Forest and Bird's Northland advocate Dean Baigent-Mercer this week released drone-footage shot above Northland's Whangaroa, Russell and Otangaroa forests that he says reveal the forests are on the point of collapse.
Baigent-Mercer says the forests that were filmed had been neglected by DoC by 20 years.
"The forest here, 20 years ago [in] 1995, this amazing ecologist called Linda Conning did an assesment of it, and she found that there were 12 threatened or extremely rare plants there, weta, all sorts of wonderful things."
He tells Sunday Morning producer Jeremy Rose that there's only a small window of opportunity to reverse the catastrophic decline and save the forests.
