hen the Maori arrived there were great forests of tremendous diversity in Central Otago, but in the first few centuries of settlement most of this was burnt. A great deal of the scrub that is to be seen here now is exotic and in autumn this provides a blaze of colour.

The climate of Central Otago has been compared to that of central California and trees from that area do particularly well here. Radiata, ponderosa and big-cone pines all thrive and the occasional California big tree is also to be found.

The climate is also suitable for horticulture and when the gold ran out many miners turned their hands to orcharding. Today Central Otago is the centre for much of our stonefniit industry. Grapes are also grown and these date from an early French settler, Jean Feraud, who produced some of the first wine in the south.

Alexandra, 31 kilometres south-east of Cromwell, is a fruit-growing area and the trees form an oasis in what has been called the 'dry core' of Otago. Looking at the dry uncultivated country surrounding it is hard to believe that this was once considered prime sheep-raising country.

Much of the damage to the land has been caused by rabbits. Once the hills were alive with them and farmers resorted to desperate measures to try to control them. One farmer imported more than 200 cats from Christchurch and released them on his farm. They didn’t have much effect on the rabbits but they did on the birds. Stoats and weasels were also imported and these voracious killers spread with lightning speed along the length of the island with not much effect on the rabbits, although they undoubtedly contributed to the extinction of several bird species.

Other species had been wiped out even before the Pakeha arrived. Moa once roamed this area in vast numbers and one theory suggests that the forests were set alight to drive them into the open where they could be hunted. As well as the moa-hunter sites, moa feathers have been found buried in silt at Alexandra and in 1899 a gold-dredge on the Clutha unearthed a perfect moa egg which earned the dredgehand the princely sum of £50 when it was bought by the Otago Museum in Dunedin. Throughout this area large finds of moa bones have been made both in natural deposits such as swamps, where large numbers of birds were trapped, as well as in middens, where they were cooked for food.

By all accounts moa lingered in the south considerably longer than elsewhere, including the North Island, and it has even been suggested that the last of the moa may even have survived into the early Pakeha era.

Other extinct birds were once found here. Finsch's duck, a flightless species, was first named from bones found in 1870 in the Earnscleugh Cave near Alexandra, and a number of other extinct species, such as the eagle, goose, swan and pelican have been depicted in cave paintings throughout the region. It is thought that these were painted by moahunters and travellers during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.