134 Transactions. — Zoology. 



bird, greeting to you. The warm season appears and all trees 



have blo=somed : 

 The fragrance reaches the nose of man. You again appear trilling 



on high. 

 Trilling on the seventh [month] , trilling on the eighth [month] . 



Trill you ever forth as you fly 

 The following message to the homes of lads and lasses : Kui, kui, kui, 



whitiwhiti ora(10.5). 



In Other parts they say, " Ka tangi te Pipiwharauroa ko nga 

 karere a mahuru" — that is, " The cries of the Shining Cuckoo 

 are the messengers of warmth or spring "(49c). 



Another and commoner name for the bird is Kohoperoa or 

 Koehoperoa, the latter, I believe, the correct spelling, though 

 the vowels are often variously transposed. The word is very 

 probably formed from the words koe, hope, roa, meaning the 

 •' long tail "(106). Miss Sinclair, in her book of poems 

 entitled " The Huia's Homeland," speaks thus of the 

 Cuckoos : — 



Hearken friends to this quaint idyll from the love-lore of the Maori, 

 From the ancient native records of the Rotorua beauty, of the 



beautiful wahine. 

 Hinemoa heard the birds sing in the bush all dark and dewv. 

 Heard the Shining Cuckoo's welcome to the tender flowers of 



springtime, 

 Pretty Pipiwharauroa, fostered by Te Riroriro, 

 Heard the Long tailed Swallow also, heard Te Koehoperoa, 

 In the winter-time a lizard, in the summer-time a swallowlSO). 



Sir Walter Buller tells us that, finding the birds arriving at 

 the same time as the crane-flies, the Maoris say, " They come 

 with the mosquitos " ; and also from time immemorial the 

 Maoris have called them " birds of Hawaiki." These facts, adds 

 Sir Walter, " seem to indicate that they annually come from 

 the warm islands of the Pacific "(51). In his essay in the fii'st 

 volume of our Transactions he says that they appear earlier at 

 the extreme North, and linger there when their notes are no 

 longer heard in the South. Like the Cuckoos in other parts of 

 the world, they appear before rainy weather or coincident 

 with it, and have thus come to be known in many widely 

 different localities as " Eain-birds " and " Storm-birds." In 

 many parts of Otago and Canterbury they were called 

 by the early settlers " Potato -birds," as they invariably 

 came on the scene as the potato-planting was going on ; 

 similaily, in the North Island they got the name of "Kumara- 

 birds." 



When the suggestion that they come all the way from the 

 Pacific islands was first mane by New Zealand ornithologists 

 the statement was questioned by Mr. A. K. Wallace m the 

 following words : " Eesident ornithologists believe that the 

 two New Zealand Cuckoos migrate annually, the one from 

 Australia and the other from some part of Polynesia, dis- 



