One of the last surviving pockets of native bush on Auckland’s central isthmus is open to walkers again, seven years after a washed out footbridge first closed the tracks and a second round of storm damage left even the most determined locals turning back.
About 60 Hillsborough residents gathered on Sunday to mark the reopening of Belfast Reserve, a 7 hectare patch of regenerating forest bordered by Hillsborough Road, Belfast Street, Goodall Street, Frederick Street and the head of Taylor’s Bay on the Manukau Harbour. The reopening followed a three month rebuild over the summer of 2026 that cost Auckland Council more than 725,000 dollars and required a helicopter to fly in the timber and gravel for new bridges and tracks.
The reserve has been off the maps since 2019, when heavy rain washed out a footbridge and the council shut the entrances. Some locals kept slipping in past the barriers, but the 2023 Anniversary Weekend storm finished the job, opening five large slips that made the bush impassable. Three big pine trees came down across the tracks in the same weather. The cumulative damage was severe enough that residents told reporters they had begun to wonder whether they would ever get the place back.
The Friends of Belfast Reserve, founded in 2018 by Hillsborough resident Janet Vaughan, lobbied the council for the reopening and worked alongside environmental group Urban Ark to plan the celebration. The Sunday event included a pest trapping demonstration led by Urban Ark’s Nikita Jones, a tree hunt for the children, and replanting of disused stretches of the old track. Eight year old Ayaan Jalan and Hillsborough sisters Emily and Juliette Darlington were among the kids learning how to seat a seedling. Fourteen year old Maddy Drummond got stuck into the bank along the rebuilt track.
Local Dean Sutcliffe, who organised the tree planting with neighbour Geoff Williams, said the reserve was unusual for Auckland because so much of the canopy was mature.
“There’s a lot of tree fuchsias, king ferns and mangeao. There’s no reserve quite like it in Auckland, with a lot of things you don’t usually find in the city,” Sutcliffe told RNZ.
Williams agreed it was an incredibly special patch of bush. “There’s a lot of regeneration, so a lot of natural healing is going on,” he said. “We’ve already met a lot of dog walkers, runners and family groups, and everyone’s absolutely thrilled and delighted it’s open again.”
Vaughan said the long term hope was for residents to take up backyard pest control and form a ring of traps around the reserve, with the eventual aim of bringing back native species such as the kākā. Birds already logged in the iNaturalist app at Belfast Reserve include the tūī, kererū, kingfisher, shining cuckoo, eastern rosella, grey warbler, silvereye and fantail. Trees on site include kauri, tōtara, puriri, rimu and kahikatea, along with what Vaughan described as the magic king fern, a giant prehistoric species that is increasingly rare on the mainland.
Auckland Council Puketāpapa area operations manager Jody Morley said the rebuild was paid for from the council’s Fix and Finish Fund. The work was first delayed by the Covid pandemic and then by the 2023 storms before the contractors could finally get into the bush in early 2026. Crews re-routed the tracks around one landslide, cleared another slip, and built bridging structures across three more. A 12 metre laminated timber bridge replaced the original span across the main gully, and four further bridges considered at risk were rebuilt at the same time. The three downed pine trees were removed.
The story of how Belfast Reserve survived to be saved at all is part of central Auckland folklore. Long time local Edward Lawry, who chairs the Hillsborough Conservation Society, said the land was sold in the 1970s to what he described as a couple of larrikins who immediately set about bulldozing the bush. The would be developers defaulted on their payments and the same sections were sold more than once, which gave the conservation society an opening to lobby the council into buying the land. According to Lawry, the council “bought it for a song”. The first set of public tracks opened in 2000 and cost 120,000 dollars to build.
Belfast Reserve sits inside a part of the isthmus that has been heavily built over since the 1950s. Most of the original lowland forest that once covered the volcanic cones and the slopes down to the Manukau is now gone, replaced by housing and arterial roads. Pockets like Belfast, along with the small remnants protected on the maunga and around the Onehunga foreshore, are some of the last places in central Auckland where a walker can still stand under a closed canopy of native trees and hear bush birds rather than traffic.
For Hillsborough residents the practical effect of the reopening is simple. The bush tracks can be entered from Goodall Street, Belfast Street and Frederick Reserve, and the gates that closed in 2019 are now open. For the volunteers who have spent seven years waiting, the bigger prize is the chance to start the next stage, building out the trap network and slowly tilting the bird life back towards what once lived there.
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This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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