Our young forester goes sheep shearing in New Zealand

AS you walk down the high street of your local town do you ever wonder what was there before? Obviously the nature and character of the buildings will vary on the age and location of the settlement. Nevertheless, whether it’s medieval, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian or more contemporary, something existed there long before any of this.

It’s almost certain, as you park your car in some modern shopping complex, that long before its construction, a complex ecosystem of flora and fauna had existed on that very spot for thousands of years. As you lock your car and begin your journey into town you follow the same path as bears and wolves and woolly mammoth thousands of years before. Always remember they existed here far longer than we’ve been here.

Someone once said to me that you never own a house, you’re merely a temporary guardian before passing it on to someone else. And so it is with the landscape. Change is a constant.

As if to emphasise the point, there’s a plaque on an old oak tree as you head into Jedburgh on the A68. It reads: ‘This tree was once part of the Great Caledonian Forest which stretched from the south coast of England to the north of Scotland.’ When Julius Caesar first set foot in this country on 26 August, 55 BC it was possible to walk from the south coast to the north of Scotland without leaving tree cover. It must have been an incredible sight, but several thousand years before that, in the aftermath of the last ice age, there were no trees at all. 

With change in mind, I have begun my latest stint in New Zealand. “Keep your head down and don’t mention the trees,” an old colleague advised.

Since my last visit to New Zealand, forestry has become a dirty word in the wool sheds.

The attitude of farmers and shearers towards the forestry industry has changed dramatically and collectively they don’t take too kindly to anyone associated with the wide-scale planting of trees on new ground. Even the Huntaway dogs refrain from mentioning the word ‘bark’!

READ MORE: Danny Graham: Our young forester on the kindling boom

In New Zealand, shearing isn’t a job so much as a quasi religion and to many this reforesting of the landscape is a threat to their way of life. If you’re Kiwi and involved with sheep then there’s every chance your father was and his father before him, ad infinitum going back hundreds of years. The Romney sheep remains the backbone of many people’s livelihoods.

It’s been four years since I was last here and I can’t believe the change in the landscape. Hills, which only four years ago were covered in lush green grass and grazing sheep, are now grey with long rank grass and serried rows of green radiata pines making a new claim to the landscape. The farmers refer to the ‘tree man’. Who he is is a mystery, but what they do know is that ‘he’ has lots of money and clout and can easily afford any 10,000-acre sheep station that comes on the market. Mention of the ‘tree man’ is usually followed by the expulsion of a large gob of phlegm. 

Of course, the tree man’s true identity is unremarkable. ‘He’ is a conglomerate of the large, heavily polluting industries from the southern hemisphere working in collusion with governments in an attempt offset their carbon emissions. By reforesting large areas of New Zealand they can sleep easily in their beds. Air New Zealand is a big player here and given there was the near collapse of the airline industry post-COVID, it is puzzling to many how they are now one of the largest purchasers of land, easily able to outbid any rival sheep farmers.

Having quickly grasped the vibe among my co-workers I have been careful to hide my identity as a ‘tree man’ and am happy to go along with their assumption that I’m just a roaming shearer from England, and that to me, Husqvarna is a brand of motorbike and Stihl is a shearer who works very slowly! Whenever the ‘tree man’ is mentioned – which is quite often – I pretend I know nothing and feel more like a spy working in post-war Britain.

254 years ago, Captain Cook arrived on the eastern shores of New Zealand armed only with muskets and axes. The landscape then was densely wooded with indigenous flora and the sound of bird life must have been near deafening. It didn’t take long for Cook and the settlers who followed him to fall out with the Maori people who had been there for thousands of years and had learned to live in harmony with the natural world. The slash-and-burn approach of those who followed Cook was at loggerheads with the Maori philosophy.

Apparently, before Cook’s arrival, New Zealand contained no animals with more than two legs. The new settlers spent no time in pulling down existing forests and replacing them with new varieties of grass and crops as well as a whole range of quadrupeds. A boat carrying 24 moose sailed from North America – 20 were in-calf and four were bulls. With such a mountainous landscape the idea was to populate these vast areas with animals suited to them. As it happens, all the moose died en route bar one male who lived for 62 days before succumbing to ‘loneliness’.

Deer proved to be an exception and, once established, they began to thrive, until finally today they are now classed as pests. I was shearing on a sheep station last week with 16,000 Romney sheep. It is located in a remote, hilly region and close to a vast area of ‘untouched’ native bush and newly planted pine. This combination of habitat houses huge herds of fallow and red deer. The deer are fat and healthy, able to eat on the lush grass and then retreat to the trees for cover.

Last year, 3,000 deer were culled on this single farm in one shoot from helicopters. This operation, as you can imagine, was extremely expensive but it also had more serious repercussions. Because of the remoteness of the sheep station, the collection of the carcasses wasn’t feasible and so they were left where they fell. In the hot New Zealand sun this created a maggot farm, but as the venison ran out, the flies turned their attention to the sheep. This created huge health problems among the farmer’s stock and he lost many animals to fly strike. We are now a year on and talking to the farmer he was of the view that the deer herds have recovered and seem even stronger. What really concerns him are plans for neighbouring farms to create new plantations and the implications this will have on the ecological balance.

I was told by an experienced harvester driver several years ago that farmers and foresters rarely get along and I’m beginning to think he might be right. Foresters are often portrayed as the villains of the farming world; careless forwarder drivers chewing up good ground, old tree guards littering the landscape and trees planted on good agricultural land.

‘We’ll all be eating bark soon,’ is a phrase I quite often hear. Strangely, there’s little appreciation for the timber industry by the farmer when he’s knocking in new wooden fence posts or using timber to keep his stock orderly. In fact, he’s more likely to be complaining about the longevity of the posts, which is another argument altogether.

This is now the third time I’ve travelled to New Zealand to escape the dark English winter. I originally came to learn how to shear. The first visit was, without doubt, a baptism of fire, but after seven months of full-on, intensive work, I was brought up to speed with the average British shearer. This time round I’m here more to get a break from the chainsaw, catch up with some old friends, have some recreational time and explore the country. Well, that was the intention! On paper it looked easy: shear a few sheep, make some dollars, drink plenty of nice draught NZ beer and take the time to act like a tourist.

It’s possible I underestimated just what hard work taking the wool from sheep really is.

The west coast of the north island of New Zealand is where the fastest shearers in the world originate from and I have arrived in the thick of it. Many of these lads were already up to speed and have been working round the clock, seven days a week. I have now dropped myself into this arena on the back of a week’s gluttony and excess, which was hardly the ideal preparation. 

To be continued ...