragments of turf, stones and gravel horne forward on the current. Instead of a gradual ooze from a saturated countryside there is a brief spate. Without straining language stock may be thus truly pictured as melting at an aceelerated rate the highlands into the sea. "The evil results of this liquifying process are hy no means, however, confined to hill country. On the alluvial flats it takes a different form. They, too, are threatened by these ultimate effects of grazing of sheep and cattle on uplands that never should have been open to the axe and plough. In olden days before the country was stocked, before its primaeval vegetation was destroyed, floods indeed occurred as a w. Biver-banks were' as nowadaya bitten out and gouged, but these inferior soils of the bleaker inland were filtered throughout every mile of the river 's run; the coarser soil was deposited by blockage of dense riverside jungle and undergrowth. In those days millions of detaining leaves and blades stemmed the flood, each acting as breakwater, each hoarding its own tapering tail of debris. Thus only the finest silt, the most minutely comminuted vegetable matter reached the flats. The mouths of rivers were then, moreover. in great degree canalised,

the current conflned by the dense growth fostered by conditions of damp luxuriance and oceanic warmth. Now bad unfiltered soil is snperimposed on good. With the trampling, moreover, and browsing of stock, especially of cattle, these guardian thickets were broken down and destroyed; the untrammelled river broke bounds; long deposited layers of silt and vegetable mould were directly engulfed by the sea. In place of flat terraces on eithex side of a deep, smooth, straight river, we have a main stream torn into shallow channels, its mouth altering at every fresh. "On the high grassed ranges of the south, the sheep has been wholly respongible for an aceelerated crumbling of mountain into sea. True is it that there as of yore rain falls, frost disintegrates and glaciers flow, but then at least there was no constant stirring by sheep 's feet of shingle on the screes, no nibbling of the specialised plant speeies that bind the stonv ' slides; nor lastly, was a dense vegeta j tion forbidden by the perpetual fires , of modern methods of alpine sheep- ! farming. ' 1 1 Friends of New Zealand. think well on that reference to the "high grassed ranges of tho south." The highest and bleakest of that land is the Kea country. In the balance of nature the Kea Iielps to conserve the native vegetation, which is a natural buffer , against erosion of the comparativelv • rieh farm lands in the lower districts. j . et there is a howl for the extermina- i tion of the Kea. • While ^ pastoralists and their stock are ruining the protective cover on sub-alpine country, much better land, close to railways and motor highways, is being over-run with noxious wee'ds, mad is being thrown out of cultivation. Here, surel y, is a good subjeet for that conferenee. i