It is so sad about your Rogers Rabbit. In the last three issues of The Weekend Sun he seems to be moving into the last stages of dementia. Maybe he has been caught too often in the headlights of a fast approaching boy racer causing a retinal dysfunction that doesn't allow him to see things as they really are – how very sad.

Also he seems to have lost his sense of time. The paddling that he says he has done around the harbour since the sixties must have ceased sometime in the early eighties, which was when the rampant mangrove began to spread, even to right outside his own door. Now they seem to be spreading everywhere and have become a menace that he cannot get his ole bunny head around. He needs to get out and about more often and open his old ‘myxi' eyes to see what is happening around him and his kayak.

But after all he is a loveable old, old bunny and he is beginning to fantasise. Like some old men, his preoccupation with the past is getting him to see naked ladies hiding in the mangroves – no wonder he wants to keep them!

But please treat him ever so kindly and gently now he is so old and losing his hair. When you put him to bed and hear his prayers, tell him a simple story of how we produced the silt, the mangrove crept up and thrived in it, trapped even more silt and gradually covered all the golden sand. And tell him this too: if the relentless march of the mangrove continues, he will have no sandy beaches left where he can take his mokopuna to picnic, build sandcastles and paddle in the sea.

Signed: The Sandy Beach Brigade
Alias: Dave Lind & Peter Callow

Editors Response: Thanks SBB. Nothing wrong with this rabbit's eyesight – all those carrots. I do have concerns for your own vision, however, possibly obscured by the swinging machetes and the rumbling mangrove munching machinery.

You seem to have missed the sentences that said:
1. A few areas suffer major encroachment; and
2. There's certainly room for some removal where mangroves are out of control.

There's been a lot of hard work by some dedicated estuary groups clearing mangroves that have completely choked waterways such as Welcome Bay and Waikaraka Estuary and I have no problem with that. My concern is the attitude among some paranoid citizens who regard every mangrove as a bad mangrove.

And yes, there are mangroves outside my back door. They haven't spread an inch in 20 years.
Brian.