Plea For Timber Conservation On Norfolk Is.

Wandering Cattle Provide Unpleasant Problem.

From Our Own Correspondent.

Norfolk Is., Sept. 9.

THE new Administrator, Captain C. R.

Pinney, is particularly interested in estimating our timber re sources, which he is determined to safeguard and to conserve; and it is well, indeed, that it is so.

At present, the timber is being ruth lessly cut down in all directions, not only by the mills, which must, of course, provide timber for building and for fruit cases, but by persons who are devastating the mountain reserve, in particular, by taking the finest woods for fence posts and firewood.

If our shelter goes, Norfolk will be come but a barren rock —blistered in the summer months, leaping with a thousand torrents in the wet winter season; the fertile soil all washed down the steep hillsides into the depths of the valleys that intersect the island from end to end.

And in regard to the general destruc tion of our invaluable timber, not only are thoughtless humans involved, but wandering, homeless cattle are also doing their share.

Owing to the fact that the island is heavily overstocked with animals, for whom their owners have no pasture, it is permissible, on payment of a very small charge, to allow stock to graze here and there and everywhere upon the roadsides and on such land as is not yet enclosed by fencing.

But that open land is shrinking month by month, as it is taken up

and fenced, and familiar water holes are also being lost to the wretched cattle, who suffer every summer from lack of water and who must suffer in creasingly with every hot season as it comes round. Very little pasture is de liberately cultivated, water is seldom conserved for them, and, on the whole, animals have as poor a time on this island as anywhere in the world.

Unwanted calves are never de stroyed at birth or even converted into veal at an early age. Tied up like dogs, they exist precariously on what they are allowed of their thin mothers’ milk and, at a month or so old, they are turned out to wander the island in little hungry bands, gnawing like sheep instead of browsing like cattle, at everything that promises sus tenance —even the prickly, inhospit able, infant pine.

The condition of horses and cattle towards the end of a long dry summer is almost unendurable to the tender hearted, and a prosperous dairy farmer from New Zealand, who left here by the last steamer, stated that no inducement would be sufficient to keep him here during the next few months.

This indictment sounds harsh, per haps, but it is long overdue and if, seeing the facts in cold, considered print will help stockowners on the island to realise the sorry circum stances under which their own actual cattle endure existence and to redress their lot, it will be well worth writing.