Drummond. — On hitroduced Birds. 249 



In former years I have sold in March, April, and Ma}^ from 

 lOcwt. to 15cwfc. of strawberries. Now they are all destroyed." 



The two species of quail introduced, the swamp-quail {Synoe- 

 cus ai(stralis) and the Calif ornian quail {Callipepla calif ornica), 

 have been hardly more successful than the pheasants. They 

 never increased so rapidly, however, and their failure is not so 

 marked. The Californian quail is still plentiful in some of the 

 North Island districts, where farmers write against its name, 

 " No good." At Te Puke, in the Maketu district, quail live 

 largely on clover, taking both the seed and the young plaiits 

 in the bush clearings. Stoats and weasels, cats, poison, and 

 bush-fires are their enemies. 



In regard to the Californian quail a farmer at Ngatimaru 

 says : " I have noticed that this bird wants fairly large tracts 

 of land. It is also better if the land is hilly and broken, with 

 bush and scrub here and there. It seems to get on very well 

 on land where there is plenty of bush. On other land it does 

 well for a time and then its numbers are decreased, for what 

 reason I do not know, unless it is on account of the cats, which 

 I think are largely to blame." 



A farmer in the Motu district, in the Auckland Province, 

 says that quail need more protection, and he suggests that 

 private owners should proclaim their properties private sanc- 

 tuaries, and every third year should be a close one. 



The Two Swans. 

 There is a very striking contrast between the white swan 

 and the black swan in respect to their acclimatisation in New 

 Zealand. The black swan is near the top of the list of 

 successes, while the white swan has increased slowly and with 

 obvious difficulty, and has sometimes quite failed to establish 

 itself. The black swan, in fact, has shown much greater adapt- 

 ability than the other species, whose first attempts at incubation 

 in Christchurch and other places were utterly ineffective. The 

 black swan settled down at once to its new conditions. It was 

 introduced into Canterbury partly with the object of destroying 

 watercress in the Avon, which runs through Christchurch. In 

 a few years the birds had increased largely, but in 1867 many 

 of them forsook the Avon and made long and rather notable 

 migrations to the wild country on the West Coast, and to Otago, 

 and even Marlborough. Less than twenty were liberated on 

 the Avon at first by the Christchurch City Council. These 

 birds did the work desired from them, as they cleared a pathway 

 through the watercress for the current. In 1880 there were 

 hundreds of black swans in the Avon and Halswell Rivers, as 

 well as the Heathcote, as manv as five hundred sometimes 



