Forget the Alexander Blossom Festival, in central Southland we’ve got our own style of blossom celebration! Kōwhai at Kōwhai Reach are currently in full bloom and look incredible. More information about how to find the site and what to expect when you get there can be found at this link.
Posted on: Wednesday, 7 October 2026
The 2026 Planting Day was successfully completed on Sunday 4th October. After weeks of rain the day was hot, sunny, blue sky and windless, also a change from recent years! A group of around 35 people assembled at 10am and we were finished by 1pm. The plants – the usual collection of wind and frost tolerant “first planter species” (such as cabbage trees, Pittosporums, Coprosmas, broadleaf) were collected from the Southland Community Nursery on a very wet Friday morning, put onto trailers by Nursery volunteers and a group placed all the plants on-site on Friday afternoon when it had stopped raining so hard!
Barry Smith and Brian Rance oversee the whole operation and the ground had been prepared earlier with herbicide and combi-guards were on hand to protect the new plants from rabbits and enable spray releasing to be done later. With the scale of the Bushy Point planting project, spraying is a necessary evil, but hand weeding of many other areas is always a popular activity in summer and if you can help with that contact the [Enable JavaScript to view protected content]
The plants this year were funded by Trees that Count which funded the main plantings 500 trees, OLG have funded a further 200 red tussocks which were also planted on the day and 100 tall long lived in-fill plants such as kahikatea, pokaka, totara, matai and rata have been funded by OLG to be planted by other groups such as schools this year.
After planting, people walked either through Bushy Point back to Rances Education Centre for a bbq or collected their cars and drove round to Grant Road. Ray and Nicky were waiting with bbq delights and drinks – very welcome. Thanks to Dani from DOC for organising the bbq food.
Thanks to Barry for the bulk of the organising, OLG Committee members and all the volunteers from the Nursery and OLG for another successful planting day. Barry will have exact stats on just how many plants we have put into the ground at Bushy Point but it will now be over 38,000 plants!
Thanks to Chris Rance for this report.
Posted on: Monday, 5 October 2026
The Australasian bittern, matuku, is one of our rare birds. A solitary and secretive creature, their numbers are low, however several years ago a citizen science project, the Matuku Muster, was started to try and find out just how many there might be in Aotearoa. In the spring the booming of the male bird can be heard, their way of finding a female to breed with in the wetlands they inhabit. You will see there is an official Matuku Muster event (details here), however as well as that, there will be other searchs for this elusive bird across Southland. One of those is at the Waiau Trust’s Rakatu Wetland on the Blackmount-Redcliffs Rd. You are invited to join with Waiau Trust members and Wendy Ambury, national leader of the Matuku Muster, to listen for the bittern on the Saturday evening and Sunday morning, 31st October/1st November, at Rakatu and other nearby wetlands, plus the offer to stay at the nearby Te Koawa Lodge for the Saturday night. If you would like to join in the Rakatu Matuku Muster, please contact Roger Hodson, Waiau Trust Operations Manager on 027 667 1542 or email [Enable JavaScript to view protected content]. Check out the Rakatu Wetlands here.
Posted on: Tuesday, 22 September 2026
Six years. Twelve hundred trees. One rare forest coming back.
On a Sunday this winter the Southland Tramping and Outdoor Recreation Club finished something they began in 2021: six straight years of planting trees at our Ōreti Tōtara Dune Forest Reserve, near Invercargill.
A hundred trees a year to begin with. Then 700 in 2024, to mark the club’s 75th anniversary. A hundred more in each of the past two years. Around ten or twelve members turning up each time, whatever the Southland weather had in store.
The first plantings are well away now — some of the wineberry is over three metres. The later ones will soon stand taller than the grass around them.
Ōreti is one of the last tōtara dune forests left in the country. It is being brought back by people who simply kept coming back.
Read more of this story and check out the project on our SERN site here.
Posted on: Tuesday, 15 September 2026
Excerpt from Thriving Southland’s September newsletter:
‘This year we had four applications submitted to this fund this year from Lower Oreti, Greater Dipton, Otama and Hedgehope Makarewa Catchment Groups covering everything from creating an animal pest trap library, restoring Kowhai Reach, sediment reduction mitigations, and possum control.
The Westpac Water Care Project is an annual opportunity where seven community-led catchment projects from around Aotearoa receive $10,000 to support practical restoration projects in their local waterways. The Westpac Watercare Team said that there was an exceptional level of quality applications this year, with amazing work being done across New Zealand. The lucky winner of the Southland funding was …drumroll… Greater Dipton with Kowhai Reach restoration!
Kowhai Reach is a special area of rare, meandering riparian forest and an ancient kōwhai trees (some over 400 years old) on the Winton Stream at Kauna in Central Southland. It is a community-led restoration project with strong support from local landowners, QEII covenantors, QEII National Trust, Limehills School, Southland District Council and the local Catchment Groups and many more.
Congratulations to all four entrants. It was an amazing range of projects from our region, and the Thriving Southland Catchment Coordinators will now work with the other three Groups to find funding to make their projects happen. Many thanks to Westpac and the NZ Landcare Trust for this great funding opportunity.’
Posted on: Tuesday, 8 September 2026
