Smith. — On the Birds of Lake Brunner District. 205 



sea birds,"* — which has always served to remind me of 

 Homer's battle between the frogs and mice — in which om- 

 little owl, who could not join the great united army of land 

 birds in the long day's sanguinary conflict, owing to his being 

 a nocturnal bird ; yet, at the close of that prolonged fight, 

 when the sea birds were utterly routed, distinguished him- 

 self by acting as a brave herald-trumpeter, and so added to 

 their fear by joining in the pursuit with his insulting dis- 

 cordant note of ironical derision — tod Jco'e ! tod koc ! — thou 

 (art) brave ! thou (art) victor ! These words are ludicrously 

 Maorified from the owls' common note of kail kofi ! koii koil ! 

 by a kind of onomatopeia — so common among the Maoris, and 

 which a Maori, by a slight twist in the pronunciation, and 

 more particularly when made in the mimicking tone, would 

 cause them to pretty nearly resemble. 



Having referred to that ancient Maori fable of the battle 

 of the land and sea birds, in which nearly all our indigenous 

 land birds are brought to the fore to repel the invaders, to 

 fight and to perform prodigies of valour, even to the including 

 of the piwakawaka, Bhipidura flahcllifera, Gml. — the pied 

 fantail-ilycatcher — I would just call your attention to the 

 grave fact of the total omission of the gigantic moa (Dinornis, 

 sps.), and of all allusion to it, as a further proof of what some 

 of you have already more than once heard from me, that the 

 ancient Maori did not knoic of its living existence as a bird ; 

 for, if they did, they would have assuredly brought it pro- 

 minently forward on that occasion as their gi-eat hero and 

 redoubted champion, and the dreadful foe of the sea-birds, to 

 whom, as giants in the battle-field, Goliath of Gath, or Og of 

 Bashan, would have been but puny comparisons. That one 

 plain and striking list of negative evidence, re the age in 

 which the moa existed, has ever seemed to me to be of far 

 greater value than all the loud and fussy statements of modern 

 Maoris, made to suit the times and the wishes and questions 

 of zealous European inquirers. 



Akt. XXI. — On the Birds of Lake Brnnner District. 



By W. W. Smith. 



[Read before the Otago Institute, 10th July, 18S8.] 



Since the colonisation of New Zealand, less than forty years 

 ago, the flora and fauna of some parts of the country have 

 undergone many changes. This is most marked in the whole 



* Translated briefly — together with some other of their ancient 

 fables — by me, in Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. xi., p. 102. 



