776 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fully compact group with apparently no very close allies, unless 

 it be the raptores,* as has been suggested by some of their de- 

 scribers. They furnish us, however, with at least one very cu- 

 rious bird, and that is the kakapo of New Zealand {Stri7igops 

 Jiahropfilus), also known as the "owl parrot" or "ground parrot." 

 This survivor of the primitive parrot stock is but another impor- 

 tant type that appears to be doomed to early extermination, and 

 that, too, unfortunately, before a thorough monograjjh upon its 

 morphology and life history have been furnished by science. 

 Most large museums are amply supplied with skins of the kaka- 

 po, and a dozen or more specimens have been transported to Eng- 

 land alive and studied. But all this is but a very small part of 

 what yet remains to be known of the species. Stringops is noc- 

 turnal in habits, almost entirely so, and feeds only toward dark, 

 when it will issue forth from its hiding place under rock or root 

 of tree to seek for the seeds and fruits upon which it lives. It 

 also eats leaves, twigs, bits of roots, and even grass, moss, or other 

 plants. Some of the flight' muscles and the keel of the sternum 

 are aborted in this parrot, so its powers of flight about amount to 

 nil. It spends most of its time upon the ground, and goes up 

 into trees only by climbing. Many of the introduced predaceous 

 animals of the country are its enemies, and to thein must be 

 added the greatest destroyer of animal life of them all man. 

 This is one of the largest of the parrots, and it derives some pro- 

 tection from its |)lumage, which is of an earthy green, freckled 

 and finely zigzagged over with snufl^ brown, with longitudinal 

 dashes here and there of straw yellow. It has a powerful beak 

 like a macaw, which it most efficiently uses. About the face the 

 feathers are long and stringy, and so arranged as to remind one 

 at once of a strigine physiognomy. It is an intelligent as well 

 as an afi^ectionate bird in captivity, but lacks the characteristic 

 longevity of the group to which it belongs. f The owls, ;j; which 

 are more or less remotely allied to the goatsuckers* rather than 

 to the true raptorial birds, || are in some strange way connected 

 through that peculiar strigine nightjar the guacharo or oilbird 

 of northern South America and the island of Trinidad."^ This 

 great goatsucker is a little larger than our barn owl, with a mot- 

 tled plumage after the order of the whip-poor-will, only with 

 more brown in it, and is in habit quite as nocturnal as either one 

 of them. In immense numbers it resorts to caverns, coming out 

 in noisy array only at dark to seek the nuts and fruits which con- 

 stitute its food. Steatornis breeds by the hundreds in the vast 



* Acciprtres. f No doubt it should occupy a fiiinily by itself, as the Stringopsidce. 



\ Strigcs. * Caprimu'gi. 



II Accipitres. ^ Steatornis caripensis. 



