Last weekend, while visiting Nelson, we went for a 45 minute walk in the Brook Waimarama Sanctuary.
The Sanctuary will extend over c. 715 hectares of a former Water Reserve owned by Nelson City Council. Most of the site is mature beech forest with occasional huge podocarps but the southern part is diverse broadleaved forest on land cleared in the 19th Century. Over 250 species of plants have been recorded and the birdlife includes rarer species such as NZ falcon, yellow-crowned parakeets, weka and robins.
The site is an ideal size and location. It is a short distance from Nelson City, Stoke and Richmond with forested corridors to take birdlife from the sanctuary into these areas and into residents’ gardens. It is joined to the south to 100,000’s of hectares of native forest including the Mt Richmond Conservation Area.
The Sanctuary covers a huge area, and clearly you could walk for days. Unfortunately though, our time was limited. I hope to return sometime for further exploration.
We walked up to a small waterfall, where I took a few photos, experimenting with different lengths of exposure. Click the photo at the top of this post for a larger version and then click the next button within the photo gallery to see a couple more photos.
The Brook Sanctuary are merely at the beginning of a long programme that involves eradicating pests, putting up a pest-proof fence and restoring the birds and bush in the area.
Here in Wellington we’ve all benefited enormously from the still very young Karori Sanctuary — in the past few years we here on Mt Victoria have seen the arrival and increase in numbers of tui and other native birds, for example.
For the Brook Sanctuary to achieve their goals they need sponsors, donors, volunteers and support. If you can offer anything, even buying some of the beautiful cards they sell, visit their Contact Us page to find out how to help.
With projects like these, perhaps Aotearoa New Zealand will one day be restored to the glory it was 200 years ago before the Europeans arrived en masse to cut down the forests, introduce devastating pests, and hunt much of the wildlife to extinction.
No related posts.
