OTHER ALIENS ON TUTIRA PRIOR TO 1882 319 



cricket, it seems never to have received a Maori name a fact in 

 itself pointing to a comparatively late naturalisation, to a period when 

 the mind of the native had become surfeited with novelties, his in- 

 telligence sapped by ill-digested alien knowledge, his old-time interest 

 lost in forest life and lore. 



In the open the mason fly plasters its cells on to the pitted 

 surfaces of limestone crag ; within doors its vermiculated clay chambers 

 are fitted into every available crack and chink, into key-holes, beneath 

 projecting laps of weather-boarding, in folds of suspended garments. 

 A situation particularly favoured is an oilskin coat suspended on a 

 verandah such an article, if shaken after prolonged disuse, always 

 precipitating a rain of broken clay chips and flaccid spiders. Every 

 chamber contains cells of different sizes, in each of which an egg is 

 deposited, and the compartment then filled in with spiders, which for 

 long retain their freshness, and which appear to be torpid rather than 

 dead. In due course the eggs hatch, and the grubs feeding on the 

 stores provided, become white maggots. Later again unless, as not 

 infrequently happens, destroyed by parasites the mature insect, dark, 

 slender, and elegant, emerges and completes the circle of life. 



The black cricket, puharanga " bush-ranger " of the natives, whose 

 faint musical trill tells us that autumn has come once more, is reputed 

 to have reached New Zealand either in matting from the islands, or 

 in the bedding of troops from India. It has never been plentiful on 

 Tutira ; the rainfall is too great for a semi-tropical insect, the soils of 

 the run too porous. Only in localities where alluvial clays fissure and 

 crack in summer can the insect become a plague, but on such lands 

 I have known its numbers multiply into millions. 1 



1 Whakawhitira, a Poverty Bay farm, owned by my brother, Harry W. G.-S., in the 

 'nineties, was on one occasion so stripped of grass that not a green blade remained over several 

 hundred acres. Each stool of ryegrass was nibbled as close as the night's stubble on a man's 

 unshaven chin. The season had been unusually dry, and the soil an exceedingly stiff " papa " 

 alluvium had fissured in innumerable deep cracks which afforded cover to the crickets, and 

 where they bred in enormous quantities. Their numbers, vast in themselves, were reinforced 

 by a general move coastwards from the interior, a movement increasingly noticeable during 

 autumn. It was indeed only on the approach of winter that the crickets loosened their grip 

 on the ravished farm ; finally, probably in search of warmth, they perished in the sea, at any 

 rate on two occasions whilst on the bay I noticed them thick aboard the steamers. Besides 

 ruining the ryegrass fields, the boles of the lemon and orchard groves were barked as rabbits 

 in snow bark ash and sycamore. As rabbits, too, cleared certain districts of cabbage-trees 

 (Cordyline australis), first falling and then eating them, so the black crickets felled my 

 brother's nine-feet maize crop, nibbling each stem through at the base, and then on the ground 

 consuming stalk, leaf, and milky pod. Leather bands of machinery, kid boots, wall-papers and 

 men's coats, were attacked. Ducks, fowls, and turkeys, gorged with insects, laid as if spring 



