Is the Ahuriri Conservation Park an ecological wasteland? For this first-time visitor it certinaly looked so.

We took our kids for a long weekend adventure up the Ahuriri River, a girlfriend and I wandering to Hagens Hut where the children revelled in crossing streams, climbing giant boulders and roasting marshmallows over the fire. 

That was fun, but there was a serious side to our adventure, and I went home thinking about the lack of ecological diversity in this place. We immerse our kids in nature so they can pass a love and appreciation of wild places onto their own children and then on down the generations. But it seems today’s wild places are disappearing before our eyes. 

It was my first time up this valley and I was excited to uncover some of its treasures. I left feeling saddened and concerned.

A first-time visitor can find it difficult to know whether the environment being entered is healthy or whether it’s an area in ecological decline.

Something about the Ahuriri was wrong.

The long drive into the conservation area passes extensively grazed farmland and station operations. We gave up counting sheep and wondered why half a dozen slow-moving bulls were wandering the rocky bed of Birch Stream, soiling the waterway.

Once at the park boundary we stood in awe of the steep sides and snow-capped tops of the wide river valley. The Huxley Range, home to the Thurneysen Glacier, some 1500m above, was wrapped in cloud, while Mt Maitland and the Barrier Range loomed tall on the true left.

You can still see evidence over millions of years of the power of ice and water in the deep ridges and grooves carved into the valley walls. Now, all that’s left behind, aside from these geographical scars, are heaps of huge rocks collected and shed by the slow-moving glacier, scattered across the valley floor.

As I gazed up the valley, I saw the barren flats of what appeared to be an ecological wasteland reaching well beyond the private grazing land and into the conservation park boundary.

The wide valley floor is choked with thick mats of exotic grass and peppered with hawkweed, leaving no space for fragile native plants to breathe.

Past Shamrock Hut and signs advising of recent poisoning operations, flocks of Canada geese roamed the riverbanks. Their large droppings create foul pools of green and brown slush in the swampy ground.

A pair of black-fronted terns flew up the braided riverbed, and a couple of pied oystercatchers called to each other.

Clumps of tussock waved in the breeze, and here and there were reddish-orange dracophyllum, many nibbled back to the base. The matagouri scrub camouflaged scrapes and scuffs from rabbits or hares.

Beneath the beech canopy the forest floor was peppered with droppings (deer, hare, possum, chamois and tahr live here) and it supported a few crown ferns.

Towards Hagens Hut, small patches of mountain toatoa appeared alongside clumps of snow tōtara.

On the far side of the river a shallow tarn was home to two paradise shelducks and I heard the unmistakable peep-peep of the enigmatic titipounamu/rifleman. Two of these tiny birds bounced through the branches to get a closer look at me.

That night I lay in my tent listening to the call of a ruru. Morning came with no bellbird song but later there was a distant cry of a kea.

Heading back downriver, I saw tussock flattened by what I presume was the weight of recent snowfall. 

Maybe it’s still early in the season. Maybe the bait will do the trick, the birds will be back, and this beautiful valley will again come alive.

But as we drove down the dusty road through many kilometres of highly modified farmland, I worried that out there, our wild places were quietly dying.