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. 8377) 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 Is!. 19 Jan. 1805,” on 
which Von Pelzeln in 1860 founded his JV. 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 Plyctolophus 
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 ;2 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 differences pointed out by Von Pelzeln 
1A third form, from an unknown locality, has been distinguished as J. 
esslingi (Rev. 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 W. Buller (B. N. Zeal. ed. 2, i. pp. 150-175) believes it to be, like 
his own JN. occidentalis and N. superbus, as well as the so-called N. montanus 
of Haast, founded on individual variation. 
2 Canon Tristram (bis, 1892, p. 557) believes that one in his possession had 
this origin, and so it may prove. 
