North Island, reputedly less scenic than South Island, is hilly rather than mountainous, but just as wooded. It’s hard to know how much of the forest is indigenous, as a lot of trees have been introduced by settlers, but Trevor is a mine of information on a lot of them. The problem with introduced species of anything is that it will often smother what was there before. The conservation societies are trying to get rid of ‘wildings’ - so that areas can be returned to their original makeup. New Zealand's original wildlife consisted of mainly birds, most of them flightless; its only mammals were a couple of bats. The Maoris hunted the several species of moa (a large flightless bird) to extinction, hard to envisage when you see the size of some of these were over
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