area that was burnt<\/a> was successional vegetation, so it had regenerated from past fires. There was a very large fire in 1918 and then there was another one in 1947, and so that vegetation is around 78 to 105 years old. Or was.<\/p>\n\u201cHistorically it would have been forest, and that\u2019s where it was heading. There was lots of woody vegetation. But – one of the key things about that area were that it was full of plants with very oily resinous wood material – things like turpentine scrub; phyllocladus, which is alpine celery pine; manuka; and there was also the exotic weed calluna.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of the calluna had been killed by the heather beetle, and Singers believes that\u2019s why the fire was so vigorous.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of that was sitting as dry tinder kindling that had been killed, so it was sort of this layer of thatch ready to go up,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe vegetation was full of volatile oils so once it gets going, all of that stuff burns very, very hot.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the podcast, Singers explains the history of heather in the park and how the eradication of it became the world\u2019s most successful weed bio-control operation, defoliating thousands of hectares.<\/p>\n
Other victims of the fire will likely include freshwater fish, insects and birds.<\/p>\n
While species such as the k\u0101rearea (falcon) would have been able to get themselves out of reach of the flames, Singers says the smaller creatures may well have been caught.<\/p>\n
That includes endangered species such as the whio (blue duck) which lives near the Whakapapa River, p\u012bwakawaka, riroriro (grey warbler) and m\u0101t\u0101t\u0101 (fernbird).<\/p>\n
\u201cParticularly fernbirds, they don\u2019t actually fly particularly well, they sort of hop from bush to bush to bush.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo some of those I suspect would have just been caught up. They wouldn\u2019t have been able to escape. That area was a particular stronghold for the North Island fernbird, it was low and scrubby – that\u2019s what they love. That\u2019ll be a real major loss for that species.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he says the greatest threat is the return of weeds such as gorse, broom and heather. Their seeds will be hiding in the soil ready to break out again. Wilding pines had been eliminated from the area too, but after the fire it will be extremely vulnerable to those being re-established.<\/p>\n
This winter hasn\u2019t been a great one for the Ruapehu District as the famous Chateau remains closed, and there\u2019s been uncertainty over the fate of the ski fields that saw a drop in advance bookings. A couple of weeks ago floods closed State Highway 4 into the area. Now, State Highway 47 is closed as firefighters do their work.<\/p>\n
Mayor Weston Kirton says initially we were talking about 100ha which we thought \u201cwas a lot, but now we\u2019re talking about 2800. That\u2019s huge, and it\u2019s left a big scar in our DoC estate, which of course is valuable to our communities,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Firefighters are likely to be in the area for at least a week and there will be hotspots for a long time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe only need a couple of hot days and things start evolving from that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Kirton points out that while this will have some effect on tourism in the northern part of the district, it\u2019s business as usual for most of the rest.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what I\u2019m saying here is we might need a helping hand to actually make a recovery, because this has come at a point where we\u2019d normally be buzzing with people going across the Tongariro Crossing.\u201d<\/p>\n
His district has been hit by eruptions, floods, mill closures, the Covid downturn, thin ski seasons, ski operators going bust and the historic chateau closing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems to be a mayor that attracts all these disasters,\u201d he jokes.<\/p>\n
But Civil Defence Minister Mark Mitchell and Conservation Minister Tama Potaka have been to visit and he\u2019s optimistic there will be some sort of \u2018bounce-back\u2019 funding from the Government, whether it\u2019s for replanting or to help encourage tourists to come back.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve been fully briefed on the situation, they understand the dynamics of this, they understand this is DoC estate that needs to be preserved, and they apparently are going to give us some financial support.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019m grieving today. I\u2019m feeling quite impacted by it to be honest,\u201d says ecologist Nick Singers. He\u2019s the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[73530,1975,4995,2079,3012,111,43,139,69,11763,223,46029,9182,664,25351,14443],"class_list":["post-128594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-alexia","tag-at","tag-away","tag-fire","tag-hopes","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-russell","tag-the","tag-tongariro","tag-tourists","tag-turn","tag-vast","tag-wont"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}