Overview
Many different kinds of plants and animals depend on beech trees for a home or for food. Whitehead and yellowhead birds spend most of their time feeding on caterpillars and spiders in beech trees. Tiny riflemen also spend a lot of their lives hunting for insects on the trees, while moreporks and bats use dead hollow trees as nest sites and roosts.
A great range of insects and other invertebrates feed on various parts of the beech trees. Some specialise in eating the roots, some the wood, and others the leaves, buds, and flowers. About a hundred kinds of invertebrate live in the leaf litter under beech trees. One square metre of leaf litter under these trees could be home to 570,000 individuals – bugs, worms and snails.
Each night a lot of traffic travels up and down the trunks of beech trees. Vast numbers of insects, spiders, and caterpillars leave the ground and climb up the trunks to feed on the leaves. Before dawn, they have all climbed down, dropped off, tarzanned down on silken threads, or grown wings and flown away.
When people first started celebrating Christmas here, they used to strip the parasitic scarlet mistletoe branches off beech trees to decorate their houses. But this mistletoe is also a top delicacy for possums, and they have eaten them off the beech trees from one end of the country to the other.
A fungus shaped like a strawberry (Cyttaria) also grows on silver beech branches up in the mountains and is eaten by native pigeons. The same fungus grows on beech trees in South America. Over 170 other kinds of toadstools and fungi grow in our beech forests – some under, some on, and some inside the trees.
If you chop down a beech tree, you kill off a whole community of plants and animals. That is why it is so important to look after them. Apart from that, beech trees play an important role in binding the soil and preventing it from eroding.
Apart from humans, the animals that do the most damage to beech forests these days are deer. Deer make a meal of any leaves within reach, but they also chew out beech seedlings and the shrubs and ferns that grow under the trees. After deer have been through, the bush looks empty – there are no saplings left. The deer prevent the beech forest from regenerating.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database.