12. Beech Trees

I had been managing the lodge whilst the Lodge Manager was on leave and the first four days had run smoothly.  I realised that I felt more comfortable managing than being managed after 25 years or more of being my own boss. Still, I was mindful that this was an exceptional experience regardless of how it pressed all of my uncomfortable buttons.

From the office that was just outside from the kitchen area, the loud sound of dishes clanking together could be heard as lodgees handwashed, steralised, dried and put the dishes away. I looked at my watch and realised I had an opportunity to take my break between the split shifts.

It had been raining hard and constantly for the last two days so seeing the sun was a relief.  I decided to stay close to the lodge just in case I was called back. I headed back to my room and got changed and put on some hiking shoes and stood outside on the balcony, looking down the thick canopy of beech trees below.

I could hear the sound of the rushing water from the Clinton river below. Just beyond the steps off the balcony started a the track that meandered its way down to the river. I began the walk down and as I past the silver beech trees, I ran my fingers over their small leaves (Nothofagus menziesii) that lined the path.  The leaves were about 5-10mm long and their margins were doubly toothed with blunt teeth and bark was a silvery-white colour.  The tree can actually grow quite large, up to 30m, and it was on the bigger silver beech trees that the mistletoe were flowering on when I saw them at Lake Ohau in early summer. 

As I reached the end of the track I had to cross a small stream and as I skipped across it, I looked up and noticed that directly behind it in the distance was a waterfall gushing from the very tip of a very tall mountain.  I had no doubt that it was the source of the stream that trickled into the Clinton river.  I reached down and ran my fingers through the water and felt the icy chill of the snow that still hung to the tops of the mountains; not having yet succumbed to the frequent avalanches of a few weeks ago.

I stepped over the large rocks, which would have come down from the mountain in a very large avalanche-event at some stage in the past.  I carefully navigated across them until I reached more even ground that was covered in mostly buttercup leaves and end-of-season waxy-looking yellow petalled flowers.  I looked up the rocky river bed and noticed the water was flowing faster than usual because of the heavy rain over the past two days.  The view was always breath-taking, regardless of how many times I saw it.  

Above me was a tree that had a low-hanging branch covered in leaves that looked like the silver beech but had a slightly red tinge in their veins.  The leaves were about 20mm long, had six to eight pairs of coarse, sharp teeth around the upper two-thirds of their margins and I guessed this must be the red beech tree (Nothofagus fusca).  In winter their leaves turn a bright shade of red, setting them apart from all other beech tree species.  This tree can grow over 30m and must look quite magestic in winter set against the snow.

Once I found my secret spot, the place I sunbathed last time I was here, I set my pack down and took out my lunch.  It was set back from the river and the rocks were covered in a spongy moss.  I positioned my bag up against the rock behind me and leaned back into what felt like an old comfortable chair.

I noticed a few silver beech seedlings nearby and studied their leaves. Some were bigger than the others and just as I let go of the young sapling, a native lasioglossum bee flew past me and then returned to land on my arm.  I studied her as she no doubt studied me, and I wondered if she was the same bee from the other day I was here. She eventually flew off and I watched her fly into her nest nearby, probably depositing some food next to the eggs she had laid.  Lasioglossum bees are known as sweat bees, so perhaps she was attracted to the salt on my skin as opposed to saying a friendly hello.

Lasioglossum are a native solitary bee and unlike honey bees, will never meet her parents or her children.  Her entire life is hatching, mating, laying eggs, and finding food for her children before dying in late summer.  It's been that way for millions of years.

There is also a black beech tree (Nothofagus solandri) which grows from the East Cape to Westland and South Canterbury, but not here in Fiordland.  Black beech is host to a native scale insect that excudes honeydew which then encourages the growth of a black sooth-mould fungus.  Honeybees, wasps and birds all collect this honeydew, and beekeepers harvest the honeydew from their hives several times during the year.

When I was packing honey, our honeydew honey was collected from Oxford, a small settlement located near the foothills of the Southern Alps. It was close to where I used to live ten years earlier on a lifestyle block in the Waimakariri region of North Canterbury.    

The fourth species is the mountain beech (Nothofagus solandri var. cliffortioides) and as the name suggests, these trees are found at higher altitudes.  The leaves are smaller with smooth margins but with a sharply pointed tip and these trees don't tend to reach higher than 15m except in some areas where the odd taller tree has been spotted.  Like the black beech, it can be covered in sooty mould and hybridism often occurs between them, making it hard to know what you are looking at.   

The last known of the beech species is rarer and less known: Clinker beech or the hard beech (Nothofasgus truncata).  Like black beech, honeydew on the bark produced by a scale insect provides food for bees and birds alike, but the leaves are more like the red beech with blunt teeth around the upper two-thirds of the leaf and the tree is not found further south than Marlborough and Nelson/northern Westland. 

It felt like it was just me and nature and I could have stayed there for the rest of the day… but my second shift was about to start and I headed back to get changed.

I often looked out my bedroom window to the encroaching native bush outside and saw mostly ferns and the trunks of silver beech trees beyond.  With so much rain here the forest never stopped growing and I wondered just how long the bush would take to completely cover every building here. Before every tourist season, men would be helicoptered in to cut back the bush and evidence could be seen of felled trees just beyond the buildings.

I headed up towards the office and to the noisey kitchen. After shift was about to start.

(Beech tree explanations from Lawrie Metcalf's Trees of NZ and Know Your NZ Trees, found in the main lounge at Pompolona).