WALK: Busby Head Track
From the Urquharts Bay car park, an easy loop walk takes you around Busby Head to Smugglers Bay. The loop track takes one hour. An alternative is a 20-minute walk that takes you straight over to Smugglers Bay from the car park.
On the loop track, you will walk past the gun emplacement at Home Point. This was built during World War II as a defence against possible invasion. The six-inch naval gun was aimed with the help of a camouflaged radar station on the ridge above Ocean Beach.
Inside the remote control room is a landscape painting of the Bream Bay area. It offers a unique interpretation of what the area looked like before the construction of the Marsden Point Oil Refinery.
To minimise disturbance to the area, and out of respect to local iwi and their ancestors, please do not venture off the marked tracks.
The Department of Conservation, local iwi the Whangarei Heads Restoration Trust and the community are committed to restoring Bream Head, which includes a re-vegetation programme, weed and pest control. You may see predator traps beside the track. We ask for your safety that you please do not interfere with them.
Dogs and open fires are not permitted in the reserve including the beach.
Bream Head Scenic Reserve is one of New Zealand’s premier coastal forest reserves and is the best example of its type in Northland. It provides a refuge for a diverse range of species brought together in a unique coastal broadleaf forest association including kiwi, kukupa (wood pigeon), threatened invertebrates, bats, skinks, geckos, several bird species from offshore islands like kaka, kakariki (red-crowned parakeet) and bellbird, and nationally and regionally significant plants.
Bream Head also provides habitat for coastal birds and the southern most mainland colony of the threatened native flax snail – pupuharakeke.
The area from Home Point – Smugglers Bay contains dense evidence of Maori occupation, including a defensive pa on Busby Head, many house terraces, food storage pits and an almost continuous midden reflecting the wealth of sea food / kai moana resources in the harbour. There are a number of these sites along the ridge to Bream Head. An archaic midden at Smugglers gives in indication of the length of time Maori have occupied this area.
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