Anne Stewart and John Craig with Winston at Tahi in Pātaua North. Photo /Tania Whyte
Joanna Wane visits a Northland nature sanctuary that's made it their business to do the right thing
Bloody city greenies, locals called them. One contractor gave it three years before they wore themselves out, realised it was an impossible task and scuttled back to Auckland.
And who would have blamed them? When ecologist John Craig — then a professor of Environmental Management at the University of Auckland — first saw the rundown cattle farm his daughter Suzan had bought in Northland, it was in a miserable state.
Extensively grazed, with muddy paddocks almost completely denuded of trees, the 315ha property was what John describes as "absolutely bald". It was also eerily silent. "When we came, there wasn't even one flax bush," he says. "No tūī. Now we have them living with us all the time. In spring, there are hundreds, if not thousands, when the karo we've planted flowers."
Since the Craigs took over in 2004, the number of bird species recorded on the land has risen from 14 to more than 70, including many that are rare or endangered. All but the kiwi, which were initially procured through Operation Nest Egg and now have a population of 60-plus, moved in of their own accord. An official request was submitted for a release of pāteke (brown teal) — the rarest of our waterfowl on the mainland — but a flock of them simply turned up.
Fernbirds, banded rails and bitterns now breed in the restored saltmarsh, where once flood-prone paddocks would bury cows up to their bellies in water. But the return of birdsong to the bush is just part of the story behind Tahi, a "biodiversity-positive" nature sanctuary and coastal eco-retreat in Pātaua North, 30km east of Whangārei.
Over the past 18 years, a massive regeneration project has transformed the degraded landscape at an astonishing rate. Sweeping tracts of bare pasture have been planted with close to 400,000 native trees, with 30,000 more being added each year, and 14 wetlands have been created or restored, re-establishing native ecosystems and creating habitats that thrum with wildlife. And that's the gospel according to John: "It doesn't take long to change the world."
Conceived as a sustainable and carbon-neutral business model, Tahi generates income from its natural Tahi Honey range and boutique guest accommodation in two beautifully restored farm bungalows and a smaller cottage that have private access to the surf beach. (A seasonal on-site cafe has stayed closed this summer as a result of Covid-19.)
All the profits go directly into conservation and other community and cultural projects. In 2020, Tahi's achievements were recognised at the Sustainable Business Awards, winning the Restoring Nature category and the supreme Transforming New Zealand award.
John and his wife, Anne Stewart, a former conservation scientist and past director of Auckland University's MBA programme, live privately on a section of land carved off from the main property. With Suzan running the company from her home in Switzerland, they've been boots on the ground right from the start, commuting to Tahi until John took early retirement after 36 years at the university so they could make a permanent move north.
The only livestock left on the old farm today are a couple of elderly pet cows and some horses (which, John tells me, produce about a quarter of the methane emitted by cows or sheep). Anne breeds pedigree Oldenburgs — her star stallion, Ikarus, is a stunning blue-eyed Oldenburg cremello she brought over from Germany.
Now a private environmental consultant, John was a key figure in the evolution of Tiritiri Matangi Island as a wildlife sanctuary in the mid-70s. It wasn't a popular concept in official conservation circles but he was convinced that while people were part of the problem, they needed to be a key part of the solution too.
"If you can't have people in nature then people aren't part of nature, and looking after it becomes someone else's job," he says. "The [past owners of the farm] were just appalled at what we were doing because we were reversing everything they'd ever done to make a farm productive. But give it a decade and when we brought them back, they understood."
Rather than blanket Tahi with dense forest, plantings have been designed with open green spaces, mown pathways and a series of signposted trails through the bush, over the rolling hills and along the estuary.
The tracks are open to the public on Sundays during summer, and primary school groups have partnered with Tahi in a dune restoration programme. A six-hour "Long Walk", which spans views of a historic pā site inland and a panoramic coastal outlook to the Hen and Chicken Islands and the Poor Knights, is currently under development and scheduled to open before the end of the year.
"Locking up trees in great tracts of land and throwing away the key isn't the answer," says Anne, a keen nature photographer who documents life at Tahi. "When we started this, it was really tempting to wind back time and put the cloak back on the land. But you can't just say, 'Look, we've saved that forest.' That isn't it.
"You have to look at the biodiversity and consider the ecology of the whole thing. We have one of the most intense predator programmes in Northland and we still caught three stoats a couple of days ago. This is an onslaught and people have to be committed."
The skeleton of what Tahi has become today was already in place when Evan Karaka arrived in late 2010 to work on pest and weed control. He's now officially the sustainable land manager, though he prefers the term kaitiaki for his guardianship role that incorporates engaging with school groups, leading tours through the property — "trying to explain that big pond was once a hay paddock" — and reconnecting people with their ancestral land.
Local kaumātua are on call for special events and at the start of each public open day, Karaka brings the Tahi team together for a karakia at the remains of a kūmara pit below the pā site, to acknowledge the iwi's tipuna and ask for their blessing.
A dairy farmer for 20 years, he's come full circle at Tahi, "putting back into the whenua, as opposed to my practices as a farmer, where it was all about milk solids and live weights. Here, it's carbon credits and the environment."
Owner Suzan, who's lived offshore for the past three decades, bought the property as a way to give her three sons a deeper personal connection to New Zealand. She says Tahi would never have happened without her own childhood experiences on Tiritiri Matangi, where she banded birds and learned how to distinguish their calls.
"Natives and biodiversity were the only narratives I ever saw or heard growing up," she says. "My father is a wealth of knowledge. We'd walk through the forest and every tree would have a story."
Suzan worked in London for many years as an international energy trader and says her vision for Tahi was to create a circular economy that illustrates it's possible to do the right thing and be financially viable. Beekeeping has run in the family since the 1880s — Tahi Honey now sells in 27 countries.
A skincare range is due to launch in March, but her long-term vision is far more ambitious. She's on the advisory board for The Long Run, an organisation of nature-based tourism businesses committed to driving sustainability (Tahi was a founding member) and part of a high-powered new initiative bringing together international leaders on energy transition, carbon and biodiversity.
"When you look at Tahi, which is a microscopic example of what's possible, we have such potential to raise our ambition as a country and globally," Suzan says. "Look at how quickly things have restored there; that could happen on a much larger scale."
After less than 20 years, the transformation at Tahi is truly extraordinary. Some established sections of bush — pūriri, pōhutukawa, kauri, mānuka, kānuka, māhoe, harakeke, cabbage trees, nikau and many more — look for all the world as if they've been bedded in for generations. The planting programme has also resulted in the storage of more than 2000 tonnes of carbon, with native trees chosen not only as carbon soaks but for their biodiversity value, in particular the role they play in attracting birds and invertebrates.
Ecosystem specialist Neil Mitchell, who collaborated with John on Tiri in the 1970s, has done a carbon assessment at Tahi and developed a way to measure sequestration that incorporates long-term goals around restoration and the conservation of ecological values (you can read more about that at tahinz.com).
For example, pūriri, a native hardwood, stores two and a half times the amount of carbon per cubic metre of tree compared to pine, he says, "and it keeps doing it for hundreds of years". Pūriri also rates highly for its biodiversity value. A habitat for the pūriri moth, it's a source of nectar for native birds when it flowers through autumn and winter, and its berries are a favourite snack for kererū.
Mitchell says re-establishing a functioning native ecosystem requires active engagement, such as effective pest control, rather than leaving nature to recover on its own. In the face of introduced species, natives can struggle to get a foothold. "On Tiri, the grass was so dense that seeds weren't even reaching the ground." Now, around 60% of that island sanctuary is covered in regenerating forest, just 40 years after the withdrawal of its farm lease.
He shares John Craig's philosophy that, unlike predators, people are only a problem when you exclude them. "What both of us understood was that if you involve people, they want to be involved, instead of experiencing conservation vicariously through their television sets. Everybody should be able to access nature. It's not the private reserve of scientists, but part of everyone's heritage."
Broadcaster has written a new book about the joys of getting older.