18 Comments
Jul 9, 2023Liked by Melanie Newfield

Lovely story Melanie. I agree with you fully.

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Thanks so much Alan.

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You have captured the spirit of our forests so well - I am pining for a bush walk! I enjoy your more science-based posts, but I'd love to read more like this one as well.

The town I now call home is in agricultural scenery. Like you with Wellington, I find it hard to look around and not see what it might have been historically (mostly forest).

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Thank you. It's funny, I still instinctively love the sight of green grass-covered hills, then something checks me, and I realise what I'm looking at.

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I see the grassy landscape and feel like I'm not in New Zealand! I'm actively trying to find beauty in it, because it *is* around me and I can't change that 🤷🏽‍♀️

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I get it. I found that when I lived in Christchurch. I had to get into the hills sometimes as I found the flat strange.

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I love this new style as well. Beautiful prose.

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Thank you, I'm glad you liked it.

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I love this piece, Melanie. It's reminiscent of some walks I've taken where forests once stood, or through forests that cover just one mountain surrounded now by green fenced fields. I wish we'd let them all grow back :-)

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Thank you. I know what you mean, just yesterday I was looking at a landscape where there was an occasional tiny patch of forest and thinking about what was once there.

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While your prose is vivid and melodic the story of the trees is heartbreaking. We were in the Hoh Rain forest last week and it was dry! The moss and formations were beautiful but because (I’m guessing) of the dry April thru June the Hoh lacked bugs, mud and moisture. Besides this and throughout the Olympics too many trees were downed because of the infested Burls. And many of the trees left standing had burls.

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Thank you so much. It is heartbreaking, so many of the trees are so slow-growing, they take centuries not decades and we never realised when we were cutting them. Sad seeing the rainforest dry - here's it's the opposite, we've had record rainfall and everything is rather swampy. But good for the trees.

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A beautiful story Melanie and it brought to mind the expression no two walks in nature are the same. I think it is why you can live near the woods and never grow tired of the locale. Your observations make this all the more interesting as it is clear your explorations and writing about your world has informed you and probably changed what you notice. It is fun to go along on a walk with you. What I find most interesting is the decision to close off a space, try to let it re-emerge but make changes on what animals might be introduced. All of the interacting systems likely get knocked out of balance and something doesn't quite seem right as you observed about the fern coverage.

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Thank you Mark. You're right, no two walks are the same.

The story of the forest at Zealandia is an interesting one. New Zealand has no native land mammals apart from three bats, one of which is now extinct. The introduction of mammals to New Zealand was devastating. They basically ate everything - deer, pigs and goats ate the lower parts of the forest, possums ate the canopy, rats, stoats, ferrets, weasels and cats ate the birds, rats, mice and even hedgehogs ate the insects. Even the most remote native forest, if these mammals aren't controlled, is largely silent and slowly transforming into a much less diverse environment. Zealandia is a grand experiment, fencing out all the mammals and seeing if the forest and birds recover. And they have, although many of the birds had to be reintroduced from offshore islands because there are so few left on the mainland.

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Lovely! I enjoyed this walk in the woods with you, Melanie - I'd love more like this (alongside your continued excellent research). It gives me a glimpse into your forests from halfway across the world. I do wonder - it's your winter now, correct? Do your trees not drop their leaves during the cold season? Here, that picture of the lake would be lined with skeleton trees and very little green during winter.

Thank you for the walk with you!

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Thank you Heather.

It's a strange case in New Zealand, very few of our trees are deciduous. So our forests stay green during the winter. I suspect it's partly a case of the mildness of our winters, but even our alpine trees like the mountain beech keep their leaves. Also, conifers keep their leaves in the northern hemisphere and they are in harsher climates that your deciduous trees. It may also have to do with our very changeable weather, so that we might get weather that's a few degrees warmer in the winter (or a few degrees colder in the summer) and that can push the tree from one season to the other.

I'm actually not entirely sure... there's a rabbit hole for certain.

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During a recent trip to NZ, I did wonder how 'kiwis' felt about their land. You have articulated that so well. Returning home to Australia, I felt a certain gratitude for the abundance of bird life, bug life and plant life that surrounds me. Despite the colonial legacy, we must have done something right.

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I think that a lot of us in New Zealand forget how so much of what we see is foreign to our nation. I just love the way Australia is when I go there, the way there are so many native species around. I just adore your plants, especially eucalypts.

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