Photo: Gerard O'Brien Rewilding is growing in popularity. Maureen Howard and Bruce Munro visit the largest piece of regenerating forest on Otago Peninsula to talk with Peter Cooke, Anna Moore and Shanta McPherson about their surprising, successful experiment to let nature take the lead. Towering, ancient rimu with graceful, drooping branchlets hold court in the ridge line-to-valley-floor forest.
Smaller trees — kānuka, pittosporum, fuchsia, matipo — gather around their feet, while in the canopy tītīpounamu (riflemen) chase insects, tūi serenade mates and ponderous kereru plot arcing courses across the verdant valley kingdom. It is unrecognisable from four decades ago when Peter Cooke and Anna Moore bought this 4ha property on the northeast flank of Hereweka, Otago Peninsula’s landmark Harbour Cone. Then it was almost-bare, degrading farmland; remnant rimu riding desolate, steep-walled waves of grass pocked with blackberry, gorse and cattle.
However, the couple decided to restore the paddocks to their native forest state. And that is what they have spent the past 40 years doing, although they would say they have done little more than get out of the way and let natural processes take their course. "We just .
.. let nature do its thing here.
It wasn’t as if it was arduous; nature did its job ...
[with] minimal interference from us," Peter says. Peter, a GP, and Anna, a psychotherapist, bought this piece of land overlooking Hoopers Inlet in 1980, attracted by the 7.
