TRIP REPORT : Lowe’s Bush, Te Pamu

 Saturday/Sunday :   5–6 February 2005

Hi, my name is Harvey, the Resident Rabbit here at Te Pamu.   First up I’ve got this trip report from friends up there on the Botanical Society’s visit to Lowe’s Bush.   It started with Pat foolishly selecting as trip meeting point the best café in Carterton – it took some time to get everyone away from their lattés.   They all eventually showed up at Lowe’s and piled over the fence into our bush.   They soon discovered the recent plantings by DOC of endangered olearias and pittosporums.   As they’re all small-leaved and mostly inedible, we rabbits think they are rightly endangered, but they all got identified and weeded.

Then they skirted around the big old trees at the southern end, across the open country into the dense original growth in the centre of Lowe’s.   We rabbits never go there, as even when the plain around Lowe’s is dried out in drought, it is still soft and damp under foot, there is carpet of inedible pukatea seedlings, and in one area pools of water persist even in the worst drought.

To our surprise none of them got lost, even though there are no tracks and the undergrowth is so dense that even a few metres separation is out of sight.

Then most of them took off down to the Ruamahanga for a swim, leaving us in peace again.

Te Pamu

I met some of them when they showed up at Pat’s place, Te Pamu, in the early evening.   They found themselves camping sites and then gathered around to talk and feed as is their wont.   Pat gave them his spiel about planning to get Te Pamu under a QEII covenant, and also his ‘conservation crofting’ rant about tying up places like Te Pamu in charitable trusts and letting them revert to native bush.   What are we rabbits going to eat then?

In the morning, Pat got them to move a whole lot of dirt to make a patio outside his new cottage, so he got to look more than usually pleased with himself.   Then they scattered all round the place looking at the (mostly inedible) regenerating bush.   Pat has since showed me the species list – more than 150 – and he seems pretty pleased with it.   But he has added a list of animal pests: feral cats, ferrets, stoats and the like.   But he has included rabbits!   The nerve of it, when everyone knows the biggest pest on the planet is humanity.

Pat McLean