New high country reserve in Otago

Forest and Bird, Issue 280, 1 May 1996, Page 4

New high country reserve in Otago

A TENURE DEAL covering one of Otago’s largest and oldest pastoral leases — the 25,000- Ww

hectare Earnscleugh station overlooking Alexandra and Clyde — will result in more than 8,000 hectares of significant high-altitude tussock grasslands, herbfields and wetlands being protected as conservation land. The area to be transfered to DoC includes the Old Man Tops, Fraser Basin and the Omeo Creek headwaters. It will create a conservation corridor stretching along the summit of the Old Man Range and the adjoining Old Woman Range. On lower country, two species of endangered flightless chafer beetle and a number of threatened plants will have their habitat protected. The remaining, northern, section of the lease — apart from five small conservation reserves within it — will become the freehold property of the current runholder, Alistair Campbell. He is likely to sell part of it for lifestyle and horticultural blocks, an option unavailable to runholders under a pastoral lease. Under a special lease, Mr Campbell will still be able to run stock on about half the land being transferred to DoC, although the department will

set the stock levels and ground cover will be monitored. The deal is regarded as a significant one by conservationists. Earnscleugh was considered a "tough nut" in the current process of tenure review of high country leases, in that many observers could not envisage how the necessary conservation values could be protected while retaining a viable production unit for the runholder. Forest and Bird played a major role in the settlement. The success of the deal suggests that if a lease such as Earnscleugh can be divided by consent between production and conservation uses under the existing Land Act, then there is little need to enact the current, highly deficient, Land Bill, now before Parliament.