Helping clean up Whangape ‘the right thing to do’

With 630 hectares of rolling sheep and beef farmland bordering Lake Whangape in the lower Waikato River basin, James Lowry’s family has always taken a keen interest in the environment.

James’ mother, Margaret, fenced off nearly 4 hectares of kauri forest on the farm in the 1990s. 

“I guess it was mum that started all the work here when she fenced off the kauri block. It’s not always an easy choice because when you fence off areas you’re also retiring farmland, and the work itself costs a lot of money. But on balance, we know it’s the right thing to do,” says James, who has carried on his mother's legacy.

James fenced off about 5 hectares of wetlands and planted out the land with a variety of plants, trees and shrubs, including mānuka and flax.

He also completed about 5 kilometres of fencing along both sides of the Tikotiko Stream, which runs through the farm on its way to Lake Whangape, and fenced off some smaller waterways on the property.

Waikato Regional Council helped him on this journey with funding and advice, while Fish & Game provided the plants for his wetlands.

Building on that work, James fenced off a further 6.8 hectares in 2021, and next year he will fence off another 6.6 hectares, retiring the land in both areas to regenerating bush. This work has been supported by the $2.9 million restoration partnership project to protect Lake Whangape – a joint collaboration between the Department of Conservation, Waikato Regional Council and Waikato-Tainui, with funding from the Waikato River Authority and the Ministry for the Environment’s freshwater improvement fund.

Lake Whangape is the second largest lake in the lower Waikato River catchment, which has an area of 35,000 hectares. The wider project is working with landowners across the catchment to install and repair fencing around the lake margin and adjacent wetlands, and plant 53,000 native plants around the margins of the lake, along with controlling the invasive pest plant alligator weed.

“We first got involved when the regional council was here monitoring water quality in the stream that feeds Lake Whangape at the start of the project. You don’t want to sit back and do nothing, and you want to do the right thing,” says James.

They identified the five hectares of steep and erosion prone land on the farm that in large rain events has the potential to wash sediment down the farm and into Lake Whangape. The Lake Whangape Restoration project has helped fund half the cost of fencing and planting the area.

“It is a $63,000 project over two years and the Whangape Restoration Project has paid for around half of that. We didn’t have to plant it out, but we have put in mānuka, kānuka, pittosporum and māhoe to speed up the regeneration process.”

A grant of $16,000 from the Game Bird Habitat Trust helped to pay for the trees.

“We’re hoping the work we’re doing will, over time, improve the water quality in Lake Whangape by removing a lot of the sediment,” says James.