154 MUTTON BIRDS 



anxiety for my nestlings' lives. Many birds do 

 evil actions, as for example the Shags of Kane- 

 te-toe, but I think they sin rather from a low 

 ideal of conduct. The Weka has eaten of the fruit 

 of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and 

 in consequence, no bird bears a more guilty 

 conscience. There is in him an eternal readiness 

 for flight. He knows that half his life has been 

 spent in rapine and plunder, and that punish- 

 ment ever dogs his heels. In perfection he 

 illustrates the text which tells how 'the 

 wicked flee when no man pursueth.' Even as 

 I leaped from the stage he was gone, rushing 

 across the open, with lightning speed, wings 

 spread, screaming aloud, an image of terror; 

 then safe again in the smallest fraction of time 

 behind a stump, a fern frond, a shadow, 

 anything, he had become transformed ; and my 

 eyes fell, not on a terrified, guilty bird flying 

 for dear life after the attempted perpetration 

 of a crime, but on the quietest and most sober of 

 brown birds, very leisurely and very deliberately 

 flicking his tail, and very slowly sauntering away 

 as if nothing in life really mattered very much, 

 that there was no such thing as haste and that 

 "not to desire or admire if a bird could but 

 learn it were more than to walk all day like the 

 sultan of old in a garden of spice."* 



The photograph facing page 150 shows a Weka 

 in the very act of theft. I had disturbed from 



*It was here the first inkling of the Weka or Ocydrome skirt 

 Ocydromus dawned on me, and although the invention may at 

 first appear to be foreign to the subject of bird life, there is in 

 truth a threefold connection between the topics. The birth of 

 each new idea is the result of the union of older conceptions and 

 1 make no apology for the few remarks explanatory of the process. 

 They will serve to show to ordinary people the inventor at his 

 task. All my life I have watched the Weka, and marked the 



