CHAPTER IV. 



NESTING. 



But o'er mj' isles the forest drew 



A luautle thick — save where a peak 

 Shows his grim teeth a-snarl— aud throug-h 



The iiltered coolness creek aud creek, 



Taugled iu ferus, iu whispers speak. 



And there the placid great lakes are, 



And lirimmiug rivers proudly force 

 Their ice-cold tides. Here, like a scar, 



Dry-lipped, a withered watercourse 



Crawls from a long-forgotteu source. 



— Arthur H. Adams. 



Though the Kea has become, during the last forty years, 

 the most notorious of all our New Zealand fauna, yet so 

 cunning was the bird, and so secluded was its retreat, that it 

 is only during the last few years that we have pierced the 

 uncertainty that hung around its home life, and have been 

 allowed to gaze with curious eye upon its nest. 



The information concerning its home life that has come 

 to hand in recent years is quite in keeping with the 

 notoriety of the bird, and it can be safely said that its 

 breeding habits are the most striking and interesting of those 

 of our avifauna. 



Were the Kea surrounded by countless enemies it could 

 not have chosen a more impregnable fortress in which to rear 

 its young ; it is a veritable Gibraltar, and as such it usually 

 remains unmolested. 



Not only is the country in which the Kea lives dangerous 

 as well as difficult to travel over, but it is in some of the 

 least inaccessible places in that almost inaccessible country, 

 high up in the mighty peaks, that the Kea makes its home. 



I cannot improve upon the graphic description of the 

 Kea's home given by Mr. T. H. Potts. " It breeds in the 



