HOW A BIRD FEEDS. 41 



of armorial bearings, and a bird's pedigree was 

 "read off" and its rank assigned according to the 

 form of its beak. 



The model of the strong, sharp-pointed, hooked 

 beak of the birds of prey is closely followed by 

 that of the parrots. In both cases we have an 

 adaptation to the peculiar requirements of each 

 group. In both it is needed for tearing up large 

 portions of food into small pieces, albeit one is of 

 flesh and another fruit. The parrot's beak, how- 

 ever, has proved itself readily convertible into 

 the hawk's, inasmuch as a New Zealand parrot 

 has, within recent years, changed its diet very 

 largely f r om one of fruit to that of flesh. Since the 

 introduction of sheep into that part of the world 

 by the settlers, this bird seems to have found a 

 diet of flesh more stimulating than one of fruit. 

 Exactly how this came to be is not known. Two 

 explanations have been advance! The first has 

 it that the birds settled on the skins of the sheep 

 slaughtered for their wool, and picked off" pieces 

 of fat therefrom, as well as various tit-bits from the 

 carcasses of the same, and thus found out how tooth- 

 some — or beaksome — mutton was. From this 

 they went a step further and did the slaughtering 

 for themselves. Parties of them now go a-hunt- 

 ing, worry a sheep till exhausted, then dig down 

 through the back and so wound the intestines 

 that death results. Another explanation is that 

 the birds in the original instance mistook the 

 sheeps' bacl<s for the huge masses of lichen com- 

 mon to this region, and of which the birds are 

 very fond. Not finding it to their taste at the 

 top, they dug deep and soon came to the flesh 



