Neill Simpson has dedicated his life to protecting and enhancing the Whakatipu’s environment, including building trails and tracks that enable generations to enjoy it. As he approaches his 90th birthday he chats to MATT PORTER, who discovers there’s no chance of him slowing down
Neill Simpson turns 90 tomorrow, but there’s too much to do for him to sit back and reflect on the milestone for long.
The botanist, conservationist and ecologist still runs his Conservation Consultancy, designing native vegetation plans and getting his hands dirty implementing them for clients.
But the paid-for stuff isn’t near the half of it.
He and his wife, Barb, remain passionately active in the Whakatipu Reforestation Trust, the group they founded in 2013 to help realise their vision to return as much of the Basin as possible to its native flora and fauna, and ridding it from as many wilding conifer pines as is feasible.
As trustees, they lovingly tend to the native plants in the trust’s nursery at Jardine Park, down the road from their Kelvin Heights home, and get among replanting swathes of the Whakatipu on weekends with the reforestation community.
Next March, the trust will mark the 10th anniversary of the nursery — within three years of opening its gates, the plant house had doubled in size, with capacity for 10,000 plants a year across 70 grey shrubland, lake shore, riparian and beech forest species.
Fittingly, the birthday will feature the planting of 1000 natives in an area to the east of the nursery where a stand of pines has been cleared, getting the trust within cooee of planting 100,000 natives on public land.
That remarkable effort is merely the substantial tip of a huge iceberg of contribution that Neill continues to give to the ecology of the district.
Originally from Whanganui, he, Barb and their three sons moved to Queenstown in 1981 for Neill’s new gig as senior ranger with National Parks and Reserves Department, now Department of Conservation (DoC), to oversee the development of The Remarkables skifield.
The couple had been regular visitors here, often on tramping and mountaineering trips in the back country, and skied Coronet Peak ‘‘when there was only a tow rope’’.
But Neill was alarmed vast tracts of the area were starting to become covered in douglas fir.
Wildings are a diversity-killing monoculture with the ability to thrive well up into the high country and take over native beech forests.
‘‘It’s not only the plant life, it’s all the bird life as well,’’ Neill says.
The pines force the birds out, robbing the bush of the songs of the tui and bellbird and heavy wing-whoosh of the kererū (wood pigeon).
‘‘I came from Tongariro area and had been pulling out wilding pines there for years.
‘‘I could see they were just starting off here, so I started pulling them out here as well.’’
The skifield work didn’t start straight away, so as senior ranger Neill organised funding for at least six participants of the government’s PEP (pre-employment) scheme to help him clear as many wilding conifers as possible, starting with the reserves at Ben Lomond and along the Lake Whakatipu foreshore, from Closeburn to Queenstown.
‘‘The other thing was the Department of Lands and Survey opened a nursery in Manapouri, so we had a steady supply of native plants.’’
Neill and his crew added a third element to pulling out exotics and planting natives — building and enhancing walking tracks ‘‘all over the place’’.
Countless locals and tourists have him to thank for iconic walks such as Queenstown Hill, Ben Lomond and many others.
A drive to return Pigeon and Pig Islands, near the upper north reaches of Lake Whakatipu, to their pristine best after fire tore through Pigeon Island in 1996, led Neill and Barb to found the Whakatipu Reforestation Islands Trust.
Over 15 years they led the trust’s native planting efforts and predator eradication to restore the once bare and weedy islands into a haven for native birds.
Rehabilitating the islands to the point that the native vegetation began regenerating itself meant they could refocus their efforts on the mainland.
It’s been more than 25 years since Neill retired as DoC’s Whakatipu field centre manager and regional botanist for Otago, but he’s never stopped giving to his beloved ecology and community.
His efforts have been rightfully recognised with Neill awarded the Queen’s Service Medal for services to conservation in 2014.
The following year, he and Barb were joint winners of New Zealand conservation’s most prestigious award, the Loder Cup.
Gazing out his window, across the lake to a Queenstown Hill still carpeted with big stands of pines, the grandfather of six says in an ideal world that view would be full of beech forest.
It’s the sound such a vista would make, as much as its sight, that really excites him. ‘
‘We’d have a lot of birdlife.
‘‘If you have a large area of native bush, like on the [Pigeon and Pig] islands for instance, in a month’s time when the kōwhai are flowering you can’t hear yourself talk for the birds.
‘‘It’s just magic.’’
