AND OTHER BIRDS H 



the volume written ou their ways and views by 

 a tripper on a summer touv. 



What is required — I shall manage it some 

 day — is a two years' constant residence, and a 

 watchfulness kept up during every day and 

 eA^ery night of each of the fifty-two weeks. 



Oh, these delightful islets of the south, their 

 clean seas and wooded shores. We were free, 

 beyond recall for days, it was delightful to 

 wake like a child eager for the day, to whom 

 still the world is fresh and to whom each hour 

 brings wonder and surprise, to cheAV the cud of 

 yesterday's discoveries, th^^ morrow's to antici- 

 pate. Then what good fellows were the fishing 

 folk. All my life T have known gillies and 

 gamekeepers to be the best of company, and now 

 I found myself intimately connected with a class 

 of man equally simple and with the same width 

 of outside interests. 



Herekopere, or, as it is often called, Te 

 Marama, is one of the many islets that dot the 

 ocean east of Stewart Island. It lies about 

 eight miles out from Half Moon Bay, and 

 consists of perhaps two or three hundred peaty 

 acres. Rising abrupth^ from deep seas, with 

 here a rock and there a reef maned with bull 

 kelp it is hard of approach except on the west. 

 There beneath the rotting cliffs of red granitic 

 schist, stretches a pebbled beach, the enormous 

 pebbles piled deep on one another, the smallest 

 larger than a moa's egg, and thousands larger 

 than a giant's head; they are round and 

 perfectly smooth, their great weight, I suppose, 

 preventing the slide that gives "to shingle on 

 shelving shores, its characteristic form. 



This beach lay almost directly beneath the 



