It was a miserable tramp through native bush that sparked a light deep inside St Paul’s Collegiate old boy James Fitzgerald.
It turned him into the managing director of a thriving eco-tourism business, and it set him on a mission to bring the long-lost dawn chorus back to 500 hectares of virgin forest in the Mamaku Range, between Rotorua and Tirau.
The miserable tramp took place during the annual 18-week adventure at St Paul’s Tihoi Venture School on the edge of the Pureora Forest Park.
It sucked, Mr Fitzgerald recalled.
All his 14-year-old mates from the Hamilton school were exhausted and grumbling when a tutor said "stop, look around".
The tutor pointed to the epiphytes growing off grand old native trees. To the mosses clinging to life in the moist shade and the saplings reaching upward for sunlight.
Mr Fitzgerald, 32, remembers the moment with clarity. He thought, "holy crap – here I was smashing my way through the undergrowth with my thoughts everywhere but on the incredible beauty around me".
Years later, another moment at Tihoi came into focus. The rats, scuttling around his cabin at night, were not just searching for food there but throughout the entire forest. With help from possums and stoats, millions of native birds die in their jaws every night.
The lesson was drilled into him, he said.
It was those experiences that allowed him to spot an opportunity to set up zipline canopy tours in a patch of bush, bordered by State Highway 5 and Dansey Rd, at Mamaku.
It was the perfect location.
Mr Fitzgerald launched into the enterprise in 2008 and got it up and running in August last year, with help from university friend and structural engineer Andrew Blackmore.
In the first year they took 12,000 people through the forest and in five years it should be a far richer experience.
The Department of Conservation owns the scenic reserve and it is partnering with Mr Fitzgerald’s Rotorua canopy tours to set up pest control over the entire area in five years.
Five hundred traps have been laid over a 10 kilometre trapping line network and the area will be pre-fed for the next six weeks in the hope of maximising results when the traps are set live on September 8, day one of Conservation Week.
The trapping project will cost $20,000 in year one and a network of tracks is also on the cards.
When it comes to their goal, Mr Fitzgerald does not mince his words. "We will bring back the dawn chorus – it’s pretty much a guarantee".
So hats off to Tihoi Venture School for that miserable tramp.
IMAGE (Thanks to Waikato Times/Fairfax Media) FLYING HIGH: Rotorua Canopy Tours managing director, James Fitzgerald, in the forest where he plans to help reinstate the dawn chorus.
