628 



NESTOR 



their side, wounding the intestines, and so causing the animals' 

 death. The lacerations are said to be made so uniformly in one 

 place as to suggest deliberate design ; but the bird's intent has yet 

 to be investigated, though it is admittedly an eater of carrion in 

 addition to its ordinary food, which, like that of the Kaka, consists 

 of fruits, seeds, and the grubs of wood-destroying insects, the last 

 being obtained by stripping the bark from trees infested by them. 

 The amount of injury the Kea inflicts on flock-masters has doubt- 

 less, as always happens in similar cases, been much exaggerated, for 

 Dr. Menzies states {Trans. N. Zeal. Inst. xi. p. 377) that on one 

 " run," where the loss was unusually large, the proportion of sheep 

 attacked was about one in three hundred, and that those pasturing 

 below the elevation of 2000 feet are seldom disturbed.^ 



On the discovery of Norfolk Island (10th October 1774) a 

 Parrot, thought by Forster to be specifically identical with the 

 "Kaghaa" (as he wrote the name) of New Zealand, — though his 

 son {Voyage, ii. p. 446) remarked that it was "infinitely brighter 

 coloured," — was found in its hitherto untrodden woods. Among the 

 drawings of Bauer, the artist who accompanied Robert Brown and 

 Flinders, is one of a Nestor marked "Norfolk Isl. 19 Jan. 1805," on 

 which Von Pelzeln in 1860 founded his N. norfolcensis. Meanwhile 

 Latham, in 1822, had described, as distinct species, two specimens 

 evidently of the genus Nestor, one, from the collection of Mr. Thomas 

 Wilson of Maidenhead, said, but doubtless erroneously, to inhabit 

 New South Wales, and the other brought by Col. Hunter from 

 Norfolk Island. In 1836 Gould described an example, without any 

 locality, in the museum of the Zoological Society, as Plydolophus 

 productus, and when some time after he was in Australia, he found 

 that the home of this species, which he then recognized as a Nestor, 

 was Phillip Island, a very small adjunct of Norfolk Island, and not 

 more than five miles distant from it. Whether the birds of the two 

 islands were specifically distinct or not we shall perhaps never know, 

 since they are all extinct (Extermination, pp. 223, 224), and no 

 specimen undoubtedly from Norfolk Island seems to have been pre- 

 served ; - while, now that we are aware of the great diversity in 

 colour, size, and particularly in the form of the beak, to which the 

 New-Zealand members of the genus are subject, it would be unsafe 

 to regard as specific the difi'erences pointed out by Von Pelzeln 



^ A third form, from au unknown locality, has been distinguished as N. 

 esslingi {Eev. Zool. 1856, p. 223), and has been regarded by several writers, and 

 among them Count T. Salvadori {Cat. B. Brit. Mus. xx. p. 8), as a good species, 

 though Sir AV. Buller {B. N. Zeal. ed. 2, i. pp. 150-175) believes it to be, like 

 his own N. ocddentalis and N. superius, as well as the so-called N. montanus 

 of Haast, founded on individual variation. 



- Canon Tristram (Ibis, 1892, p. 557) believes that one in his possession had 

 this origin, aird so it may prove. 



