228 2'ransacttons. 



time the pigs would stock the whole island. The Maori kept 

 his word, and the navigator's belief was fulfilled. In later 

 years the " Captain - Cooks," as they were called, afforded 

 splendid diet for the Maoris and the early European visitors. 

 It was these " Captain-Cooks," by the way, that began the 

 disastrous attack on the native fauna. To them is attributed 

 the work of banishing the tuatara from the mainland to a few 

 small islands on the sea-coast. 



By the time civilisation had sent out its advance guards of 

 pioneers the pigs had increased so largely as to become a nui- 

 sance. They multiplied astonishingly, and enormous numbers 

 assembled in the uninhabited valleys far from the settlements. 

 At Wangapeka Valle3% in the Nelson Province, Dr. Hochstetter, 

 in 1860, saw several miles ploughed up by the pigs. Their 

 extermination was sometimes contracted for by experienced 

 hunters, and Dr. Hochstetter states that three men in twenty 

 months, on an area of 250,000 acres, killed no fewer than 

 twenty - five thousand pigs, and pledged themselves to kill 

 fifteen thousand more. 



When civilisation had fairly established itself, bringing many 

 species of its domestic animals and several species of its do- 

 mestic pests and vermin, there began a short, sharp, but bitter 

 struggle between the new faima and the old one which had pos- 

 sessed this country for ages. The result was never in doubt. The 

 old fauna, which may be regarded as aristocrats of the animal 

 kingdom, had absolutely no chance against the shrewd, vulgar, 

 hard-headed, cunning, practical, greedy, and ferocious invaders, 

 who were inured to hardship and had walked hand in hand 

 with adversity through many generations. The incident was a 

 specially dramatic one in respect to the avifauna. The native 

 birds were driven completely away — not altogether, or even 

 chiefly, by the newcomers, but by influences that the latter 

 had been taught by experience to combat. 



Sentiment, necessity, and utility played parts in connection 

 with the acclimatisation of birds, and it was necessity and utility, 

 not sentiment, that carried most weight. About forty years ago 

 the country was smitten with a blasting plague of insects, which 

 crawled over the country in vast hordes. The gathering of the 

 caterpillars was a sight that caused consternation to agricul- 

 turists. They came not in regiments and battalions, but in 

 mighty armies, devouring crops as they passed along, and leaving 

 fields as bare as if the seed had not been sown. 



In the Auckland District one settler kept a paddock closed 

 up for a short time in order to place some young stock in it, 

 but when he completed his purchases he was astonished to find 

 that the grass in the paddock had disappeared. It had been 



