This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
— BY BARBARA KEENAN
In early October the Club was fortunate to have Carol Johnston from the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary as a speaker. Although a technical glitch caused Carol's presentation to be improvised, she nonetheless gave an excellent talk where she discussed the history of the Sanctuary, it’s 500 (yes 500) year plan, as well as the plants and bird life that we'd currently see. Spring is the perfect time to visit the Sanctuary as the flora are in full bloom and the birds are very active. For those not familiar with the Sanctuary, it is sited on the old Karori water reservoir catchment which had been closed to the public for 120 years. In the early 1990's James Lynch, then Chairman of the Wellington branch of the Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society, developed a conservation vision that would see fauna, flora, habitats and processes representative of an indigenous lowland forest restored to the managed area. In order to achieve this vision, a predator fence was constructed around the perimeter of the Sanctuary. Predators which are kept at bay include possum, cats, rats, stoats, weasels, ferrets and mice. With the fence installed, the Sanctuary was then able to eradicate predators within its grounds, creating a native forest which would become home to many rare native birds. Carol’s presentation was the perfect background for the easy day walk which followed a few days later. There were 18 punters who braved the weather forecast of hail only to be pleasantly surprised by near perfect weather. The Sanctuary has many walking trails which range from pram accessible tracks to proper tramping trails. Although this was an easy walk, we still had to uphold our reputation as a tramping club, and so embarked upon the “harder” trails with a walk up to the wind turbine. There was lots of bird life about, though I’m not up on my bird identification and can’t tell you what we saw. In addition to the walking and tramping tracks, the Sanctuary has many points of interest. We saw Kaka up close at the kaka feeding stations. The Weta Hotel contained several hollowed out logs that were covered with plexiglass, thus allowing us to see weta which were fast asleep inside. A highlight for me was the Morning Star Goldmine where a volunteer provided you with a hardhat and torch so that you can see large groups of Weta in their natural habitat — not for those who are squeamish around bugs! A visit to the Sanctuary is a must. For more information go to www.sanctuary.org.nz