The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces.
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
It’s easy to drive past here and dismiss the area to the west of the road as “waste land” or abandoned farmland, but this area was deliberately set aside in 1985 by a forward-thinking family. Regeneration over the last 35 years (or more) means that what you are looking at is likely to be close to the original landscape before the influence of European immigrants.
“QEII National Trust was set up in 1977, with the intention that it was set up by farmers for farmers and other landowners at a time when the New Zealand Government offered subsidies to encourage bush and wetland clearance on farms. There was a desire in the community among farmers and other landowners to protect areas on private land that were home to native species. Their vision was for protection to be both voluntary and everlasting, legally protecting the land forever.” (Wikipedia)
Even the smallest of area which are set aside for conservation and regeneration provide a stable habitat for New Zealand’s diverse plant and animal species, many of which are unique to our land.
Currently over 4600 covenants have been registered, protecting over 180,000 hectares.
Here you can see red tussock, thought to be the dominant plant species before European settlement.
“Determining the type and extent of the indigenous ecosystems present in Southland prior to human settlement is problematic. The extensive burning that followed Maori settlement and then further burning, grazing, and the widespread establishment of introduced species that followed European settlement dramatically altered the original (pre-human) ecosystems over large parts of the Southland Conservancy. Furthermore, indigenous ecosystems are not static but change in response to natural disturbance events and evolve in response to natural processes such as climate change. … At the time of human settlement, Southland was almost entirely covered by forest….Areas of tussockland, flaxland, and sedgeland were present in wetlands throughout Southland…Rushland and shrubland were present in bogs and on peat domes. The extensive forests of the Southland Plains and hill country were largely destroyed by fire between 800 and 600 years ago. Red tussockland spread across the Southland Plains. Bracken, and then snow tussockland, spread onto hill country sites. … all ecosystems in the Conservancy have been modified to some extent by species introduced since human settlement.” (https://www.doc.govt.nz/globalassets/documents/getting-involved/landowners/nature-heritage-fund/nhf-southland-protection-strategy.pdf)
While red tussock might look like a dull and boring landscape, it has more to offer than you would think at first glance:
- In olden times, southern Māori used tussock to make leggings that protected their bare legs from speargrass. Tussock was also used in pāraerae (sandals), as it was found to be much warmer with pātītī (tussock grass) around the feet than without it.
- Takahē eat the sweet new growth at the base of red tussock tillers.
- They are a spectacular sight on a day with wind and sun to highlight their reddish brown and green sheen and typically arching formations as they wave around in the breeze, especially if they are flowering.
- They can live for hundreds of years because they continually regenerate themselves on their own accumulated dead matter. There are always new tillers (plant shoots) initiated where growth happens at the base of the tussock. By the turnover of old and new tillers and the accumulation of biomass, each tussock creates its own living environment.
- They can mast just like beech trees in certain years (masting being an excessive production of seed) but it is not certain whether they have the same temperature triggers and the masting isn’t as pronounced as beech or other snow tussock species.
- Red tussock typically lives in places where it’s too wet and/or cold for woody vegetation. It likes frosty hollows and valley floors. As soon as the slope increases, other things come in like woody vegetation or other species of snow tussocks.
- Red tussock can colonise after forest clearance if it’s already somewhere in the landscape.
- Small as it might be, this reserve is important as there are only 72,000 hectares of red tussock throughout the whole country.
- Red tussock are like a protective cloak, with the leaves intercepting the force of the rain and reducing erosion. They also act like a huge sponge and so are terrific water collectors. Because red tussock are often on misty valley floors, the mist condenses on the leaves and the water flows down them and into the fibrous tussock base where it is absorbed and held. Extensive red tussock lands have a lot of biomass which can soak up large volumes of water and release it slowly and so act as an important buffer against flooding.
- Info from https://blog.doc.govt.nz/2018/06/10/red-tussocks-admiration/
Limited parking on both sides of the road. Remember that this is a tourist route.