The task of felling and getting the timber out of the bushes is a difficult and dangerous one. The country north of Auckland, where Kauri abounds, is usually very broken, and seldom admits of a tramway being laid down to carry the logs on. When the timber is on high ground, the usual method adopted is to cut the logs into suitable lengths with cross-cut saws, move them by means of timber jacks and immense teams of bullocks to the brow of a convenient incline, and let them slide down a well-greased shoot composed of young Kauri trees, a great number of which are thus annually destroyed.
If the bush happens to be on the borders of the Kaipara, the logs are placed behind booms until enough are collected to make a raft. If, however, it is situated some little distance from deep water, the logs are laid in the bed of an adjacent creek, higher up in which a dam is formed and the water stored. When sufficient logs are collected, and sufficient water stored behind the dam, the sluices are opened, and the logs washed down to the Kaipara, where they are gathered, chained together, and towed to their destination.
Ordinary Kauri timber presents, when polished or varnished, a wavy appearance, and is darker in some places than in others; but occasionally Kauri is mottled, and when this is the case it is very valuable for veneering purposes, being worth from £3 to £5 per hundred superficial feet, while the average price of ordinary Kauri is only ten shillings per hundred feet.
The mottling is sometimes caused by the tree throwing out an excessive number of branchlets, and at others by a sort of disease in which the too rapid development of cellular tissue prevents the proper expansion of the bark, and small portions become enclosed in the sap wood, and form the dark mottlings. Mottled Kauri trees are usually found in rocky situations.
The total area covered by forest in the North Auckland provincial district--of which the Kaipara forms a part--is estimated by the chief surveyor to be seven million two hundred thousand acres, about one million six hundred and seven thousand acres being held by the Crown. One peculiar feature in these forests is that while they possess several trees--among others the Kauri--not to be met with in any other part of New Zealand, they still contain all the trees found elsewhere in the colony.