RATS. 89 



cause. He goes on to say, " I have examined many of these 

 animals, and have not found a single female. One of my neigh- 

 bours has examined two hundred of them, and a Maori, at the pa 

 beyond Wakapuaka, one hundred, with the same negative result. 

 Some females have, however, been taken, and in one case they 

 were found breeding. He is more like a big field-mouse than a 

 Norway rat; and besides being considerably smaller he is slightly 

 darker in colour, and less malodorous. He climbs trees and flax- 

 plants, and is phytophagous rather than carnivorous." 



Button, writing in 1887, said, " The rat appears to have 

 invaded Picton at the end of March, and to have suddenly 

 disappeared by the 20th April. Old Maoris recognized it as the 

 rat they used to eat in former times, and said that swarming on 

 to the lowlands periodically was always characteristic of it. These 

 rats were often noticed climbing trees. In the Pelorus, where they 

 stopped longer, they built nests, like birds, in trees." 



Kingsley, in 1894, records it as nesting on the branches of 

 small trees, 4 ft. to 5 ft. from the ground, near Totaranui, and 

 gives examples from Motueka, Riwaka, Collingwood, Nelson, and 

 Taranaki. I myself have seen tall thorn hedges at Whangarei full 

 of their nests large, shapeless structures, which at first I thought 

 must have been made by house-sparrows which had taken to building 

 in hedges. 



At the present time black rats are extraordinarily common about 

 Christchurch. Mr. Speight, the curator, informed me three years 

 ago that Canterbury Museum was infested with them. A good deal 

 of the damage said to be done to orchards by opossums is almost 

 certainly the work of the black rat. 



Marriner reports that he met with grey rats at North-west Bay 

 in Campbell Island, which Waite, of the Canterbury Museum, 

 thought were probably specimens of Mus rattiis. 



The brown, or Norway, rat (Mus decumanus) is ubiquitous, and, 

 though there is no record of its arrival in New Zealand, it no doubt 

 arrived here in the earliest days of settlement. Early in last century 

 Russell, or Kororareka, in the Bay of Islands, was the chief port of 

 the young colony, and rats must have become very abundant there. 

 Charles Darwin, who visited the Bay of Islands in 1835, says in 

 his account of the voyage of the " Beagle," "It is said that the 

 common Norway rat, in the short space of two years, annihilated 



