Brian Rudman: Days numbered for disputed North Shore pines

In my part of town, the noisy conversation of a tui overhead is still rare enough to have me craning skywards and feeling annoyed there's nothing tasty in my backyard to encourage him to linger.

The tui may be rare in my neck of the words, but not so in other parts of the city, thanks to the ecological stepping stones that thousands of volunteers have been planting across the region in recent decades.

Tiritiri Matangi Island of course, with its 300,000 new trees and 78 species of birds stands out, but crucial too are the smaller mainland oases like the one near my place created by the Friends of Coxs Bay, and Centennial Park, Campbells Bay, on the North Shore. The latter is the result of more than 30 years' hard slog by retired zoology professor John Morton, his wife, Pat, and a cast of countless others.

I mention Centennial Park because the North Shore City Council is going through a hearing process to decide whether to permit the staged removal of 200 pines - 25 a year - along with assorted wattles and monkey apple trees from the park, to enable the end stage of this long project to be played out.

The Centennial Park volunteers say the pines and other exotics are now standing in the way of the final step of recreating the native bush that once grew on the land. A group of locals are upset that, among other things, they will lose their existing views of the mature pines, and the shade of the monkey apples when they promenade into the park.

You can't help feeling these complainants are missing the bigger picture.

Now I'm no native tree Nazi when it comes to pines. Well, not all pines, though I would happily see every Norfolk gone tomorrow, along with those awful tortured twisty things outside St Patrick's Cathedral. But it's hard to imagine a farm without a row of shelter belt macrocarpas, or the central North Island bereft of its radiata forests.

I'm even keen that the radiata on the newly acquired Hauraki Gulf island reserve of Kaikoura remain, at least for the time being, until a replacement food source for the resident kaka has been established.

I have a gnawed pine cone from Kaikoura in my office to remind me of the need to be pragmatic about these things. During the battle to save the island, I'd wandered down a rough road through second-growth manuka and kanuka into a grove of towering pines, alive with the chatter of parrots. High above you caught a flash of crimson as they flew from one cone to another. On the ground lay the emptied discards.

Now in the goodness of time, it makes perfect sense to chop out these foreigners as part of the vision of restoring Kaikoura to a more authentic state. But in the short term, starving the kaka, a remnant of times past, off the island because it had taken a liking to foreign food would be just crazy.

Across on the mainland in Centennial Park the volunteers and the council have, for three decades, been recreating a bushland from what was once predominantly second-growth scrub, left over, it seems, after the ravages of kauri logging. Alongside the odd surviving 150-year-old kahikatea are thrusting young teenage kauri, rimu, totara and puriri. New planting is progressing at around 1400 plants a year.

The 200 problem pines are self-sown ones shading the regrowth and slowing regeneration. In the past, volunteers quietly ringbarked them, a few at a time, and waited until nature did its work. No one seemed to notice, or maybe possums were blamed. But ringbarking is no longer considered acceptable, hence the resource consent application. Planning commissioners have postponed a decision until after a site visit.

Don Service, a local who has been associated with the park for 40 years, defends the monkey apples and wattles as historic, saying, "The inherent assumption that natives are superior to exotics seems rather chauvinistic and politically correct." I agree with his argument. But that's not the issue here.

A large grove of pines stand nearby and the bush society says it's just as keen to preserve them as Mr Service. But the exotics on death row are in an area which for 30 years has been redeveloped as an oasis of native bush. It's hardly being chauvinistic or PC to say that, for these trees, their time is up.