#podocarpaceae

- Kahikatea

A tree that was growing on the side road next to the Mill House. It happened to be festooned with an AMAZING display of Beard Lichen.

Anyway -

AKA White pine, katea, kaikatea, koroī, kōaka, kahika, and kāī (for the young tree). First described botanically by the French botanist Achille Richard in 1832 as Podocarpus dacrydioides. Dacrycarpus means 'tear shaped fruit', and dacrydioides refers to its similarity to the related podocarp Dacrydium.

Adult trees have dull green overlapping scale leaves while juvenile have needle-like leaves, often with a bronze hue.

New Zealand's tallest tree, up to 65m in height. Formerly dominant in damp fertile areas on both islands, where it grew in spectacular stands including in swamps. Unfortunately 'damp and fertile' is also prime dairy country, and the timber was used for Māori watercraft and tools, and by Europeans for wood pulp, barrels, and butterboxes, being white and odorless. Populations in most of the country have been decimated as a result.

In Māori mythology kahikatea is a child of Tāne, the god of forests and birds, and Hine-wao-riki, and was an important source of wood timber, tattoo dye, chewing gum, and berries for food. The Māori sometimes had to climb more than 30 m to reach the latter. A decoction or steam bath of the leaves was used as a cure for internal complaints.

A Kahikatea tree can produce 800kg of seed a year. The seeds have fleshy attachments called receptacles which encourage birds such as kererū and tūī to eat and disperse them. The trees also support a spectacular range of epiphytes - 100 different species have been recorded on a single tree.

Threats to the trees, beyond land-clearing and logging, include drought, invasive willows which occupy their preferred habitat after disturbance, and seed predation by introduced rats and mice. New Zealand had neither until the arrival of humans.

The plight of the kākāpō is a tragedy. Once the third most common bird in New Zealand, this large, flightless parrot has seen its numbers reduced to less than 150. In fact, for a time, it was even thought to be extinct. Today, serious effort has been put forth to try and recover this species from the brink of extinction. It has long been recognized that kākāpō breeding efforts are conspicuously tied to the phenology of certain trees but recent research suggests one in particular may hold the key to survival of the species.

The kākāpō shares its island homes (saving the kākāpō involved moving birds to rat-free islands) with a handful of tropical conifers from the families Podocarpaceae and Araucariaceae. Of these tropical conifers, one species is of particular interest to those concerned with kākāpō breeding - the rimu. Known to science as Dacrydium cupressinum, this evergreen tree represents one of the most important food sources for breeding kākāpō. Before we get to that, however, it is worth getting to know the rimu a bit better.

Rimu are remarkable, albeit slow-growing trees. They are endemic to New Zealand where they make up a considerable portion of the forest canopy. Like many slow-growing species, rimu can live for quite a long time. Before commercial logging moved in, trees of 800 to 900 years of age were not unheard of. Also, they can reach immense sizes. Historical accounts speak of trees that reached 200 ft. (61 m) in height. Today you are more likely to encounter trees in the 60 to 100 ft. (20 to 35 m) range.

The rimu is a dioecious tree, meaning individuals are either male or female. Rimu rely on wind for pollination and female cones can take upwards of 15 months to fully mature following pollination. The rimu is yet another one of those conifers that has converged on fruit-like structures for seed dispersal. As the female cones mature, the scales gradually begin to swell and turn red. Once fully ripened, the fleshy red “fruit” displays one or two black seeds at the tip. Its these “fruits” that have kākāpō researchers so excited.

As mentioned, it is a common observation that kākāpō only tend to breed when trees like the rimu experience reproductive booms. The “fruits” and seeds they produce are an important component of the diets of not only female kākāpō but their developing chicks as well. Because kākāpō are critically endangered, captive breeding is one of the main ways in which conservationists are supplementing numbers in the wild. The problem with breeding kakapo in captivity is that supplemental food doesn’t seem to bring them into proper breeding condition. This is where the rimu “fruits” come in.

Breeding birds desperately need calcium and vitamin D for proper egg production. As such, they seek out diets high in these nutrients. When researchers took a closer look at the “fruits” of the rimu, the kākāpō’s reliance on these trees made a whole lot more sense. It turns out, those fleshy scales surrounding rimu seeds are exceptionally high in not only calcium, but various forms of vitamin D once thought to be produced by animals alone. The nutritional quality of these “fruits” provides a wonderful explanation for why kākāpō reproduction seems to be tied to rimu reproduction. Females can gorge themselves on the “fruits,” which brings them into breeding condition. They also go on to feed these “fruits” to their developing chicks. For a slow growing, flightless parrot, it seems that it only makes sense to breed when food is this food source is abundant.

Though far from a smoking gun, researchers believe that the rimu is the missing piece of the puzzle in captive kākāpō breeding. If these “fruits” really are the trigger needed to bring female kākāpō into good shape for breeding and raising chicks, this may make breeding kākāpō in captivity that much easier. Captive breeding is the key to the long term survival of these odd yet charismatic, flightless parrots. By ensuring the production and survival of future generations of kākāpō, conservationists may be able to turn this tragedy into a real success story. What’s more, this research underscores the importance of understanding the ecology of the organisms we are desperately trying to save.

Photo Credits: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A 2,518 metres (8,261 ft) tall stratovolcano, ideally positioned to catch every change in the weather coming off the Tasman. As a result it gets up to 11 meters of rain a year, and the winds between the peak and the remains of its predecessor can exceed 130kph.

Naturally, of great importance to the local iwi, and it certainly made an impression of the Europeans too - although a lot of early paintings exaggerate the height.

watercolour by Charles Heaphy, some time between 1839 and 1849.

They named it Mt Egmont, although happily the original name is back to being the official one.

The volcano erupts, on average, every 90 years, with major eruptions every 500. Of considerably more concern are the repeated catastrophic cone collapses that turn most of the volcano into gigantic landslides sweeping fridge-sized boulders and smaller debris dozens of kilometers away from the volcano, and well past the current coastline.

Anyway, while we wait for it to go bang again, visitors can enjoy the fascinating change in vegetation as you go up the mountain. As you get higher and higher, the coastal vegetation is replaced by the goblin forests, contorted mossy woods dominated by Kamahi (Weinmannia racemosa), that developed after eruptions destroyed the preexisting podocarp and Nothofagus forest, and as you go higher the trees are replaced by tussock grasses and later alpine plants.

There are still kiwi in the national park, which is one reason dogs are strictly banned. The introduced stoats continue to be a problem - we saw one on one of the tracks.

There was also this building, a corrugated iron structure noteworthy for being the oldest such building left anywhere in the world. It was originally a fort, and still has gun slits. The windows are new.

Most of the species I saw around the visitors center are were new to me - I could have spent a week just phtographing the incredible lichens in the goblin forest. Here's some that weren't new.

And a few lichens I don't have an ID on.

AKA Prumnopitys ferruginea, and originally Podocarpus ferrugineus. 'ferruginea' derives from the rusty colour of dried herbarium specimens. Miro comes from the Proto-Polynesian word milo - the Pacific rosewood (Thespesia populnea) found on tropical islands far to the north.

A podocarp endemic to New Zealand, growing in lowland terrain and on hill slopes throughout the two main islands and on Stewart Island.

It can live to about 600 years in age, and 25m in height, with a trunk up to 1.3 m diameter. Like other podocarps, the fruit is fleshy and berrylike, and spread by birds such as the New Zealand Pigeon.

Formerly known as red pine. Happily the Māori name rimu is now in common usage. That name derves from the Polynesian term limu, a generic term for edble seaweeds, which the tree's foliage were reminiscent of, although that term was itself derivied from Proto-Austronesian's *limut meaning "moss". The scientific binomial refers to the cypress-like leaves and droplets of resin.

A large evergreen podocarp conifer endemic to New Zealand. Can reach 60m in height and 1000 years in age. In mast years the groves are especially productive of the orange protein-rich fruit and seeds, and are essential for the breeding of the flightless Kākāpō parrots.

Māori originally used the inner bark to treat burns and cuts, and the resinous heartwood of rimu (called māpara or kāpara) for wooden items such as combs and fernroot beaters, and it is still popular for the production of high quality furniture. However, many of Aotearoa's original rimu groves have been destroyed, and recent government policies only allow limited logging on private land. Stumps and root wood, from trees felled many years before, are used in wood turning.

Slow to establish, with fairly high moisture requirements, but a widely grown ornamental in New Zealand.

An evergreen coniferous shrub native to the mountains of New Zealand, with fleshy fruit. It grows as shrubs a few meters across, and rarely more than a meter tall. Branches in contact with the ground often root. It can survive under snow for months, but requires frequent rain to thrive.