he Urewera National Park is the largest park in the North Island, covering almost 200,000 hectares. It is without doubt the finest area of natural bush remaining in the North Island and as it ranges from about 150 metres to 1400 metres in altitude it encompasses a variety of vegetation.Also found here are Lakes Waikaremoana and Waikareiti, among the most beautiful lakes in the North Island.

The park gives a good idea of what New Zealand was like before humans arrived. From any high area in the park the vegetation stretches like a green undulating carpet into the distance. In the lower areas around the lakes the dominant trees are rata, rimu and tawa. As you move higher, the rata and tawa are gradually replaced by beech. Higher still, only beech is found. This, too, is found in successive altitudinal layers - first red beech, then silver beech and, at the highest reaches, the mountain beech.

Of particular interest to botanists is the presence at Lake Waikaremoana of the kakabeak shrub, the kowhai-ngutu-kaka of the Maori. Curiously, although this plant is well known to the home gardener, in the wild it is a rare plant indeed, limited to about a dozen plants growing near the lake, a few on Great Barrier Island, together with some in the inlets of the Bay of Islands and on the coast near Thames and Tolaga Bay.

The fauna of the park is relatively diverse. Most evenings if you are camped near the lake you will see the beautiful puriri moth which is often attracted by lights. You will certainly hear the plaintive cry of the morepork, and probably that of the kiwi. Shags, tui and kereru and many smaller birds can be spotted moving about the forest fringes. In the smaller streams whio can sometimes be seen, and grey ducks, mallard, paradise ducks and black teal all frequent the lake.

The park headquarters at Aniwaniwa provides comprehensive information about the flora and fauna of the area. While tramping through the bush around the lakes watch for some of the scarcer native birds. Kaka, kakariki, korimako, pied tits and robins are all to be found, but kokako seem to have disappeared. Also some of the last sightings of the bush wren and piopio were from the Urewera. Of considerable interest too, was the sighting in 1924 by William Cobeldick, a ranger based in Rotorua, of a pair of huia in the bush near Lake Waikareiti, as well as a single huia at Taharua Stream near the source of the Mohaka River in the same year.

While living in the Urewera area between 1895 and 1910, Elsdon Best, one of our first ethnologists, asked the Tuhoe which birds had disappeared from their area and the list they gave him was as follows: whekau, or hakoke, the laughing owl; kakapo; kaha, the grebe; kareke, the marsh rail; koitareke, the quail; kotuku; mohopatatai, the land rail; kea; mohorangi; momotawai, the bush wren; tieke; and tihe, the stitchbird. It is obvious that these names include a number of Tuhoe dialectal names different from other Maori names for these birds (for example, mohopatatai for mohopereru, and koitareke for koreke). However, the two I find particularly interesting are kea and mohorangi. The kea has seldom been reported elsewhere in the North Island and in the South Island it is a bird of the mountains, yet Best obviously was not confusing the Urewera 'kea' with kaka, as he describes the kea as being a smaller bird frequenting the open country and with a differently shaped bill. He also says it was 'he manu ahua whero' - 'of a brownish or reddish colour'. The other mysterious name is mohorangi. 'Rangi' has a variety of translations including 'day'. Does that mean it was a diurnal rail? If so, we still don’t know which rail it refers to and it may well have been the takahe.

Being an inland people far from the rich coastal food resources and separated from them by often-hostile tribes, the Tuhoe were entirely dependent on the forests for their food. Elaborate rituals often attended food-gathering and ornate and well-manufactured utensils were used in the snaring of birds and for storing them. Best collected many of these and they are now in the Museum of New Zealand.

Heading back towards Gisborne from the Urewera takes you first to Frasertown, from where there are two routes north. The inland route, via State Highway 36, will take you through more scenic country, but the road is the rougher of the two. It does, however, give you the opportunity of seeing many bush birds and the tree collection at Kaikiore, near Tiniroto. This arboretum contains a very good collection of both native and exotic trees, many of which are quite rare specimens.