Along with a New Zealand Timber feature this month, we take a trip back in time with Ross Lockyer to his Ecological Survey days as a Forest Ranger back in 1964. Ross writes:
“In our third year training in 1964 when we were based at the Forestry Training Centre in Rotorua, we got involved in some serious bushwacking in the native bush, known as Ecological Survey or just Eco.
“It was early spring and the weather was wet most of the time. During that time we did two Eco Survey trips, each of two weeks’ duration. We were split up into small groups and sent out to different blocks of native forest around the central North Island. The first one that my group did was up in the Raukumara Ranges off the Waioeka Gorge between Whakatane and Wairoa, and the second was up the Motu River on the south-western side of the Raukumara Range.
“The Motu trip was almost as wet as the Waioeka trip. The Eco team leader for the Motu trip was Mike Andrews. He was a really good bloke. Mike graduated from Ranger School about three years before us and later became Manager of Fletcher Forests, Taupo, and then Managing Director of Fletcher Challenge, one of New Zealand’s largest companies. The Ranger Trainees on that surveying trip remained the same, consisting of Dave Cameron, Barry McLaughlin, and me. but this time the Woodsman with us was Bill Wray. And there was no dog.
“Eco Survey was a project designed at that time to survey all of New Zealand’s native forests using a system of sample plots selected randomly from aerial photographs and then located physically on the ground by the Eco Surveyors. We first collected our aerial photographs, which had been scanned and marked so that the sample plots that we were to survey and sample represented a good example of each separate forest type. Our packs were heavy, as we had to carry tent flies, food for three weeks, all of our surveying gear, sleeping bags, a change of clothes, rifles, slashers, billies and cooking utensils.
“We had been saturated with heavy and constant rain along with all our gear and food for over a week while in the bush. We had been living mainly on tinned Irish stew, Hellaby’s corned beef, soggy Eco Survey wholemeal bread (which a Rotorua baker made especially for the Eco crews to last for a couple of weeks in the bush), and rice, soaked overnight in Maggi soup. Barry never ate rice for years after that.”
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