348 TUTIRA 



for settlement in Poverty Bay, I had discovered chaffinches at the 

 head-waters of the Mangatu stream a mountain tributary of the 

 great Waipaoa river. The birds were moving down - stream, for 

 upon our return a few hours later they had proceeded coastwards a 

 considerable distance. This original band of chaffinches I have always 

 believed to have been one of many straggling across the watershed, 

 following in a general way the course of the eastward - flowing 

 stream. 



Reasons have been given for thinking that the blackbird and 

 thrush migratory movement followed the coast, without deviation, 

 round East Cape. Settlement, however, had made vast strides since 

 the 'seventies. Huge gaps had been cut out of the forest -lands of 

 both coasts ; woodlands had been fallen both east and west of the 

 high watershed Motu-Maugahamia-Arawhona ; Opotiki on the one 

 coast and Gisborne on the other were almost, though not quite, 

 continuously linked by grassed lands and open country. The proba- 

 bilities are that the chaffinch followed the blackbird and thrush 

 coastal route until somewhere about the Opotiki region ; there, tempted 

 by the wealth of cultivated ground, it appears to have diverged from 

 the sea, and, following the line of light, the open farm lands, moved 

 inland up the Motu river, then up its tributary head-waters until the 

 watershed was topped. Again utilising a river-bed route, the tributary 

 streams of the Waipaoa, and later the channel of that great river 

 itself, were followed to the opposite coast. The chaffinch, in fact, 

 threaded one river from mouth to head-waters, another from head- 

 waters to mouth. Reaching the east coast, the migration moved 

 southwards attracted, perhaps, by the greater quantity of low- 

 growing scrub extending in that direction. Its vanguard was reported 

 to me twice from the Wairoa and once from Waihua ; it reached Tutira 

 in the spring of 1902. 



North of Gisborne, on the other hand, the chaffinch remained 

 unknown, none having rounded the East Cape, none having 

 diverged from the main body moving south. So small a species as 

 the redpole a bird, too, of the wilderness might have been 

 overlooked ; the chaffinch, in a district where attention had been 

 called to the matter of aliens by my inquiries, could hardly have 

 been so passed over. During winter, moreover, the latter species 

 draws into homesteads and farmyards ; with the sparrow and yellow- 



