PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DATE FOR PARAWAI SCHOOL/BUPA PLANTING DAY: Now on 5th June.

Kia ora koutou!

May kicked off with a small celebration to mark the opening of the Moanataiari Lookout Track, whose entrance was cleared by a TEA working bee last year. It’s looking fabulous now, especially with a picnic table at the top to enjoy the incredible views in comfort.

This was an exercise in kotahitanga or collaboration, with contributions from:

and of course members of TEA. A huge thank you to everyone involved!

The track itself needs a huge amount of work to remove the climbing asparagus, club moss, tradescantia and more, but for now, we can celebrate the progress so far and look forward to more locals and visitors enjoying the track in the future. TEA is looking at what could be planted at the lookout to replace the removed gorse and manuka. Anything up there will need to be something low growing and very hardy as the soil is poor and wind exposure very high!

New entrance way with signage and boot cleaning station
Signage integrating this new track into the DoC network
Wanderers enjoying an historical talk from Russell Skeet
Enjoying the view, the refreshments, and new picnic table at the top

Upcoming events

Mark your calendars for 5th June 22nd May NZLT Bupa Pārāwai School Community Planting Day. Please follow the link for details, including how to register for catering purposes.

Ongoing work

The biggest ongoing project at present is the Privet Project. Because of the scale (enormous) and location (steep hills above urban areas), we need to be really careful how we approach it. Imagine cutting down all those trees then having a large weather event wash them down into Thames, or to clog up other waterways!

Advice from ecologists has suggested running smaller pilot projects to find out which of the possible methods will suit best, and scale up well across the peninsula. Currently we’re looking at different funding avenues for this pilot investigation, so if anyone out there has cash burning a hole in their pocket, do feel free to get in touch . . .

Mā te wā!