Mr. J. Haast on the Birds of New Zealand. 103 



the subalpine vegetation. It is omnivorous, and seems to be 

 the true scavenger of the country. It despises nothing. Bread, 

 flour, bacon, yellow soap, and even the remains of its own kin- 

 dred, are greedily devoured. They quickly find out a camp, 

 where their instinct leads them in search of food. The woods 

 resound with their call, which consists of two notes in the octave, 

 of which the lowest is the first given. We caught a great many, 

 as a valuable addition to our stock of provisions. The capture 

 is generally made by means of a flax snare at the end of a stick, 

 keeping behind it a smaller bird, at which they run pugnaciously; 

 and even when there is no time to take them in this way, no 

 small bird being at hand, they come to the snare, attracted by a 

 branch rattled on the ground behind it, accompanied by an 

 imitation of the notes of one of the smaller birds. We have 

 even caught them by the hand, by simply exhibiting a dead 

 Robin. The Weka lays four to five eggs, yellowish white with 

 chocolate-coloured spots, of the size of a fowVs egg, in a nest 

 prepared rudely with a few dead leaves and dry grass in a flax- 

 bush. It breeds in the mouths of November and December, 

 like all the other birds of New Zealand, with the exception of 

 the Kaka {Nestor meridionalis), which breeds only at the end of 

 summer — say at the end of February and beginning of March. 

 The Weka has great affection for its young ones, and it was 

 often with the aid of one of them, which were easily caught, that 

 we secured the parents ; a note of distress from the young bird 

 invariably bringing the old ones to its assistance, when they 

 were easily caught in the snare held in readiness. 



" On the summits of the mountains I met with a very shy bird, 

 closely resembling a Plover [Charadrius) , which till then I had 

 never seen. On the lakes, besides the several inhabitants before 

 enumerated, we found the Crested Grebe {Podiceps cristatus ?), 

 of which only very little is known. Another inhabitant of the 

 plains in former years was the Kakapo [Strigops hahropdilus) 

 or Night-Parrot ; but it seems that it is now nearly extinct 

 there, and that it has found a refuge in the wild mountain 

 regions unmolested by man and dog. In former years the 

 Marnia plains were a celebrated hunting-ground of the Maories 

 for these birds ; but we did not even observe their tracks in 1 he 



